1984 language control essays

Language as the “Ultimate Weapon” in Nineteen Eighty-Four

This processes of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets . . . Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. (42)

Works Cited

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Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four and the control of language

Orwell’s 1984 depicts the oppressive results of a society that is no longer cohesive.

The party’s philosophy of power:  “We are the priests of power” and this involves power for power’s sake.  O’ Brien symbolically provides an image of the party’s complete power, which is the image of the boot stamping on the human face forever..   O Brien further explains that this symbolic boot, which is the “boot” of power” is the boot that inflicts absolute “pain and humiliation”; it is a boot that seeks absolute control over individual’s mind and their feelings and “utter submission” to the party. This boot will “tear human minds to pieces” and Big Brother will “put them back together again”…

“Power is not a means; it is an end” (276) / 302

“The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual. “

The goal of Big Brother is the annihilation of the individual. The individual becomes all-powerful through merging and blending self with the Party, so that “he is the Party”. (277)

Power, is “power over human beings” , but “above all over the mind”   The party controls external reality through the control of the mind, and it controls the mind, through the control of language.

• Syme concludes, “Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak” (55)
• Syme comments, “were cutting the language down to the bone”
• Syme, “it’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words” .
• Syme encourages Winston to recognise that the “whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought”.   He explains, “in the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible because there will be no words in which to express it.”  Syme refers to the fact that individual thought, rebellious or “unorthodox” thoughts will be impossible and so, too, will the true concept of individual freedom.   Each concept will be expressed in just “one” word.   Any “subsidiary meanings will be rubbed out and forgotten”. (55).
• The party controls the mind through the control of language (Newspeak), the control of history (the past) and the control of war / enemies, the process of DoubleThink.

“Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought” ,. By “cutting down the choice of words” to a minimum, to “the bone”, people will be restricted in their capacity to think.

It is important that Orwell chooses the example of the word “free”.  This is because 1984, is a political treatise that examines the concept of, and the importance of freedom.  Contrastingly, the Big Brother dictatorship survives and thrives because it tramples on the very notion of individual freedom.

Words such as “free” are only possible in their literal application: “The dog is free from lice’. Orwell suggests that it is impossible to state terms such as “intellectually free” and “politically free” because they refer to unknown concepts.

To safeguard against individual deviation from Party doctrine and to ensure an individual does not think for themselves, (that the “party has “power over both “body” and  the “mind” and over “external reality” ) the party has an elaborate system of control, ranging from Newspeak (reduction of language) to constant falsification of history to prove the infallibility of the party.  Orwell believes that there is a correlation between words and thought processes. In the absence of words such as rebellion and defiance, people will not have think these concepts.  To this end, language control and mental manipulation are essential in The Party’s maintenance of power. The official language of Oceania, ‘Newspeak’ was designed to reduce and narrow the range of thought so as to diminish an individual’s ability to commit Thoughtcrime. “It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words”. With the reduction of words comes the reduction in the range of consciousness which becomes “always a little smaller”.

Newspeak replaces Oldspeak

At the basis of Big Brother’s propaganda machine, lies the new language, Newspeak which replaces Oldspeak.

Orwell includes in his Appendix, a discussion of “The principles of newspeak” to show how it will replace Oldspeak by the year 2050.   He explain the concept of the reduction of language as a reflection of the reduction of thought processes, and a a means of control.

The party is able to control an individual’s mind and their intellectual reality through language.  In so far as “thought is dependent on words”, then the complete replacement of Oldspeak will mean that the party member will have absolutely no concept of terms such as “politically free” or “intellectually free”.  In other words, rebellion will be unthinkable.

• In the Appendix, “Principles of Newspeak”, Orwell states that the “expression of unorthodox opinions” “was well-nigh impossible”.  Even the statement, “Big Brother is ungood” could “not have been sustained by reasoned argument because the necessary words were not available”.   Furthermore, the “concept of political equality no longer existed”.

Newspeak is a linguistic tool to control people’s thought processes. Language is constantly reduced in an attempt to reduce thinking.

• Syme makes a distinction between Oldspeak and Newspeak and praises Newspeak. He states, “it’s the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year.” (55)
• As Winston knows, with the reduction in language, comes the reduction in the range of consciousness which becomes “always a little smaller”. By 2050, the language will be reduced to such an extent that no one would be able to understand a typical 1984-conversation.

Thoughtcrime and the Thoughtpolice

The main purpose of the Thought Police is to eradicate the problem of “thought crime”.  A “thought crime” consists of an individual and independent thought that does not follow party doctrine.   “”Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed for ever.” (21)

Writing in his diary, recording his individual past and moments of his personal history are examples of “thought crime” that inevitable attract the attention of the Thought Police, whose extensive surveillance tactics ensure that they monitor any “unorthodox” thoughts. The thought police are capable of plugging into any “individual wire” and monitoring one’s thought processes and daily-life movements.   “It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time.” “You had to live .. in the assumption that every sound you made was overhead” (5)

DOUBLE THINK  (based on fundamental contradictions)

Ingsoc have devised the method ‘Doublethink’ to control people’s thought processes. Doublethink is the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts whilst simultaneously believing in both of them; it is “to know and not to know”. This method of manipulation makes it possible for citizens to believe Party doctrine even while they are conscious of information that is to the contrary.

Double think, or “duck speak” which is to “quack like a duck”, enables the party to control people’s thought processes.

Syme explains that duck speak is double think.  It is “one of those words that have two contradictory meanings.” (57)  It can mean either abuse or praise.

Likewise, double think is “to know and not to know”.  It is to know the truth and yet tell lies. “To hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out”. It is to believe in the truth and in falsehood at the same time and to be conscious of this contradiction (or conscious of this process).  (p 37)  It is to forget something, but to remember it when needed.

The Departments  (based on fundamental contradiction)

( The Departments; (the three Ministries); Ministry of Truth is “an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, three hundred metres into the air”.  It contains three thousand rooms above ground level.   The size is significant which reflects absolute power but also its purpose which is to control history and thereby control the present and the future. Likewise the Ministry of Love is surrounded by “a maze of barbed wire entanglements”. (6)  (The paradox of war.)

Orwell uses irony upon irony and contradictions to explore the literal attempt by the Ingsoc dictatorship to trample upon individuality and to wield absolute power.

In the Ministry of Truth, where Winston works, the party members falsify documents constantly to prove the party’s infallibility and to minimise records of comparison.  During his interrogation, O’Brien displays to Winston the ease with which the Party erases inconvenient truths and ensures that the citizens are “cut off from the past’. He flushes a photo of Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford down the symbolic memory hole and thereby erases the historical memory of their existence along with the fact that Winston is adamant that they had been forced to make false confessions. (258)

From the outset, Orwell capitalises repeated references to “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU”  to highlight the impossibility of private and independence space . As Winston tries to find a secret corner in his room, he knows that this is impossible in a world where there are telescreens on every corner, posters on each .. and thought police who are constantly monitoring one’s “unorthodox” behaviour.

This is evident during Hate Week when The Party speaker changes the nation he refers to as an enemy and the crowd immediately accepts his words. It is through these methods that The Party is able “to arrest the course of history”. Thus, through the use of such techniques The Party was able to break down an individual’s capacity for independent thought. By controlling “reality which is inside the skull” the party is able to overcome the “laws of Nature” as well as incontrovertible truths such as 2 + 2. This ensured that it controlled which eminently demonstrated their use of power in an oppressive means.

Goldstein – enemy of Ingosc; a champion of “freedom”

As part of its attempt to control the historical war narrative and the thoughts of its citizens, Big Brother fabricates an enemy in the figure of Goldstein, who becomes the target of blame and suspicion. Orwell depicts Goldstein as the ultimate rebel, who opposes Party doctrine at every level. He champions freedom of speech and “freedom of assembly, freedom of thought” and  although he ambiguously appears to have “sheeplike qualities” there is constantly the threat of the Eurasian army in the background of these Hate –related videos. As Orwell suggests, Big Brother and the controllers of Oceania deliberately fabricate the enemy, and spread rumours about the Brotherhood and the underground secret movements, in order to keep the population alarmed, and scared.   By rewriting the history of war between Oceania and its enemies such as Eurasia, Big Brother is presented as the “saviour” figure who elicits considerable hysteria as a means of further controlling the emotions of the citizens. During the two-minute Hate session, the “entire group of people broke into a deep, slow, rhythmical change of B-B”. As Winston notes, “it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise”.

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Language in Orwell’s 1984 as a Means of Manipulation and Control Essay

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George Orwell’s novel 1984 is a classic of dystopian literature where a future society is presented, in which rewriting history and control over language are used to manipulate the masses. The novel became a bestseller and is widely considered a cult work of 20th-century literature. It was written in 1949 but still resonates with readers today due to its relevance and talent to penetrate the essence of contemporary societal issues. Orwell’s 1984 is a perfect illustration of how language can be utilized to control people politically and manipulate them psychologically.

One of the key themes in the novel is the control over language and rewriting history. In the world of 1984 , the government uses language as a tool for shaping and manipulating people’s thoughts and behaviors (Hama 267). In the novel, the government creates a new language called Newspeak to limit people’s cognitive abilities by forbidding the use of certain words and phrases (Orwell 6). Additionally, the ruling class rewrites history to conceal its mistakes and maintain its power. That way, the government controls the masses by manipulating their thoughts and memories.

In Orwell’s book, language serves as an important tool of power and control. The main character, Winston Smith, works at the Ministry of Truth, where his job is to rewrite historical records to fit the existing political situation (Orwell 6). This means that the past can be changed and controlled by those in power. In the novel, Orwell describes how the Ministry of Truth rewrites the history of World War II to demonstrate that Oceania has always been a Eurasian ally, not their enemy (17). The author, thus, shows that power controls not only the present but also the past, which is the foundation of people’s identity and culture. Changing the past, in turn, enables the government to control the future.

