critical review 1984

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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• Read TIME’s Original Review of <i>Nineteen Eighty-Four</i>

Read TIME’s Original Review of Nineteen Eighty-Four

G eorge Orwell was already an established literary star when his masterwork Nineteen Eighty-Four was published on this day in 1949, but that didn’t stop TIME’s reviewer from being pleasantly surprised by the book. After all, even the expectation that a book would be good doesn’t mean one can’t be impressed when it turns out to be, as TIME put it, “absolutely super.”

One of the reasons, the review suggested, was Orwell’s bet that his fictional dystopia would not actually seem so foreign to contemporary readers. They would easily recognize many elements of the fictional world that TIME summed up as such:

In Britain 1984 A.D., no one would have suspected that Winston and Julia were capable of crimethink (dangerous thoughts) or a secret desire for ownlife (individualism). After all, Party-Member Winston Smith was one of the Ministry of Truth’s most trusted forgers; he had always flung himself heart & soul into the falsification of government statistics. And Party-Member Julia was outwardly so goodthinkful (naturally orthodox) that, after a brilliant girlhood in the Spies, she became active in the Junior Anti-Sex League and was snapped up by Pornosec, a subsection of the government Fiction Department that ground out happy-making pornography for the masses. In short, the grim, grey London Times could not have been referring to Winston and Julia when it snorted contemptuously: “Old-thinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc,” i.e., “Those whose ideas were formed before the Revolution cannot have a full emotional understanding of the principles of English Socialism.” How Winston and Julia rebelled, fell in love and paid the penalty in the terroristic world of tomorrow is the thread on which Britain’s George Orwell has spun his latest and finest work of fiction. In Animal Farm (TIME, Feb. 4, 1946,) Orwell parodied the Communist system in terms of barnyard satire; but in 1984 … there is not a smile or a jest that does not add bitterness to Orwell’s utterly depressing vision of what the world may be in 35 years’ time.

Decades later, as the real-life 1984 approached, TIME dedicated a cover story to Orwell’s earlier vision of what that year could have been like. “That Year Is Almost Here,” the headline proclaimed . But obsessing over how it matched up to its fictional depiction was missing the point, the article posited. “The proper way to remember George Orwell, finally, is not as a man of numbers—1984 will pass, not Nineteen Eighty–Four—but as a man of letters,” wrote Paul Gray, “who wanted to change the world by changing the word.”

Read the full 1949 review, here in the TIME Vault: Where the Rainbow Ends

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The masterpiece that killed George Orwell

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."

Sixty years after the publication of Orwell's masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, that crystal first line sounds as natural and compelling as ever. But when you see the original manuscript, you find something else: not so much the ringing clarity, more the obsessive rewriting, in different inks, that betrays the extraordinary turmoil behind its composition.

Probably the definitive novel of the 20th century, a story that remains eternally fresh and contemporary, and whose terms such as "Big Brother", "doublethink" and "newspeak" have become part of everyday currency, Nineteen Eighty-Four has been translated into more than 65 languages and sold millions of copies worldwide, giving George Orwell a unique place in world literature.

"Orwellian" is now a universal shorthand for anything repressive or totalitarian, and the story of Winston Smith, an everyman for his times, continues to resonate for readers whose fears for the future are very different from those of an English writer in the mid-1940s.

The circumstances surrounding the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four make a haunting narrative that helps to explain the bleakness of Orwell's dystopia. Here was an English writer, desperately sick, grappling alone with the demons of his imagination in a bleak Scottish outpost in the desolate aftermath of the second world war. The idea for Nineteen Eighty-Four, alternatively, "The Last Man in Europe", had been incubating in Orwell's mind since the Spanish civil war. His novel, which owes something to Yevgeny Zamyatin's dystopian fiction We, probably began to acquire a definitive shape during 1943-44, around the time he and his wife, Eileen adopted their only son, Richard. Orwell himself claimed that he was partly inspired by the meeting of the Allied leaders at the Tehran Conference of 1944. Isaac Deutscher, an Observer colleague, reported that Orwell was "convinced that Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt consciously plotted to divide the world" at Tehran.

