Free online copy to read of George Orwell's 1984

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George Orwell's 1984

 

Free online copy to read of George Orwell's 1984

http://www.mondopolitico.com/library/1984/1984_c1.htm

 

Nineteen Eighty-Four (often 1984) is a darkly satirical political

novel written by George Orwell. The story takes place in a nightmarish

dystopia where the omnipresent State enforces perfect conformity among

members of a totalitarian Party through indoctrination, propaganda,

fear, and ruthless punishment. The novel introduced the concepts of

the ever-present, all-seeing Big Brother, the notorious Room 101, the

ubiquitous thought police, and the bureaucrats' and politicians'

language Newspeak. Many commentators draw parallels between today's

society and the world of 1984, suggesting that we are starting to live

in what has become known as Orwellian Society. The novel was

successful in terms of sales, and has remained one of the most

influential books of the 20th century.

 

Along with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, the world of Nineteen

Eighty-Four is one of the first and most cited characterizations of a

realistic dystopia to have appeared in English literature. The book

has been translated into many languages. Orwell acknowledged the

influence on his novel of Yevgeny Zamyatin's Russian novel We,

completed in 1921. Nineteen Eighty-Four has been used to the point of

cliché in discussions of privacy issues. The term " Orwellian " has come

to describe actions or organisations that are thought to be

reminiscent of the society depicted in the novel.

Contents

 

 

 

The title

 

The novel was written by George Orwell under the working title of The

Last Man in Europe. However, the book's publishers in both the United

Kingdom and the United States, where it was simultaneously released,

moved to change its title for marketing purposes to Nineteen

Eighty-Four. First published on June 8, 1949, the bulk of the novel

was written by Orwell on the island of Jura, Scotland in 1948,

although Orwell had been writing small parts of it since 1945. The

book begins approximately on April 4th, 1984 (the first entry in

Winston Smith's diary) at 1.00 pm ( " It was a bright cold day in April,

and the clocks were striking thirteen... " ).

 

 

The Party

 

In his novel Orwell created a world in which citizens have no right to

a personal life or to personal thought. Leisure and other activities

are controlled through a system of strict mores. Sexual pleasure is

discouraged; sex is retained only for the purpose of procreation,

although artificial insemination (ARTSEM) is more encouraged.

Big Brother: in reality, this menacing figure is the BBC design

department's Roy Oxley.

Big Brother: in reality, this menacing figure is the BBC design

department's Roy Oxley.

 

The mysterious head of government is the omniscient, omnipotent,

beloved Big Brother, or " B.B. " , usually displayed on posters with the

slogan " BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU " . However, it is never quite clear

whether Big Brother truly exists or not, or whether he is a fictitious

leader created as a focus for the love of the Party which the Thought

Police and others are there to engender. It is perfectly possible that

the conflict between Big Brother and Goldstein is in fact a conflict

either between two fictitious or two dead leaders, whose true purpose

is to personify both the Party and its opponents.

 

His political opponent is the hated Emmanuel Goldstein, a Party member

who had been in league with Big Brother and The Party during the

revolution. Goldstein is said to be a major part of the Brotherhood, a

vast underground anti-Party fellowship. The reader never truly finds

out whether the Brotherhood exists or not, but the implication is that

Goldstein is either entirely fictitious or was eliminated long ago.

Party members are expected to vilify Goldstein and the Brotherhood via

the daily " two minute hate. " During this ritual citizens are expected

to ridicule and shout at a video of the hated " bleating " Goldstein

expounding his alternative philosophy (indeed, the image ultimately

morphed into a bleating sheep).

 

The three slogans of the Party, on display everywhere, are:

 

* WAR IS PEACE

* FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

* IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

 

Each of these is of course either contradictory or the opposite of

what we normally believe, and in 1984 the world is in a state of

constant war, no one is free, and everyone is ignorant. Through their

constant repetition, the terms become meaningless, and the slogans

become axiomatic. This type of misuse of language, and the deliberate

self-deception with which the citizens are encouraged to accept it, is

called doublethink.