Orwell’s book also indicates that language is an instrument of thought control. In 1984 , Newspeak, the language created by the government, was adopted as the official language of the country. This language was specifically designed to eliminate people’s ability to think and express their thoughts. Hence, since individuals could not express their thoughts and feelings in the new language, they were not able to talk about those important things at all. As Hossain remarks, the language in Oceania was utilized more for “intimidation” than “regular communication” (24). Newspeak is intended to destroy all ideological thoughts that contradict the country’s political regime. One example of Newspeak in the novel is the word ‘freedom,’ which is replaced with ‘unfreedom’ (Orwell 256). Thus, it is apparent that control of language leads to the restriction of people’s feelings and thoughts.

In the novel, the government establishes a monopoly on the use of language. People in Oceania cannot speak or write anything that contradicts the government’s political ideology. One example from the novel is the ban on using words that may cause government dissatisfaction, such as ‘freedom’ or ‘truth.’ As Hodge and Fowler note, such an “extreme compression” of the language led to a total elimination of ideas (7). Hence, people were forced to use only simplified variants of words and language, which made it impossible to express themselves to the full extent.

Furthermore, the government in the novel promotes the idea of doublethink, which allows people to believe in two conflicting ideas simultaneously. One example from the novel is the government slogan, “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength,” which contradicts common sense but is still accepted by society (Orwell 6). These instances indicate how the government in 1984 uses control over language and rewrites history to manipulate the masses and create their own version of the truth. As Orwell states, the control of one’s past depends “above all on the training of memory” (269). Therefore, the government took away people’s identity and history with the aim of controlling both their present and future.

Orwell also shows that the government can use information technologies to control people. In the book, the government used televisions that served as both a source of information and a means of control over people (Orwell 259). The televisions were constantly on and could not be turned off, and even when they were off, they could serve as a means of surveillance. Therefore, the novel 1984 is a criticism of totalitarianism and dictatorship, which are popular in the world. Orwell warns that if the state controls language and history, it can easily manipulate the masses, not allowing them to think and express their views freely. The author suggests that readers always remain vigilant and resist such threats to freedom.

Orwell’s 1984 is a work that leaves an indelible mark on the hearts of the audience. The novel makes the readers think about how important it is to preserve the freedom of thought and expression and also shows the horrors that can happen if individuals lose it. Although the novel was written over 70 years ago, its themes are still relevant and significant. George Orwell’s 1984 is a work that should be read by everyone who wants to understand the world in which one lives better. The book is a reminder that freedom is invaluable, and everyone must do everything possible to preserve it.

Works Cited

Hama, Bakhtiar Sabir. “Language as an Oppressive Device in Orwell’s 1984.” International Journal of Humanities and Cultural Studies , vol. 2, no. 1, 2015, pp. 265-277.

Hodge, Bob, and Roger Fowler. “Orwellian Linguistics.” Language and Control , edited by Roger Fowler et al., Routledge, 2019, pp. 6-25.

Hossain, Mozaffor. “Language as the Device for Psychological Manipulation in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Psycholinguistic Analysis.” European Journal of English Language and Linguistics Research , vol. 5, no. 8, 2017, pp. 25-31.

Orwell, George. 1984 . Planet eBook, n.d. Planet eBook , Web.

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Orwell's Language: Thought Control Tom Armstrong College

George Orwell’s 1984 portrays a dystopian society whose values and freedoms have been marred through the manipulation of language and thus thought processes. Language has become a tool of mind control for the oppressive government and consequently a tool of rebellion against the Party. Resultant themes arise such as manipulation, surrender, and ardent rebellion as portrayed by the novel’s protagonists, Outer Party members, Winston Smith and Julia (whose last name is unrevealed), as they fight for the freedom of knowledge that has been so inhibited by the Party’s control of everyday and historical language. The control of semantics has been presented as a new language called, “Newspeak” giving meaning to new, unscrupulous words such as, “Doublethink,” which carries several definitions such as complete mental submission to the party. The role of language in 1984 defines themes of control and the decision to rebel or surrender in a dystopian society where mind control has finally been enforced through language.

The Party’s influence on language becomes crucial for its existence when those in power realize the control of language is transitively the control of thoughts. By drawing the borders of one’s vocabulary, a person could...

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A Summary and Analysis of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four , completed in 1948 and published a year later, is a classic example of dystopian fiction. Indeed, it’s surely the most famous dystopian novel in the world, even if its ideas are known by far more people than have actually read it. (According to at least one survey , Nineteen Eighty-Four is the book people most often claim to have read when they haven’t.)

Like many novels that are more known about than are carefully read and analysed, Nineteen Eighty-Four is actually a more complex work than the label ‘nightmare dystopian vision’ can convey. Before we offer an analysis of the novel’s themes and origins, let’s briefly recap the plot.

Nineteen Eighty-Four : plot summary

In the year 1984, Britain has been renamed Airstrip One and is a province of Oceania, a vast totalitarian superstate ruled by ‘the Party’, whose politics are described as Ingsoc (‘English Socialism’). Big Brother is the leader of the Party, which keeps its citizens in a perpetual state of fear and submission through a variety of means.

Surveillance is a key part of the novel’s world, with hidden microphones (which are found in the countryside as well as urban areas, and can identify not only what is said but also who says it) and two-way telescreen monitors being used to root out any dissidents, who disappear from society with all trace of their existence wiped out.

They become, in the language of Newspeak (the language used by people in the novel), ‘unpersons’. People are short of food, perpetually on the brink of starvation, and going about in fear for their lives.

The novel’s setting is London, where Trafalgar Square has been renamed Victory Square and the statue of Horatio Nelson atop Nelson’s Column has been replaced by one of Big Brother. Through such touches, Orwell defamiliarises the London of the 1940s which the original readers would have recognised, showing how the London they know might be transformed under a totalitarian regime.

The novel’s protagonist is Winston Smith, who works at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting historical records so they are consistent with the state’s latest version of history. However, even though his day job involves doing the work of the Party, Winston longs to escape the oppressive control of the Party, hoping for a rebellion.

Winston meets the owner of an antique shop named Mr Charrington, from whom he buys a diary in which he can record his true feelings towards the Party. Believing the working-class ‘proles’ are the key to a revolution, Winston visits them, but is disappointed to find them wholly lacking in any political understanding.

Meanwhile, hearing of the existence of an underground resistance movement known as the Brotherhood – which has been formed by the rival of Big Brother, a man named Emmanuel Goldstein – Winston suspects that O’Brien, who also works with him, is involved with this resistance.

At lunch with another colleague, named Syme, Winston learns that the English language is being rewritten as Newspeak so as to control and influence people’s thought, the idea being that if the word for an idea doesn’t exist in the language, people will be unable to think about it.

Winston meets a woman named Julia who works for the Ministry of Truth, maintaining novel-writing machines, but believes she is a Party spy sent to watch him. But then Julia passes a clandestine love message to him and the two begin an affair – which is itself illicit since the Party decrees that sex is for reproduction alone, rather than pleasure.

We gradually learn more about Winston’s past, including his marriage to Katherine, from whom he is now separated. Syme, who had been working on Newspeak, disappears in mysterious circumstances: something Winston had predicted.

O’Brien invites Winston to his flat, declaring himself – as Winston had also predicted – a member of the Brotherhood, the resistance against the Party. He gives Winston a copy of the book written by Goldstein, the leader of the Brotherhood.

When Oceania’s enemy changes during the ritual Hate Week, Winston is tasked with making further historical revisions to old newspapers and documents to reflect this change.

Meanwhile, Winston and Julia secretly read Goldstein’s book, which explains how the Party maintains its totalitarian power. As Winston had suspected, the secret to overthrowing the Party lies in the vast mass of the population known as the ‘proles’ (derived from ‘proletarian’, Marx’s term for the working classes). It argues that the Party can be overthrown if proles rise up against it.

But shortly after this, Winston and Julia are arrested, having been shopped to the authorities by Mr Charrington (whose flat above his shop they had been using for their illicit meetings). It turns out that both he and O’Brien work for the Thought Police, on behalf of the Party.

At the Ministry of Love, O’Brien tells Winston that Goldstein’s book was actually written by him and other Party members, and that the Brotherhood may not even exist. Winston endures torture and starvation in an attempt to grind him down so he will accept Big Brother.

In Room 101, a room in which a prisoner is exposed to their greatest fear, Winston is placed in front of a wire cage containing rats, which he fears above all else. Winston betrays Julia, wishing she could take his place and endure this suffering instead.

His reprogramming complete, Winston is allowed to go free, but he is essentially living under a death sentence: he knows that one day he will be summoned by the authorities and shot for his former treachery.

He meets Julia one day, and learns that she was subjected to torture at the Ministry of Love as well. They have both betrayed each other, and part ways. The novel ends with Winston accepting, after all, that the Party has won and that ‘he loved Big Brother.’

Nineteen Eighty-Four : analysis

Nineteen Eighty-Four is probably the most famous novel about totalitarianism, and about the dangers of allowing a one-party state where democracy, freedom of movement, freedom of speech, and even freedom of thought are all outlawed. The novel is often analysed as a warning about the dangers of allowing a creeping totalitarianism into Britain, after the horrors of such regimes in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and elsewhere had been witnessed.

Because of this quality of the book, it is often called ‘prophetic’ and a ‘nightmare vision of the future’, among other things.

However, books set in the future are rarely simply about the future. They are not mere speculation, but are grounded in the circumstances in which they were written.