Orwell had worked for David Astor's Observer since 1942, first as a book reviewer and later as a correspondent. The editor professed great admiration for Orwell's "absolute straightforwardness, his honesty and his decency", and would be his patron throughout the 1940s. The closeness of their friendship is crucial to the story of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Orwell's creative life had already benefited from his association with the Observer in the writing of Animal Farm. As the war drew to a close, the fruitful interaction of fiction and Sunday journalism would contribute to the much darker and more complex novel he had in mind after that celebrated "fairy tale". It's clear from his Observer book reviews, for example, that he was fascinated by the relationship between morality and language.

There were other influences at work. Soon after Richard was adopted, Orwell's flat was wrecked by a doodlebug. The atmosphere of random terror in the everyday life of wartime London became integral to the mood of the novel-in-progress. Worse was to follow. In March 1945, while on assignment for the Observer in Europe, Orwell received the news that his wife, Eileen, had died under anaesthesia during a routine operation.

Suddenly he was a widower and a single parent, eking out a threadbare life in his Islington lodgings, and working incessantly to dam the flood of remorse and grief at his wife's premature death. In 1945, for instanc e, he wrote almost 110,000 words for various publications, including 15 book reviews for the Observer.

Now Astor stepped in. His family owned an estate on the remote Scottish island of Jura, next to Islay. There was a house, Barnhill, seven miles outside Ardlussa at the remote northern tip of this rocky finger of heather in the Inner Hebrides. Initially, Astor offered it to Orwell for a holiday. Speaking to the Observer last week, Richard Blair says he believes, from family legend, that Astor was taken aback by the enthusiasm of Orwell's response.

In May 1946 Orwell, still picking up the shattered pieces of his life, took the train for the long and arduous journey to Jura. He told his friend Arthur Koestler that it was "almost like stocking up ship for an arctic voyage".

It was a risky move; Orwell was not in good health. The winter of 1946-47 was one of the coldest of the century. Postwar Britain was bleaker even than wartime, and he had always suffered from a bad chest. At least, cut off from the irritations of literary London, he was free to grapple unencumbered with the new novel. "Smothered under journalism," as he put it, he told one friend, "I have become more and more like a sucked orange."

Ironically, part of Orwell's difficulties derived from the success of Animal Farm. After years of neglect and indifference the world was waking up to his genius. "Everyone keeps coming at me," he complained to Koestler, "wanting me to lecture, to write commissioned booklets, to join this and that, etc - you don't know how I pine to be free of it all and have time to think again."

On Jura he would be liberated from these distractions but the promise of creative freedom on an island in the Hebrides came with its own price. Years before, in the essay "Why I Write", he had described the struggle to complete a book: "Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist or [sic] understand. For all one knows that demon is the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's personality." Then that famous Orwellian coda. "Good prose is like a window pane."

From the spring of 1947 to his death in 1950 Orwell would re-enact every aspect of this struggle in the most painful way imaginable. Privately, perhaps, he relished the overlap between theory and practice. He had always thrived on self-inflicted adversity.

At first, after "a quite unendurable winter", he revelled in the isolation and wild beauty of Jura. "I am struggling with this book," he wrote to his agent, "which I may finish by the end of the year - at any rate I shall have broken the back by then so long as I keep well and keep off journalistic work until the autumn."

Barnhill, overlooking the sea at the top of a potholed track, was not large, with four small bedrooms above a spacious kitchen. Life was simple, even primitive. There was no electricity. Orwell used Calor gas to cook and to heat water. Storm lanterns burned paraffin. In the evenings he also burned peat. He was still chain-smoking black shag tobacco in roll-up cigarettes: the fug in the house was cosy but not healthy. A battery radio was the only connection with the outside world.