 

One essential consequence of doublethink is that The Party can rewrite

history with impunity, for " The Party is never wrong. " The ultimate

aim of the Party is, according to O'Brian, to gain and retain full

power over all the people of Oceania; he sums this up with perhaps the

most chilling prophecy of the entire novel:

 

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a

human face— for ever.

[edit]

Political geography

The world of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Not all boundaries are given in

detail in the book, so some are speculation. Note: At the end of the

novel, there are news reports that Oceania has captured the whole of

Africa, though their credibility is left uncertain.

Enlarge

The world of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Not all boundaries are given in

detail in the book, so some are speculation. Note: At the end of the

novel, there are news reports that Oceania has captured the whole of

Africa, though their credibility is left uncertain.

 

The world is controlled by three functionally similar authoritarian

superstates engaged in perpetual war with each other: Oceania

(ideology: Ingsoc or English Socialism), Eurasia (ideology:

Neo-Bolshevism), and Eastasia (ideology: Death Worship or Obliteration

of the Self). In terms of the political map of the late 1940s when the

book was written, Oceania covers the areas of the British Empire (or

the Commonwealth), the American continent, and Australia. Eastasia

corresponds to China, Japan, Korea, and India. Eurasia corresponds to

the Soviet Union and Continental Europe. That Great Britain is in

Oceania rather than in Eurasia is commented upon in the book as an

historical anomaly. Goldstein's book explains that the ideologies of

the three states are basically the same, but it is imperative to keep

the public ignorant of that. The population is led to believe that the

other two ideologies are detestable. London, the novel's setting, is

the capital of the Oceanian province of Airstrip One, the renamed

Great Britain and Ireland.

[edit]

Newspeak

 

Newspeak, the " official language " of Oceania, is extraordinary in that

its vocabulary decreases every year; the state of Oceania sees no

purpose in maintaining a complex language, and so Newspeak is a

language dedicated to the " destruction of words " . As the character

Syme puts it:

 

Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but

there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well... If you

have a word like 'good', what need is there for a word like 'bad'?

'Ungood' will do just as well... Or again, if you want a stronger

version of 'good', what sense is there in having a whole string of

vague useless words like 'excellent' and 'splendid' and all the rest

of them? 'Plusgood' covers the meaning, or 'doubleplusgood' if you

want something stronger still.... In the end the whole notion of

goodness and badness will be covered by only six words; in reality,

only one word. (Part One, Chapter Five)

 

The true goal of Newspeak is to take away the ability to conceptualise

revolution adequately, or even to dissent, by removing words that

could be used to that end. Since the thought police had yet to develop

a method of reading people's minds to catch dissent, Newspeak was

created. (This concept has been examined (and widely discounted) in

linguistics: see the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.)

 

See also: External link to a Newspeak Dictionary

(http://www.newspeakdictionary.com/index-man.html)

[edit]

 

Technology

 

The world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is first and foremost a political,

not a technological, dystopia. The technological level of the society

in the novel is mostly crude and less advanced than in the real 1980s.

Apart from the telescreens and speech-recognizing typewriters, it is

no more advanced than in wartime Britain. Living standards are low and

declining, with rationing and unpalatable ersatz products; in that

regard, Orwell's vision is diametrically opposed to the

technologically advanced hedonism of Brave New World.

 

None of the three blocs has much genuine interest in technological

progress, since it could destabilise their grip on power. Atomic

weapons, in particular, are avoided in the perpetual war, since its

whole point is to be indecisive. The technologies employed are

obsolete and perhaps deliberately wasteful. This stagnation is related

to what is perhaps the most frightening aspect of the novel: for all

their brutality, the regimes are not going to burn themselves out in

strategically significant conquests or technological arms races.

Rather, they have reached a stable equilibrium which could

theoretically last forever.

 

 

Free Copy to read of George Orwell's 1984

http://www.mondopolitico.com/library/1984/1984_c1.htm