Indeed, we might go so far as to say that most dystopian novels, whilst nominally set in an imagined future, are really using their future setting to reflect on what are already firmly established social or political ideas. In the case of Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four , this means the novel reflects the London of the 1940s.

By the time he came to write the novel, Orwell already had a long-standing interest in using his writing to highlight the horrors of totalitarianism around the world, especially following his experience fighting in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. As Orwell put it in his essay ‘ Why I Write ’, all of his serious work written since 1936 was written ‘ against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism’.

In his analysis of Nineteen Eighty-Four in his study of Orwell, George Orwell (Reader’s Guides) , Jeffrey Meyers argues convincingly that, rather than being a nightmare vision of the future, a prophetic or speculative work, Orwell’s novel is actually a ‘realistic synthesis and rearrangement of familiar materials’ – indeed, as much of Orwell’s best work is.

His talent lay not in original imaginative thinking but in clear-headed critical analysis of things as they are: his essays are a prime example of this. Nineteen Eighty-Four is, in Meyer’s words, ‘realistic rather than fantastic’.

Indeed, Orwell himself stated that although the novel was ‘in a sense a fantasy’, it is written in the form of the naturalistic novel, with its themes and ideas having been already ‘partly realised in Communism and fascism’. Orwell’s intention, as stated by Orwell himself, was to take the totalitarian ideas that had ‘taken root’ in the minds of intellectuals all over Europe, and draw them out ‘to their logical consequences’.

Like much classic speculative fiction – the novels and stories of J. G. Ballard offer another example – the futuristic vision of the author is more a reflection of contemporary anxieties and concerns. Meyers goes so far as to argue that Nineteen Eighty-Four is actually the political regimes of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia ‘transposed’ into London of the early 1940s, during the Second World War.

Certainly, many of the most famous features of Nineteen Eighty-Four were suggested to Orwell by his time working at the BBC in London in the first half of the 1940s: it is well-known that the Ministry of Truth was based on the bureaucratic BBC with its propaganda department, while the infamous Room 101 was supposedly named after a room of that number in the BBC building, in which Orwell had to endure tedious meetings.

The technology of the novel, too, was familiar by the 1940s, involving little innovation or leaps of imagination from Orwell (‘telescreens’ being a natural extension of the television set: BBC TV had been established in 1936, although the Second World War pushed back its development somewhat).

Orwell learned much about the workings of Stalinism from reading Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed (1937), written by one of the leading figures in the Russian Revolution of 1917 who saw Stalinist Russia as the antithesis of what Trotsky, Lenin, and those early revolutionaries had been striving to achieve. (This would also be important for Orwell’s Animal Farm , of course.)

And indeed, many of the details surrounding censorship – the rewriting of history, the suppression of dissident literature, the control of the language people use to express themselves and even to think in – were also derived from Orwell’s reading of life in Soviet Russia. Surveillance was also a key element of the Stalinist regime, as in other Communist countries in Europe.

The moustachioed figure of Big Brother in Nineteen Eighty-Four recalls nobody so much as Josef Stalin himself. Not only the ideas of ‘thought crime’ and ‘thought police’, but even the terms themselves, predate Orwell’s use of them: they were first recorded in a 1934 book about Japan.

One of the key questions Winston asks himself in Nineteen Eighty-Four is what the Party is trying to achieve. O’Brien’s answer is simple: the maintaining of power for its own sake. Many human beings want to control other human beings, and they can persuade a worrying number of people to go along with their plans and even actively support them.

Despite the fact that they are starving and living a miserable life, many of the people in Airstrip One love Big Brother, viewing him not as a tyrannical dictator but as their ‘Saviour’ (as one woman calls him). Again, this detail was taken from accounts of Stalin, who was revered by many Russians even though they were often living a wretched life under his rule.

Another key theme of Orwell’s novel is the relationship between language and thought. In our era of fake news and corrupt media, this has only become even more pronounced: if you lie to a population and confuse them enough, you can control them. O’Brien introduces Winston to the work of the traitor to the Party, Emmanuel Goldstein, only to tell him later that Goldstein may not exist and his book was actually written by the Party.

Is this the lie, or was the book the lie? One of the most famous lines from the novel is Winston’s note to himself in his diary: ‘Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.’

But later, O’Brien will force Winston to ‘admit’ that two plus two can make five. Orwell tells us, ‘The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.’

Or as Voltaire once wrote, ‘Truly, whoever is able to make you absurd is able to make you unjust.’ Forcing somebody to utter blatant falsehoods is a powerful psychological tool for totalitarian regimes because through doing so, they have chipped away at your moral and intellectual integrity.

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5 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four”

1984 is a novel which is great in spite of itself and has been lionised for the wrong reasons. The title of the novel is a simple anagram of 1948, the date when the novel was written, and was driven by Orwell’s paranoia about the 1945 Labour government in UK. Orwell, a public school man, had built a reputation for hiself in the nineteen thirties as a socialist writer, and had fought for socialism in the Spanish civil war. The Road To Wigan Pier is an excellent polemic attacking the way the UK government was handling the mass unemployment of the time, reducing workers to a state of near starvation. In Homage To Catalonia, Orwell describes his experiences fighting with a small Marxist militia against Franco’s fascists. It was in Spain that Orwell developed his lifelong hatred of Stalinism, observing that the Communist contingents were more interested in suppressing other left-wing factions than in defeating Franco. The 1945 Labour government ws Britain’s first democratically elected socialist governement. It successfully established the welfare state and the National Health Service in a country almost bankrupted by the war, and despite the fact that Truman in USA was demanding the punctual repayment of wartime loans. Instead of rejoicing, Orwell, by now terminally ill from tuberculosis, saw the necessary continuation of wartime austerity and rationing as a deliberate and unnecessary imposition. Consequently, the book is often used as propaganda against socialism. The virtues of the book are the warnings about the dangers of giving the state too much power, in the form of electronic surveillance, ehanced police powers, intrusive laws, and the insidious use of political propaganda to warp peoples’ thinking. All of this has come to pass in the West as well as the East, but because of the overtly anticommunist spin to Orwell’s novel, most people fail to get its important message..

As with other work here, another good review. I’m also fascinated that Orwell located the government as prime problem, whereas Huxley located the people as prime problem, two sides of the same coin.

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Doublethink Is Stronger Than Orwell Imagined

What 1984 means today

No novel of the past century has had more influence than George Orwell’s 1984 . The title, the adjectival form of the author’s last name, the vocabulary of the all-powerful Party that rules the superstate Oceania with the ideology of Ingsoc— doublethink , memory hole , unperson , thoughtcrime , Newspeak , Thought Police , Room 101 , Big Brother —they’ve all entered the English language as instantly recognizable signs of a nightmare future. It’s almost impossible to talk about propaganda, surveillance, authoritarian politics, or perversions of truth without dropping a reference to 1984. Throughout the Cold War, the novel found avid underground readers behind the Iron Curtain who wondered, How did he know?

It was also assigned reading for several generations of American high-school students. I first encountered 1984 in 10th-grade English class. Orwell’s novel was paired with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World , whose hedonistic and pharmaceutical dystopia seemed more relevant to a California teenager in the 1970s than did the bleak sadism of Oceania. I was too young and historically ignorant to understand where 1984 came from and exactly what it was warning against. Neither the book nor its author stuck with me. In my 20s, I discovered Orwell’s essays and nonfiction books and reread them so many times that my copies started to disintegrate, but I didn’t go back to 1984 . Since high school, I’d lived through another decade of the 20th century, including the calendar year of the title, and I assumed I already “knew” the book. It was too familiar to revisit.

Read: Teaching ‘1984’ in 2016

So when I recently read the novel again, I wasn’t prepared for its power. You have to clear away what you think you know, all the terminology and iconography and cultural spin-offs, to grasp the original genius and lasting greatness of 1984 . It is both a profound political essay and a shocking, heartbreaking work of art. And in the Trump era , it’s a best seller .

The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 , by the British music critic Dorian Lynskey, makes a rich and compelling case for the novel as the summation of Orwell’s entire body of work and a master key to understanding the modern world. The book was published in 1949, when Orwell was dying of tuberculosis , but Lynskey dates its biographical sources back more than a decade to Orwell’s months in Spain as a volunteer on the republican side of the country’s civil war. His introduction to totalitarianism came in Barcelona, when agents of the Soviet Union created an elaborate lie to discredit Trotskyists in the Spanish government as fascist spies.

Left-wing journalists readily accepted the fabrication, useful as it was to the cause of communism. Orwell didn’t, exposing the lie with eyewitness testimony in journalism that preceded his classic book Homage to Catalonia —and that made him a heretic on the left. He was stoical about the boredom and discomforts of trench warfare—he was shot in the neck and barely escaped Spain with his life—but he took the erasure of truth hard. It threatened his sense of what makes us sane, and life worth living. “History stopped in 1936,” he later told his friend Arthur Koestler, who knew exactly what Orwell meant. After Spain, just about everything he wrote and read led to the creation of his final masterpiece. “History stopped,” Lynskey writes, “and Nineteen Eighty-Four began.”

The biographical story of 1984 —the dying man’s race against time to finish his novel in a remote cottage on the Isle of Jura , off Scotland—will be familiar to many Orwell readers. One of Lynskey’s contributions is to destroy the notion that its terrifying vision can be attributed to, and in some way disregarded as, the death wish of a tuberculosis patient. In fact, terminal illness roused in Orwell a rage to live—he got remarried on his deathbed—just as the novel’s pessimism is relieved, until its last pages, by Winston Smith’s attachment to nature, antique objects, the smell of coffee, the sound of a proletarian woman singing, and above all his lover, Julia. 1984 is crushingly grim, but its clarity and rigor are stimulants to consciousness and resistance. According to Lynskey, “Nothing in Orwell’s life and work supports a diagnosis of despair.”