Orwell, a gentle, unworldly sort of man, arrived with just a camp bed, a table, a couple of chairs and a few pots and pans. It was a spartan existence but supplied the conditions under which he liked to work. He is remembered here as a spectre in the mist, a gaunt figure in oilskins.

The locals knew him by his real name of Eric Blair, a tall, cadaverous, sad-looking man worrying about how he would cope on his own. The solution, when he was joined by baby Richard and his nanny, was to recruit his highly competent sister, Avril. Richard Blair remembers that his father "could not have done it without Avril. She was an excellent cook, and very practical. None of the accounts of my father's time on Jura recognise how essential she was."

Once his new regime was settled, Orwell could finally make a start on the book. At the end of May 1947 he told his publisher, Fred Warburg: "I think I must have written nearly a third of the rough draft. I have not got as far as I had hoped to do by this time because I really have been in most wretched health this year ever since about January (my chest as usual) and can't quite shake it off."

Mindful of his publisher's impatience for the new novel, Orwell added: "Of course the rough draft is always a ghastly mess bearing little relation to the finished result, but all the same it is the main part of the job." Still, he pressed on, and at the end of July was predicting a completed "rough draft" by October. After that, he said, he would need another six months to polish up the text for publication. But then, disaster.

Part of the pleasure of life on Jura was that he and his young son could enjoy the outdoor life together, go fishing, explore the island, and potter about in boats. In August, during a spell of lovely summer weather, Orwell, Avril, Richard and some friends, returning from a hike up the coast in a small motor boat, were nearly drowned in the infamous Corryvreckan whirlpool.

Richard Blair remembers being "bloody cold" in the freezing water, and Orwell, whose constant coughing worried his friends, did his lungs no favours. Within two months he was seriously ill. Typically, his account to David Astor of this narrow escape was laconic, even nonchalant.

The long struggle with "The Last Man in Europe" continued. In late October 1947, oppressed with "wretched health", Orwell recognised that his novel was still "a most dreadful mess and about two-thirds of it will have to be retyped entirely".

He was working at a feverish pace. Visitors to Barnhill recall the sound of his typewriter pounding away upstairs in his bedroom. Then, in November, tended by the faithful Avril, he collapsed with "inflammation of the lungs" and told Koestler that he was "very ill in bed". Just before Christmas, in a letter to an Observer colleague, he broke the news he had always dreaded. Finally he had been diagnosed with TB.

A few days later, writing to Astor from Hairmyres hospital, East Kilbride, Lanarkshire, he admitted: "I still feel deadly sick," and conceded that, when illness struck after the Corryvreckan whirlpool incident, "like a fool I decided not to go to a doctor - I wanted to get on with the book I was writing." In 1947 there was no cure for TB - doctors prescribed fresh air and a regular diet - but there was a new, experimental drug on the market, streptomycin. Astor arranged for a shipment to Hairmyres from the US.

Richard Blair believes that his father was given excessive doses of the new wonder drug. The side effects were horrific (throat ulcers, blisters in the mouth, hair loss, peeling skin and the disintegration of toe and fingernails) but in March 1948, after a three-month course, the TB symptoms had disappeared. "It's all over now, and evidently the drug has done its stuff," Orwell told his publisher. "It's rather like sinking the ship to get rid of the rats, but worth it if it works."

As he prepared to leave hospital Orwell received the letter from his publisher which, in hindsight, would be another nail in his coffin. "It really is rather important," wrote Warburg to his star author, "from the point of view of your literary career to get it [the new novel] by the end of the year and indeed earlier if possible."

Just when he should have been convalescing Orwell was back at Barnhill, deep into the revision of his manuscript, promising Warburg to deliver it in "early December", and coping with "filthy weather" on autumnal Jura. Early in October he confided to Astor: "I have got so used to writing in bed that I think I prefer it, though of course it's awkward to type there. I am just struggling with the last stages of this bloody book [which is] about the possible state of affairs if the atomic war isn't conclusive."

