1984
1984, by George Orwell
Topic: Orwell said in an essay titled Why I write : ‘It is my purpose to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole.’
How far does Orwell achieve this in 1984 ?
Let us remember that, at the end of 1936, Orwell fought for the Republicans (against Franco) in Spain, where he was wounded. We know that Orwell’s 1984 (published in 1949) was given this title because the novel was written in 1948, just after the end of the Second World War and the fall of Hitler’s Nazi regime. At that time, Stalin’s U.S.S.R. still deported the enemies of the Party to gulags and the Cold War between this country and the United States of America had just begun. U.S.S.R would remain the most totalitarian regime till Stalin’s death in 1953.
As Orwell said, ‘every line of serious work that [he has] written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism’.
Considering those facts, how could we doubt that Orwell’s novel 1984 – as well as his previous political allegory Animal Farm – is both a literary masterpiece and a treatise on politics and totalitarianism ?
The main characters of 1984 are Winston Smith, Julia, O’Brien and Big Brother. The story starts, as the title tells us, in the year of 1984 and it takes place in England or, as it is called at that time, ‘Airstrip One’, which is the mainland of a huge country, ‘Oceania’, consisting of North America, the British Islands, South Africa and Australia. The whole country is ruled by the Party (led by a figure called Big Brother), according to the fundamental principles of ‘INGSOC’ (or English Socialism), the official language being ‘Newspeak’. The population of Oceania is divided into three parts : the ‘Inner Party’, the ‘Outer Party’ and the ‘Proles’ (who represent about eighty percent of the population). The narrator of the book is third person limited. The action starts when the protagonist,...
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