Lynskey traces the literary genesis of 1984 to the utopian fictions of the optimistic 19th century—Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888); the sci-fi novels of H. G. Wells, which Orwell read as a boy—and their dystopian successors in the 20th, including the Russian Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924) and Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). The most interesting pages in The Ministry of Truth are Lynskey’s account of the novel’s afterlife. The struggle to claim 1984 began immediately upon publication, with a battle over its political meaning. Conservative American reviewers concluded that Orwell’s main target wasn’t just the Soviet Union but the left generally. Orwell, fading fast, waded in with a statement explaining that the novel was not an attack on any particular government but a satire of the totalitarian tendencies in Western society and intellectuals: “The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: Don’t let it happen. It depends on you .” But every work of art escapes the artist’s control—the more popular and complex, the greater the misunderstandings.

Lynskey’s account of the reach of 1984 is revelatory. The novel has inspired movies, television shows, plays, a ballet, an opera, a David Bowie album , imitations, parodies, sequels, rebuttals, Lee Harvey Oswald, the Black Panther Party, and the John Birch Society. It has acquired something of the smothering ubiquity of Big Brother himself: 1984 is watching you. With the arrival of the year 1984, the cultural appropriations rose to a deafening level. That January an ad for the Apple Macintosh was watched by 96 million people during the Super Bowl and became a marketing legend. The Mac, represented by a female athlete, hurls a sledgehammer at a giant telescreen and explodes the shouting face of a man—oppressive technology—to the astonishment of a crowd of gray zombies. The message: “You’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’ ”

The argument recurs every decade or so: Orwell got it wrong. Things haven’t turned out that bad. The Soviet Union is history. Technology is liberating. But Orwell never intended his novel to be a prediction, only a warning. And it’s as a warning that 1984 keeps finding new relevance. The week of Donald Trump’s inauguration, when the president’s adviser Kellyanne Conway justified his false crowd estimate by using the phrase alternative facts , the novel returned to the best-seller lists. A theatrical adaptation was rushed to Broadway. The vocabulary of Newspeak went viral. An authoritarian president who stood the term fake news on its head, who once said, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,” has given 1984 a whole new life.

What does the novel mean for us? Not Room 101 in the Ministry of Love, where Winston is interrogated and tortured until he loses everything he holds dear. We don’t live under anything like a totalitarian system. “By definition, a country in which you are free to read Nineteen Eighty-Four is not the country described in Nineteen Eighty-Four ,” Lynskey acknowledges. Instead, we pass our days under the nonstop surveillance of a telescreen that we bought at the Apple Store, carry with us everywhere, and tell everything to, without any coercion by the state. The Ministry of Truth is Facebook, Google, and cable news. We have met Big Brother and he is us.

Trump’s election brought a rush of cautionary books with titles like On Tyranny , Fascism: A Warning , and How Fascism Works . My local bookstore set up a totalitarian-themed table and placed the new books alongside 1984 . They pointed back to the 20th century—if it happened in Germany, it could happen here—and warned readers how easily democracies collapse. They were alarm bells against complacency and fatalism—“ the politics of inevitability ,” in the words of the historian Timothy Snyder, “a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done.” The warnings were justified, but their emphasis on the mechanisms of earlier dictatorships drew attention away from the heart of the malignancy—not the state, but the individual. The crucial issue was not that Trump might abolish democracy but that Americans had put him in a position to try. Unfreedom today is voluntary. It comes from the bottom up.

We are living with a new kind of regime that didn’t exist in Orwell’s time. It combines hard nationalism—the diversion of frustration and cynicism into xenophobia and hatred—with soft distraction and confusion: a blend of Orwell and Huxley, cruelty and entertainment. The state of mind that the Party enforces through terror in 1984 , where truth becomes so unstable that it ceases to exist, we now induce in ourselves. Totalitarian propaganda unifies control over all information, until reality is what the Party says it is—the goal of Newspeak is to impoverish language so that politically incorrect thoughts are no longer possible. Today the problem is too much information from too many sources, with a resulting plague of fragmentation and division—not excessive authority but its disappearance, which leaves ordinary people to work out the facts for themselves, at the mercy of their own prejudices and delusions.

During the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, propagandists at a Russian troll farm used social media to disseminate a meme: “ ‘The People Will Believe What the Media Tells Them They Believe.’  — George Orwell.” But Orwell never said this. The moral authority of his name was stolen and turned into a lie toward that most Orwellian end: the destruction of belief in truth. The Russians needed partners in this effort and found them by the millions, especially among America’s non-elites. In 1984 , working-class people are called “proles,” and Winston believes they’re the only hope for the future. As Lynskey points out, Orwell didn’t foresee “that the common man and woman would embrace doublethink as enthusiastically as the intellectuals and, without the need for terror or torture, would choose to believe that two plus two was whatever they wanted it to be.”

We stagger under the daily load of doublethink pouring from Trump, his enablers in the Inner Party, his mouthpieces in the Ministry of Truth, and his fanatical supporters among the proles. Spotting doublethink in ourselves is much harder. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” Orwell wrote . In front of my nose, in the world of enlightened and progressive people where I live and work, a different sort of doublethink has become pervasive. It’s not the claim that true is fake or that two plus two makes five. Progressive doublethink—which has grown worse in reaction to the right-wing kind—creates a more insidious unreality because it operates in the name of all that is good. Its key word is justice —a word no one should want to live without. But today the demand for justice forces you to accept contradictions that are the essence of doublethink.

For example, many on the left now share an unacknowledged but common assumption that a good work of art is made of good politics and that good politics is a matter of identity. The progressive view of a book or play depends on its political stance, and its stance—even its subject matter—is scrutinized in light of the group affiliation of the artist: Personal identity plus political position equals aesthetic value. This confusion of categories guides judgments all across the worlds of media, the arts, and education, from movie reviews to grant committees. Some people who register the assumption as doublethink might be privately troubled, but they don’t say so publicly. Then self-censorship turns into self-deception, until the recognition itself disappears—a lie you accept becomes a lie you forget. In this way, intelligent people do the work of eliminating their own unorthodoxy without the Thought Police.

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Orthodoxy is also enforced by social pressure, nowhere more intensely than on Twitter, where the specter of being shamed or “canceled” produces conformity as much as the prospect of adding to your tribe of followers does. This pressure can be more powerful than a party or state, because it speaks in the name of the people and in the language of moral outrage, against which there is, in a way, no defense. Certain commissars with large followings patrol the precincts of social media and punish thought criminals, but most progressives assent without difficulty to the stifling consensus of the moment and the intolerance it breeds—not out of fear, but because they want to be counted on the side of justice.

This willing constriction of intellectual freedom will do lasting damage. It corrupts the ability to think clearly, and it undermines both culture and progress. Good art doesn’t come from wokeness, and social problems starved of debate can’t find real solutions. “Nothing is gained by teaching a parrot a new word,” Orwell wrote in 1946. “What is needed is the right to print what one believes to be true, without having to fear bullying or blackmail from any side.” Not much has changed since the 1940s. The will to power still passes through hatred on the right and virtue on the left.

1984 will always be an essential book, regardless of changes in ideologies, for its portrayal of one person struggling to hold on to what is real and valuable. “Sanity is not statistical,” Winston thinks one night as he slips off to sleep. Truth, it turns out, is the most fragile thing in the world. The central drama of politics is the one inside your skull.

This article appears in the July 2019 print edition with the headline “George Orwell’s Unheeded Warning.”

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Perception, Reality and Control in Orwell’s 1984

The killing of man’s individuality, of the uniqueness shaped in equal parts by nature, will, and destiny, which has become so self-evident a premise for all human relations that even identical twins inspire a certain uneasiness, creates a horror that vastly overshadows the outrage of the juridical-political person and the despair of the moral person.

––Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

The Spanish war and other events in 1936-1937 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood.

 ––George Orwell, Why I Write

George Orwell’s experiences fighting in the Spanish Civil War provided much of the fodder for his novel 1984 because, like Winston Smith in Oceania, Orwell’s experiences in Spain can be characterized by a gradual process of realization and subsequent progression to disillusionment. Orwell’s novel reflects the discrepancies between totalitarianism in theory versus in practice, the delicate boundary between perception and reality, and, finally control––over the past, over language, and, ultimately, over the human mind. The motivation behind Orwell’s enlisting in the war, and his subsequent arrival in Barcelona still eludes most scholars and Orwellian fanatics. However, it is evident that, upon his initial arrival, he was gazing at the Spanish city through rose-colored glasses. Orwell’s self-proclaimed political naivety coupled with his previous misconceptions about communism lent themselves to a sort of pre-war ignorance. However, after observing the proliferation of misinformation and blatant lies, it became clear to the author that the forces of totalitarianism were much more lethal than he had originally assumed. 

George Orwell’s time in Spain, in large part, remains a mystery. Before his untimely death, Orwell instructed his wife, as executor of his estate, not to allow biographies to be written about him. Although there is a lack of biographical information, Orwell’s commentary on publishing practices and general propaganda runs parallel to much of Winston Smith’s sentiments about the Party in Oceania. A crucial similarity between Orwell and his fictional protagonist is the retrospective posture they both seem to assume. “First, Orwell describes Barcelona in positive terms” (Rodden 63). “He was attracted to the revolutionary Republic’s egalitarianism and energized by what he saw––buildings draped with red flags or anarchist red and black flags, walls graffitied with the hammer and sickle, shops and cafes collectivized, churches gutted and their religious images burnt” (Burrowes 28-29). For Orwell, the atmosphere in Barcelona was ripe with revolution and excitement. “But then he qualifies the description––he did not know then what he knows now, and, furthermore, even at the time he was there, he could feel evil, something disturbing and sinister, in the atmosphere” (Rodden 63). For Orwell, the project of writing is one of reexamination. It is impossible to know what one will eventually know. However, one is morally bound to examine new information as it comes to light and to always pursue the truth to the fullest extent to which it can be uncovered. Perspective and perception, in this way, are intimately related to one another. The elation that Orwell had felt reverberating in the streets of Barcelona “had turned to disillusionment and despair by June the following year (…) [where he] witnessed the Soviet-backed Republican government’s crackdown against the revolution” (Burrowes 23). This gradual progression towards disillusionment is only fully realized when one allows new perspectives to inform past experiences. However, as Orwell illustrates through Winston, totalitarianism is staunchly opposed to perspective and, in some respects, the past itself. 

Orwell’s understanding of totalitarianism was deeply informed by the failures he witnessed in Spain. Although having been brought up in imperialist Burma, “he came to reject ‘the unthinking imperialism that had been his family’s meal ticket,’ and he saw the exploitation of colonies as an indictment on Britain. His rejection of the aspirations and values of his ‘lower upper middle class’ upbringing was ongoing, but it was his experience in Spain which crystallized his political views and converted him to socialism” (Burrowes 27). During this time, Orwell’s politics were informed by the real material conditions which he saw existing in the revolutionary state. He noted the state’s “economic shortcomings and its inability to make supply and meet demand” (Burrowes 29). One of the more illustrious claims of totalitarian regimes is that all individuals, being inherently equal, ought to have equal access to resources. This lofty principle, in practice, is not often achieved. 

In the state of Oceania, it is evident that the citizens are not the beneficiaries of this idealized equity. One of the first descriptions of Oceania that Orwell provides comes in the form of a juxtaposition between the pretense of mechanical power and the lack of pragmatism behind that pretense. As Winston ascends the seven flights of stairs to his apartment, he notes that “it was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours” (Orwell 1). A mere half a page later, Orwell describes the telescreen installed on his wall. An instrument that “could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely” (Orwell 2). Despite the fact that each Oceanic citizen, apart from the proles, are required to have a telescreen in their homes, the Party seems to be unable, or unwilling, to provide the resources necessary to power a simple lift. Herein lies one of the most blatant internal hypocrisies of totalitarian regimes which Winston describes as such: 

The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering––a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons––a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting––three hundred million people all with the same face. The reality was decaying, dingy cities, where underfed people shuffled to and fro in leaky shoes, in patched-up nineteenth-century houses that smelt always of cabbage and bad lavatories.” (Orwell 76) 

The reality does not match the ideal, nor does it come close to fulfilling its most basic promises. 

The realization that totalitarianism in theory falls short of its promises is an echo of Orwell’s deference to perspective. “For Orwell, memory means discipline. (…) The discipline for Orwell is in stating the truth, and, simultaneously, in knowing that truth is always provisional and never complete, its story always to be continued” (Rodden 65). Truth is not about what has been said, nor is it about what is currently being said. Rather, the truth rests at the intersection of reality and perspective. It is for this reason that “totalitarianism is not Orwell’s exclusive target. He is the inveterate adversary of every kind of expression that distorts and conceals truth” (Rodden 191). For Orwell, the distortion or outright fictionalizing of past events constitutes an assault on the individual on a literal level, but also on a deeply spiritual, individualistic level. 

Totalitarian regimes do not care for ease of life, nor do they truly care for life at all. Rather, their main objective is total and complete control of their subjects. When the pervasive rhetoric is that all is well and no one is without, this creates the impression that one’s reality is unreliable. Although Winston is well aware of the squalor prevalent in Oceania, he betrays his own mind––his own reality––while observing the proles fighting over a tin saucepan. “Winston watched them disgustedly. And yet, just for a moment, what almost frightening power had sounded in that cry from only a few hundred throats! Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that mattered?” (Orwell 72) At this moment, Winston engages in a sort of cognitive dissonance. He knows that the Party’s promises are empty and that their statements of facts are mere forgeries. However, he cannot seem to grasp why the proles do not rise up against the Party’s rule and establish political dominance. The answer, however, is strikingly simple––they do not have the luxury. Political activity requires resources, education and, above all else, time. The proles are concerned with survival, a task so consuming that there is nothing left to give to politics. This is a trademark tool used by totalitarian regimes––to keep a class of people just desperate enough where they will not rebel, but nevertheless sustained by their “primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations” (Orwell 74). In this way, totalitarian regimes do not see their citizens as people, but as replaceable cogs in a larger political machine. Orwell came to this realization in Spain when he was finally convinced that “fascism and communism were both dehumanizing totalitarian systems that so deformed their citizens that overthrowing them became impossible” (Burrowes 31). Strictly controlling access to material resources while espousing plentifulness is, in many ways, the most basic form of control in which a regime may participate.

Winston’s work at the Fiction Department represents a more theoretical, insidious form of control. On a daily basis, Winston is tasked with editing the past. Orwell writes:

The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records, and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it. It also follows that though the past is alterable, it never has been altered in any specific instance. For when it has been recreated in whatever shape is needed at the moment, then this new version is the past, and no different past can ever have existed.” (Orwell 219)

It is in this discussion of the mutability of the past that Orwell subtly asserts that totalitarian regimes aim to control reality. It is their goal to instill in the individual a sense of distrust in their own minds. Although Winston knows that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia only a short while ago, that information, for all intents and purposes, exists “only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated” (Orwell 35). The Party views the past as malleable, “and if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed––if all records told the same tale––then the lie passed into history and became truth” (Orwell 35). This view of the past runs directly contrary to Orwell’s perspective that “we cannot settle into any one view” (Rodden 63). For Orwell, the human powers of perception and interpretation are what preserve truth. However, this is an inherently retrospective act. If, in retrospection, the things that one remembers to have happened no longer exist in written history, it is a great deal more difficult to get to the truth of any matter. To alter the past eradicates the possibility of perspective. Once perspective is banished, the controlling force may now focus on manipulating the present. 

The control that the Party exerts over the past is further revealed through its total domination of language. “The most powerful weapon in the arsenal of totalitarian states is language. (…) By controlling language, governments and their media are able to instill obedience to the will of the state” (Rodden 186). This is why Orwell’s protagonist, on the first page of his novel, begins a diary. By putting language to thought, Winston participates in a revolution. It is also likely for this reason that “on 9 May Orwell wrote to his then publisher, Victor Gollancz, informing him that he intended to return to England in August and write an exposé of what he had seen earlier in the month; to counteract ‘the stuff appearing in the English papers’, which he considered to be ‘largely the most appalling lies’” (Burrowes 32). For Orwell, this mission was one that was largely motivated by a deep sense of morality. Orwell’s belief was that “we are obliged to tell hard truths: we know what these are and cannot take refuge in uncertainty when the moral demand is for truth” (Rodden 64). Orwell’s essays, Spilling the Spanish Beans and Eye-Witness in Barcelona “were his quick response to redress the lies and the manipulation and the distortion of the events that he had witnessed in Catalonia and were his ’first major assault on communism’” (Burrowes 33). In these essays, Orwell demonstrates the revelatory power of language. However, to speak that which is true one must have the words to do so. Once those words are taken away, the truth becomes more difficult to articulate and, therefore, more difficult to understand.

The Party’s insistence on dwindling down works of literary art and even colloquial vocabulary is evidence of a more clandestine form of control. In a conversation with Syme, who works with Winston at the Fiction Department, Syme says to Winston, “‘We’re destroying words––scores of them, hundred of them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone’” (Orwell 52). This moment is particularly striking because of the idea of destruction. Words come in and out of fashion, phrases that were once commonplace in Shakespearean dialogue no longer resonate with the modern ear. Languages undergo changes all by themselves. Syme believes his project to be one of promoting efficiency, but this is not the case. To destroy something carries within it the connotation that the thing being destroyed is, in some way, toxic, bad, dangerous or undesirable. Syme seems to recognize this, in part, when he says, “‘don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it” (Orwell 53). The real goal of Newspeak, the language which Syme is helping to finalize, is to limit consciousness and independent thought. 

Independent thought is the chief enemy of totalitarianism. Because “language repeatedly makes us examine and reassess what we thought we knew and understood,” to control language is to control minds (Rodden 63). One of Winston’s first entries in his diary reads, “thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death” (Orwell 29). Though Winston is referencing the specific criminal act of thoughtcrime, Orwell’s intention is to move his reader towards an understanding of how thought, in all its many manifestations, is received in a totalitarian state. “Simply because of their capacity to think, human beings are suspects by definition, and this suspicion cannot be diverted by exemplary behavior, for the human capacity to think is also a capacity to change one’s mind” (Arendt 430). It is for this reason that independent thought is inconsistent with totalitarian goals. In speaking to his friend Syme, “Winston had a curious feeling that this was not a real human being but some kind of dummy. It was not the man’s brain that was speaking; it was his larynx. The stuff coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck” (Orwell 56). Syme is a victim of the shrinking “range of consciousness” that is mandated by Newspeak (Orwell 54). To engage in thoughtcrime is to allow one’s mind to extend beyond the boundaries of this new, mandated consciousness. 

Once one’s language becomes rigid, one’s ability to experience reality becomes distorted. In speaking about the lack of “reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime,” Syme says, “it’s merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won’t be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect” (Orwell 54). This idea that one is able to control one’s reality is reminiscent of the propaganda that Orwell observed in Spain. After some time fighting in the war, Orwell notes that “Barcelona had changed for the worse, the workers’ state worth fighting for was gone, and Barcelona was now shrouded in ‘an atmosphere of suspicion, fear, uncertainty, and veiled hatred’. Orwell felt compelled to reveal increased communist duplicity and left-wing collusion in covering up the truth” (Burrowes 32-33). Duplicitousness implies, among other things, variation. For Orwell, variation is a suspect concept. “Orwell believes that we can and must say what we see, what is there plainly and clearly before our eyes; yet he also emphasizes that often it is extremely hard to see what is before our eyes. As he learned in Barcelona, appearances can deceive us––what is there is apparent, and yet not apparent” (Rodden 64). Thought has two fundamental criteria––observing and interpreting. Once these two criteria have been met, reality comes to fruition. It is the latter of these two criteria which totalitarian regimes seek to eradicate. By controlling interpretation, totalitarian regimes do not control physical reality, but the perception of that reality. Thus, they control the human mind. 

In 1984 , the Party seeks to control independent thought––the human mind––as a means of self-preservation. That which makes an individual unique is her thoughts, feelings, beliefs and fears. Each of these things informs her individual perspectives on the reality she experiences. Under totalitarian rule, it is precisely this individualistic nature which constitutes danger and the ultimate demise of the controlling party. “What totalitarian ideologies therefore aim at is not the transformation of the outside world or the revolutionizing transmutation of society, but the transformation of human nature itself” (Arendt 458). When individuality is replaced with carefully-constructed ideology, the resulting product is a shell of a human whose ability to think for herself has been destroyed and replaced with fabrications. Orwell’s writing of Winston’s neighbor, Parsons, is an example of this phenomenon. “[Parsons] was a fattish but active man of paralyzing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms––one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party depended” (Orwell 22). Parsons is the ultimate example of the Party’s objectives being actualized. He is void of independent thought and of individuality. This twofold destruction is essentially a murder––“for to destroy individuality is to destroy spontaneity, man’s power to begin something new out of his own resources, something that cannot be explained on the basis of reactions to environment and events. Nothing then remains but ghastly marionette with human faces” (Arendt 455). Without thought and a sense of self, one ceases to be. Although the physical body may be left unharmed, the internal world of the individual has been obliterated. It is this final, total domination of the human spirit that allows the Party to maintain itself. 

A belief in the “superfluousness,” as Hannah Arendt calls it, of the individual is what perpetuates a totalitarian regime’s existence. “The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood but with perpetuating itself. Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains the same” (Orwell 215). At its very core, totalitarianism is anti-individual. Its sole motive is to continue its own existence, by any means necessary. By making humanity obsolete, these regimes engage in a “radical evil” which “has emerged in connection with a system in which all men have become equally superfluous. The manipulators of this system believe in their own superfluousness as much as in that of all others, and the totalitarian murderers are all the more dangerous because they do not care if they themselves are alive or dead, if they ever lived or never were born” (Arendt 459). Totalitarianism is concerned with power for the sake of power. “One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship” (Orwell 272). Power is the ultimate end which manifests itself “in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing” (Orwell 276). Since this is how the Party deploys its power, it follows that “the death of the individual is not death” and that “the Party is immortal” (Orwell 278). The cyclical nature of totalitarian power––of “radical evil––ensures infiniteness. 

George Orwell’s 1984 may be characterized as an essay on control and all of its many consequences. Totalitarian regimes, as the term suggests, want only for total, utter control over the human mind, and, secondarily, the physical body. Although Orwell’s gradual realization of the horrors of communism led him to a place of staunch opposition and disillusionment, his protagonist seems to move in reverse. Orwell’s perspective on the Spanish Civil War compelled a political and moral awakening within. However, at the conclusion of the novel, Winston claims that “he had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother” (Orwell 308). In the end, having had his powers of thought and individuality stolen away, Winston falls prey to the Party. This book remains a poignant commentary on how political structures, of all kinds, employ methods of control and manipulation in order to retain their power. They do not care for revolution, ethics or change. Rather, they seek to dominate the individual––body, mind and spirit––for the sole purpose of maintaining their own “radically evil” existences. 

Works Cited

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism . Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968.  

Burrowes, Darryl Anthony. Historians at War : Cold War Influences on Anglo-American Representations of the Spanish Civil War . Sussex Academic Press, 2019. EBSCOhost , search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=1946782&site=ehost-live.

Orwell, George, and Erich Fromm. 1984: a Novel . Plume, 2010.

Rodden, John. George Orwell . Salem Press, 2012. EBSCOhost , search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=500801&site=ehost-live.

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The Definitive Guide to Analysing ‘1984’ for English: Summary, Context, Themes & Characters

Newspeak? Doublethink? What do all of these words mean? If you need help analysing 1984 by George Orwell, you’ve come to the right place — we’ve got all you need to know with a summary, list of key characters, themes and a 3-step essay analysis guide!

We’ve even got an analysis table and a sample paragraph that’s all free for you to download on 1984.

So, let’s throw back into 1984 (the fictional one of course)! 

1984 by George Orwell Summary & Key Messages Key Characters in 1984 Context Themes Explored in 1984 Essay Analysis of 1984

1984 by George Orwell Summary & Key Messages

The politics of oceania.

1984 belongs in the dystopian, science fiction genre as it explores the dangers of corrupted power under a totalitarian regime. Totalitarianism is a government system that dictates how its citizens think, behave and act by constantly keeping an eye on them and carrying out punishments for those who don’t obey. Sounds strict, hey? 

Sadly, this is the life of our protagonist, Winston Smith. Winston lives in a nation that resembles London in Oceania, which has been in a war with Eurasia and Eastasia since forever but no one really knows what the war is about. This is because the Party controls its people through rewriting history in the Ministry of Truth, where Winston edits historical records as part of his job.

The Party also invented a new language called “Newspeak” , which eliminates any words associated with rebellion to ensure full subservience of their nation. 

Wherever Winston goes, he is bombarded with posters of their omnipresent leader, Big Brother. There are also hidden cameras and microphones that are implanted everywhere by the thought police to monitor every move of its citizens.

It’s a scary place because if you do or say anything wrong, the thought police will capture you and force you into lifelong labour . In this world, people cannot have close friends, cannot date whoever they want and cannot have intimate relationships.

Instead, the people pent up these emotions and channel them into aggressive patriotism for their government which are expressed in two minute hate rallies. 

The Start of Winston’s Rebellion

Winston has had enough of the Party and its strict control. He purchases an illegal diary to commit crimethink, where he expresses his own thoughts and feelings about the Party through writing. He also writes about his interest in O’Brien, a member of the Inner Party who he believes could be part of the underground rebellion group called the Brotherhood. 

Access 1984 Downloadable Sample Paragraph and Examples of Analysis

Winston’s and Julia’s Relationship

At work, Winston realises that his historical records were not aligning with his memories . He notices Julia, a young beautiful girl staring at him, and he is afraid that she will turn him into the “thought police”.

However, Julia passes him a note that says “I love you” and they start an affair. 

O’Brien’s Betrayal 

As their relationship grows more seriously, so does Winston’s hatred for the Party. He and Julia decided to reveal their rebellion to O’Brien, who also appeared to be on their side .

O’Brien welcomes them into the Brotherhood and passed Winston a copy of Emmanuel Goldstein’s book. As Winston starts reading the book, the thought police charge in, arrest Winston and Julia and bring them to the Ministry of Love. Turns out, O’Brien is a snake. 

The Party Tortures Winston

At the Ministry of Love, Winston is tortured mercilessly and this makes him confess everything he knows about Julia and the rebellion .

It is then revealed that the government carries out these acts to exercise total power and control over the people of Oceania, to the extent where people not only do things out of fear, but genuinely believe in what they are doing even if it doesn’t make sense.

Winston’s Loss of Individuality

In Room 101, Winston experiences a true Fear Factor episode. The thought police threaten Winston with his ultimate fear, rats that would eat his face off. This caused Winston to scream “Do it to Julia, not me!”, which represents his betrayal to the only person that held value to him.

After this, the thought police let both Winston and Julia go, but the two ex-lovers can no longer look at each other face to face as they are both broken inside. Winston becomes a changed man who does not want to think about rebelling and instead becomes highly supportive of the Party and Big Brother. 

Key Characters in 1984

Winston Smith  The main protagonist who works under the Ministry of Truth in London, Oceania. His appearance is frail, pensive and intelligent. He hates the Party and its totalitarian system with a desire to revolutionise his current political situation. He can be emotional and idealistic with his goals. 

Julia  A beautiful young girl who is Winston’s love interest. Julia is sex-positive with an optimistic attitude about the future of the Party. She represents parts of humanity that Winston lacks, such as passive survival, intimacy, intuition and pragmatism. 

O’Brien  A mysterious leader of the Inner Party who Winston trusts as Winston believes that O’Brien is a member of the legendary rebellion group, the Brotherhood. It is revealed later in the novel that O’Brien is a leader of The Party who has been keeping a close eye on Winston. His betrayal launches us into the inner mechanisms of The Party and its totalitarian rule. O’Brien’s character parallels that of famous dictators in modern history such as Stalin and Hitler, as he is determined to indoctrinate Winston in the name of “purity.” 

Big Brother  Have you watched the show Big Brother? His character in the show is almost the same as in 1984, except a lot more controlling. In 1984, Big Brother is the most dominating figure in Oceania as he is perceived to be the ruler, although Orwell does not specify whether he really exists or not. Big Brother’s face is plastered among posters, coins and telescreens with the slogan “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU” so it’s impossible to avoid him anywhere. 

Emmanuel Goldstein As the leader of the legendary group of rebels called the Brotherhood, Emmanuel Goldstein is the opposing figure of Big Brother. Although he never appears in the novel, he has had a profound impact on Winston’s hope for the future. He is the most dangerous man in Oceania, according to the Party.  

Context in 1984

To understand 1984’s context, we must first understand the author’s personal background to craft a well thought-out essay analysis. This is because the author’s personal and historical experiences do shape the novel and its themes. So, let’s start with Orwell’s schooling days.

If you ever felt suppressed at school, Orwell can definitely relate with you on that. As a “lower-upper-middle class”, Orwell didn’t fit in with his peers and was upset with the restricted routine that schools impose on their students.

He then went on to become a British Imperial Policeman in Burma where he hated his job as he had to execute strict laws under a political system he didn’t like. After this, he moved to England and became a full-time writer. 

Orwell experienced poverty for awhile, and even lived as a coal miner in northern England which caused him to shift from capitalist ideals to democratic socialism. Here are the simplified definitions of the political concepts that influenced Orwell’s beliefs and 1984’s themes: 

• Capitalism: An economic system where property is owned and controlled by private actors, rather than by state. As such individuals can control how much they set their prices, instead of leaving it to the government to dictate. 
• Democratic Socialism: Unlike capitalism, democratic socialism is an economic system whereby property and products are owned and controlled by the entire society, alongside governments. So, the main difference here is that governments have a say in trade whereas in capitalism, governments do not interfere with private owner’s business. 

Orwell was also concerned with the rise of Thatcherism. 

In the year 1936, Orwell fought as a socialist in the Spanish Civil War during World War II, where he became familiar with totalitarian systems that are under leaders such as Hitler and Stalin. Although Orwell was passionate about socialism at first, he soon became disillusioned and disappointed with its ideals as Stalin used communism as the foundation of his authoritarian system. 

Stalin of the Soviet Union was also an important influence in shaping 1984’s totalitarian regime of Oceania, as Stalin used secret police to force confessions out of enemies through torture alike how the Ministry of Love did with Winston . Like the Party, the Soviet Union also tampered with physical records of people as they imprison and/or eliminate millions of lives. 

With the rise of the nuclear age and television in 1949, Orwell envisioned a future where everyone would always be monitored through screens in a post-atomic dictatorship . This became a fear that was highly possible when speculated thirty five years into the future. 

But as we all know, this did not become true. In the early 1990s, the Cold War ended with the triumph of democracy, as signified by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Even so, Orwell’s 1984 still serves as a precautionary tale against the corruption and abuse of totalitarian regimes, along with a profound insight into the use of language and history to manipulate one’s individuality.  

Want more information on George Orwell? Take a look at this biography found via the Orwell Foundation page!

Themes Explored in 1984

To help you get started on your thesis or topic sentence , here are three key themes from 1984 that you can write about in your essay analysis !

The Consequences of Totalitarianism

After experiencing the violence and corruption of totalitarian regimes in Spain and Russia, Orwell wrote 1984 as a warning about the dangers of an authoritarian regime where the government holds the most power. As such, the Party in 1984 administered extreme methods of physical and psychological manipulation to enforce total submission of its people. 

Physical control by the Party includes total surveillance of its people to the extent where even a twitch in the face can be enough to warrant an arrest. Morning exercises, called Physical Jerks, are also carried out before long hours at work to tire people out so they don’t have the energy to think beyond the Party’s propaganda. 

The Party also uses physical torture to “re-educate” and punish those who rebel against them. It is this physical pain that causes Winston to lose his own individuality and moral beliefs, allowing the Party to infiltrate his mind and dictate his sense of reality. 

Meanwhile, the Party also uses psychological tactics to saturate the individual’s mind with propaganda and disable its ability for independent thinking. On top of watching everyone everywhere, the telescreens are also used to indoctrinate (ie. brainwash) people into supporting the Party despite its flaws.

The telescreens also perpetuate slogans such as “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU” , to remind people that their government is always watching their back so they better behave according to the Party’s standards. 

The Party also deems close friendships and conversations with others illegal. So, if you’re itching to spill the tea, your only method of venting your emotions out is through pep rallies, where the Party encourages you to show extreme expressions of hatred to its political enemies. Ultimately, this allows the Party to dictate how and where you should express your emotions, keeping you from expressing your individual feelings, thoughts and opinions. 

Here are some quotes that illustrate the perils of totalitarianism: 

The Power of Language to Liberate and Control 

In 1984, language has the dual capacity to both restrain and facilitate individual expression. This is another key message that Orwell imparts, as he highlights how language can either promote or limit ideas which influence our beliefs, behaviour and identity. 

The Party uses Newspeak as a way of controlling the language that its people speak, which in turn dictates the people’s thoughts, actions and personalities (or lack thereof).

By eliminating words that are associated with rebellious thoughts, the Party essentially removes the people’s ability to think of resistance because there are no words to conceive it. With continual edits with Newspeak, the Party inches a step closer to their ultimate goal of total coercion from their people.

Yet, in Winston’s case, he uses language as a vehicle of self-expression as he purchases a diary for himself and writes his everyday thoughts, opinions and feelings into it . By writing in his own words, he is able to build himself an identity with his own passions, goals and perspective.

Sadly, in a world where the government overrules individual expression, Winston’s use of language dwindles, though it is encouraging to see how language can still work to preserve independent thought.

Here are three quotes that can help you get started on this theme: 

The Importance of Preserving Our Identity and Individualism

What happens if we lose everything that defines us as us? 

1984 truly delves into this scary concept as the Party removes everyone’s personal details so they are not able to establish their own identity. For example, even Winston does not know his own age, who his real parents are nor can he trust his own childhood memories as there are no photographs or evidences to help him differentiate between reality and imagination. 

Aside from Winston, the rest of Oceania are also denied documents that could give them a sense of individuality and help them differentiate themselves from others . This causes their memories to grow fuzzy, thus making the people of Oceania vulnerable and dependent on the stories that the Party tells them.

In turn, by controlling the present, the Party can re-engineer the past. Simultaneously, by controlling the past, the Party can rationalise its shortcomings and project a perfect government that is far from the truth. 

With no recollection of the past, the people of Oceania can no longer stay in touch with their real identities and instead, become identical as they wear the same uniform, drink the same brand of alcohol and more. Yet, Winston builds his own sense of identity through recording his thoughts, experiences and emotions in his diary. This act along with his relationship with Julia symbolises Winston’s declaration of his own independence and identity as a rebel who disagrees with the Party’s system. 

Despite this, Winston’s own sense of individuality and identity dissolves after his torturous experience at the Ministry of Love, which transforms him into another member of the Outer Party who blends into the crowd. By asserting a dark vision of humanity’s individualism, Orwell urges audiences in the present to truly value their freedom to express and preserve their identity. 

Here are some quotes that are related to this idea which you may find helpful:

Of course, 1984 also includes other themes that you may be thinking about writing analysis for, such as: 

• Rebellion and Patriotism 
• Active versus Passive Survival 
• The Corrupt Use of Technology

Check out our recommended related text for 1984 .

Essay Analysis: How to Analyse 1984 in 3 Steps

Analysing your text is always the first step to writing an amazing essay! Lots of students make the mistake of jumping right into writing without really understanding what the text is about.

This leads to arguments that only skim the surface of the complex ideas, techniques and elements of the text. So, let’s build a comprehensive thesis through an in-depth analysis of the 1984. 

Here are three easy steps that you can use to analyse 1984 and really impress your English teachers!

Step 1: Select your example(s)

1984 is a world of its own with its totalitarian systems, use of foreign words and more. So, we totally understand if you’re feeling lost and don’t know where to begin. 

Our piece of advice is to look for examples that come with a technique. Techniques offer you a chance to delve into the text’s underlying meaning, which would help you deepen your analysis and enrich your essay writing. 

Find our extensive list of quotes from 1984 by George Orwell!

Here are two quotes that relate to consequences of totalitarian power, which we have picked to help you visualise which examples can provide a deeper meaning: 

“Big Brother is Watching You.”  “WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH” 

Step 2: Identify your technique(s)

Getting a good grade in English is more than listing out every technique that you can find in the text. Instead, it’s about finding techniques that allow you to dive deeper into the themes you’re focussing on, while also supporting your argument. 

Try to look for techniques that allow you to explain its effects and link to your argument such as symbols, metaphors, connotations, similes and historical allegories . In Orwell’s case, he uses a lot of language techniques such as neologism, where he makes up his own words such as “Doublethink” or “Newspeak”. 

For the two quotes above, its three techniques include historical allusion, rhetoric and oxymoron. 

If possible, you can look out for a quote that encompasses a few techniques to really pack a punch in your analysis. 

Step 3: Write the analysis

Once you’re done collecting your examples and techniques, the next part is writing. You must remember to explain what the effect of the technique is and how it supports your argument. Otherwise, it’s not going to be a cohesive essay if you’re just listing out techniques. 

An example of listing out techniques looks like this: 

“The rhetoric “Big Brother is Watching You” is also a historical allusion while “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery and Ignorance is Strength” is oxymoronic.”

Instead, you must elaborate on how each of these techniques link to your argument. 

“Big Brother is Watching You” is a rhetoric imposed by the Party to instil psychological fear and submission of the people of Oceania, whereby Orwell uses to warn the dangers of totalitarianism. “Big Brother” is also a historical allusion to Hitler to remind the audience that 1984 is not entirely fictional but a possible future of our reality, urging us to take action against totalitarian regimes with the autonomy we have now. 

Meanwhile, the slogan ““WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH” represents the oxymoronic mentalities that have been indoctrinated into the people of Oceania, highlighting how totalitarian regimes would force its people to think whatever they want their people to think, no matter how illogical it is. 

Together, your analysis should look something like: 

The Party perpetuates the rhetoric, “Big Brother is Watching You” to instil psychological fear and coercion of the the people of Oceania, which forewarns a lack of individual freedom and private reflection within authoritarian regimes. As “Big Brother” is a historical allusion to Hitler, Orwell reminds the audience that 1984 and its extremist politics is a reality, urging us to defend our independence before it’s forbidden. Furthermore, the slogan “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength” embodies the oxymoronic mentalities that the Party indoctrinates into its people, revealing the extreme extent of psychological control an authoritarian regime strives to ensure their power is never questioned, no matter how irrational it is.

Need some help with your essay analysis of other texts aside from 1984?

Check out other texts we’ve created guides for below:

• Romeo and Juliet
• Run Lola Run
• The Meursault Investigation
• In Cold Blood
• To Kill a Mockingbird
• The Book Thief
• The Tempest
• Blade Runner
• Things Fall Apart
• Mrs Dalloway

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• Jul 14, 2021

Controlling Words, Controlling Thoughts: Language in "1984"

In the dystopian novel 1984, Orwell creates frightening visions of the future to warn readers about the dangerous elements of society they inhabit. Orwell depicts a society that uses language to control the thoughts of its citizens.

In 1984 , Orwell writes about the state creating Newspeak in order to make ‘plain representation in the verbal mode impossible’ according to the critic Harris, so that opposition to the social and political structure of 1984’s society is ‘literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.’ This is fitting as Orwell wrote ‘1984’ a year after the end of World War II ended to warn readers about the dangers of totalitarian governments censoring language; this was a period of history that saw the rise of the authoritarian states such as the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as well as increased state control under the Labour government in the United Kingdom, Orwell’s home country.

The strong focus on politics throughout 1984 is also reflected by the names of the main institutions in the novel’s society. Readers are first introduced to ‘The Ministry of Truth’, described as an ‘enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air’. The immense size of this building is emphasised by the tricolon ‘soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air’, which in turn highlights the power of the Party. This technique can be seen again in the torture scene, in which Winston observes that O’Brien’s face ‘was strong and fleshy and brutal... before which he felt himself helpless’ and ‘O’Brien leaned over him, deliberately bringing the worn face nearer’.

Moreover, the Party uses slogans such as ‘War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength’. The goal of those paradoxes is to make people think in ‘doublethink’, an act meaning to hold two contradictory beliefs to be true without any cognitive dissonance, thereby allowing one to be unaware of actual contradictions. The power of doublethink to corrupt thought and control minds is highlighted in the end when O’ Brien forces Winston to say that two add two does not equal four and ‘in all honesty [he doesn’t] know [the answer].’ Orwell was inspired to create doublethink by the fascist states of his time such as the USSR, presuming that ‘When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer’. Orwell believed that totalitarian systems control language in order to prevent their citizens from expressing or thinking rebellious thoughts, writing ‘If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought’.

To emphasise the corruption of language and thoughts by authoritarian states, Orwell created Newspeak, the official language of Oceania. The aim of Newspeak is again to promote ‘doublethink’, itself a neologism. Newspeak, itself a neologism, partially

achieves this through neologisms, compound words. Neologisms such as ‘Mintrue’ are designed to suppress the populace’s critical thinking skills so they would not realise that the Party is deceiving them, for example the ‘Ministry of Truth’ replaces the truth with lies.

Another characteristic of Newspeak is that it ‘is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year’. Newspeak achieves this by removing all synonyms, antonyms, comparative and superlative adjectives and creating singular ways to form adverbs and certain adjectives. In doing this, the Party hopes to prevent the populace from thinking any thoughts which challenge the Party’s power and thus stop any rebellion from materialising. However, the critic Roy Harris believes that Orwell was wrong in presuming that language could be controlled by a singular authority since ‘calling a spade a spade is not something language can do: only language users’. Therefore, Newspeak would ultimately fail as language users who cannot make words mean what they want to will make another ‘with or without government intervention’. Nevertheless, given the relentless surveillance of the populace in 1984 via telescreens and clandestine microphones, Oceanians would be coerced into adopting Newspeak, thus giving Newspeak a bigger impact on Oceanians than the people living in Britain, Harris’s frame of reference.

To conclude, 1984 offers a future in which language is diminished and abused by the people in power as a way to preserve the status quo. Edward Sapir, the founder of ethnolinguistics, which considers the relationship of culture to language, stated that “Human beings ... are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society.” For this reason, readers must take the degradation of language seriously as it could lead to the oppression, destruction and death of the members of society.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Books — 1984

Essays on 1984

Hook examples for "1984" essays, the dystopian warning hook.

Open your essay by discussing George Orwell's "1984" as a prophetic warning against totalitarianism and government surveillance. Explore how the novel's themes are eerily relevant in today's world.

The Orwellian Language Hook

Delve into the concept of Newspeak in "1984" and its parallels to modern language manipulation. Discuss how the novel's portrayal of controlled language reflects real-world instances of propaganda and censorship.

Big Brother is Watching Hook

Begin with a focus on surveillance and privacy concerns. Analyze the omnipresent surveillance in the novel and draw connections to contemporary debates over surveillance technologies, data privacy, and civil liberties.

The Power of Doublethink Hook

Explore the psychological manipulation in "1984" through the concept of doublethink. Discuss how individuals in the novel are coerced into accepting contradictory beliefs, and examine instances of cognitive dissonance in society today.

The Character of Winston Smith Hook

Introduce your readers to the protagonist, Winston Smith, and his journey of rebellion against the Party. Analyze his character development and the universal theme of resistance against oppressive regimes.

Technology and Control Hook

Discuss the role of technology in "1984" and its implications for control. Explore how advancements in surveillance technology, social media, and artificial intelligence resonate with the novel's themes of control and manipulation.

The Ministry of Truth Hook

Examine the Ministry of Truth in the novel, responsible for rewriting history. Compare this to the manipulation of information and historical revisionism in contemporary politics and media.

Media Manipulation and Fake News Hook

Draw parallels between the Party's manipulation of information in "1984" and the spread of misinformation and fake news in today's media landscape. Discuss the consequences of a distorted reality.

Relevance of Thoughtcrime Hook

Explore the concept of thoughtcrime and its impact on individual freedom in the novel. Discuss how society today grapples with issues related to freedom of thought, expression, and censorship.

The Political Satire of The Novel 1984

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The Setting of 1984 by George Orwell

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1984 by George Orwell: Literary Devices to Portray Government Controlling Its Citizens

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A World Without Love: The Ramifications of an Affectionless Society in 1984

On double-think and newspeak: orwell's language, the theme of survival and selfishness in the handmaid's tale in 1984, government surveillance in 1984 by george orwell: bogus security, george orwell's 1984 as a historical allegory, exploitation of language in george orwell's 1984, how orwell's 1984 is relevant to today's audience, the relation of orwel’s 1984 to the uighur conflict in china, symbolism in 1984: the soviet union as representation of the fears people, parallels to today in 1984 by george orwell, the relationship between power and emotions in 1984, proletariat vs protagonist: winston smith's class conflict in 1984, a review of george orwell’s book, 1984, o'brien as a dehumanizing villain in 1984, family in 1984 and persepolis, the philosophy of determinism in 1984, orwell's use of rhetorical strategies in 1984, control the citizens in the orwell's novel 1984, dangers of totalitarianism as depicted in 1984, dystopian life in '1984' was a real-life in china.

8 June 1949, George Orwell

Novel; Dystopia, Political Fiction, Social Science Fiction Novel

Winston Smith, Julia, O'Brien, Aaronson, Jones, and Rutherford, Ampleforth, Charrington, Tom Parsons, Syme, Mrs. Parsons, Katharine Smith

Since Orwell has been a democratic socialist, he has modelled his book and motives after the Stalinist Russia

Power, Repressive Behaviors, Totalitarianism, Mass Surveillance, Human Behaviors

The novel has brought up the "Orwellian" term, which stands for "Big Brother" "Thoughtcrime" and many other terms that we know well. It has been the reflection of totalitarianism

1984 represents a dystopian writing that has followed the life of Winston Smith who belongs to the "Party",which stands for the total control, which is also known as the Big Brother. It controls every aspect of people's lives. Is it ever possible to go against the system or will it take even more control. It constantly follows the fear and oppression with the surveillance being the main part of 1984. There is Party’s official O’Brien who is following the resistance movement, which represents an alternative, which is the symbol of hope.

Before George Orwell wrote his famous book, he worked for the BBC as the propagandist during World War II. The novel has been named 1980, then 1982 before finally settling on its name. Orwell fought tuberculosis while writing the novel. He died seven months after 1984 was published. Orwell almost died during the boating trip while he was writing the novel. Orwell himself has been under government surveillance. It was because of his socialist opinions. The slogan that the book uses "2 + 2 = 5" originally came from Communist Russia and stood for the five-year plan that had to be achieved during only four years. Orwell also used various Japanese propaganda when writing his novel, precisely his "Thought Police" idea.

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” “Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.” “Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.” “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” "But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred."

The most important aspect of 1984 is Thought Police, which controls every thought. It has been featured in numerous books, plays, music pieces, poetry, and anything that has been created when one had to deal with Social Science and Politics. Another factor that represents culmination is thinking about overthrowing the system or trying to organize a resistance movement. It has numerous reflections of the post WW2 world. Although the novella is graphic and quite intense, it portrays dictatorship and is driven by fear through the lens of its characters.

This essay topic is often used when writing about “The Big Brother” or totalitarian regimes, which makes 1984 a flexible topic that can be taken as the foundation. Even if you have to write about the use of fear by the political regimes, knowing the facts about this novel will help you to provide an example.

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