This is one of Orwell's exceedingly rare references to the theme of his book. He believed, as many writers do, that it was bad luck to discuss work-in-progress. Later, to Anthony Powell, he described it as "a Utopia written in the form of a novel". The typing of the fair copy of "The Last Man in Europe" became another dimension of Orwell's battle with his book. The more he revised his "unbelievably bad" manuscript the more it became a document only he could read and interpret. It was, he told his agent, "extremely long, even 125,000 words". With characteristic candour, he noted: "I am not pleased with the book but I am not absolutely dissatisfied... I think it is a good idea but the execution would have been better if I had not written it under the influence of TB."

And he was still undecided about the title: "I am inclined to call it NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR or THE LAST MAN IN EUROPE," he wrote, "but I might just possibly think of something else in the next week or two." By the end of October Orwell believed he was done. Now he just needed a stenographer to help make sense of it all.

It was a desperate race against time. Orwell's health was deteriorating, the "unbelievably bad" manuscript needed retyping, and the December deadline was looming. Warburg promised to help, and so did Orwell's agent. At cross-purposes over possible typists, they somehow contrived to make a bad situation infinitely worse. Orwell, feeling beyond help, followed his ex-public schoolboy's instincts: he would go it alone.

By mid-November, too weak to walk, he retired to bed to tackle "the grisly job" of typing the book on his "decrepit typewriter" by himself. Sustained by endless roll-ups, pots of coffee, strong tea and the warmth of his paraffin heater, with gales buffeting Barnhill, night and day, he struggled on. By 30 November 1948 it was virtually done.

Now Orwell, the old campaigner, protested to his agent that "it really wasn't worth all this fuss. It's merely that, as it tires me to sit upright for any length of time, I can't type very neatly and can't do many pages a day." Besides, he added, it was "wonderful" what mistakes a professional typist could make, and "in this book there is the difficulty that it contains a lot of neologisms".

The typescript of George Orwell's latest novel reached London in mid December, as promised. Warburg recognised its qualities at once ("amongst the most terrifying books I have ever read") and so did his colleagues. An in-house memo noted "if we can't sell 15 to 20 thousand copies we ought to be shot".

By now Orwell had left Jura and checked into a TB sanitorium high in the Cotswolds. "I ought to have done this two months ago," he told Astor, "but I wanted to get that bloody book finished." Once again Astor stepped in to monitor his friend's treatment but Orwell's specialist was privately pessimistic.

As word of Nineteen Eighty-Four began to circulate, Astor's journalistic instincts kicked in and he began to plan an Observer Profile, a significant accolade but an idea that Orwell contemplated "with a certain alarm". As spring came he was "having haemoptyses" (spitting blood) and "feeling ghastly most of the time" but was able to involve himself in the pre-publication rituals of the novel, registering "quite good notices" with satisfaction. He joked to Astor that it wouldn't surprise him "if you had to change that profile into an obituary".

Nineteen Eighty-Four was published on 8 June 1949 (five days later in the US) and was almost universally recognised as a masterpiece, even by Winston Churchill, who told his doctor that he had read it twice. Orwell's health continued to decline. In October 1949, in his room at University College hospital, he married Sonia Brownell, with David Astor as best man. It was a fleeting moment of happiness; he lingered into the new year of 1950. In the small hours of 21 January he suffered a massive haemorrhage in hospital and died alone.

The news was broadcast on the BBC the next morning. Avril Blair and her nephew, still up on Jura, heard the report on the little battery radio in Barnhill. Richard Blair does not recall whether the day was bright or cold but remembers the shock of the news: his father was dead, aged 46.

David Astor arranged for Orwell's burial in the churchyard at Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire. He lies there now, as Eric Blair, between HH Asquith and a local family of Gypsies.

Why '1984'?

Orwell's title remains a mystery. Some say he was alluding to the centenary of the Fabian Society, founded in 1884. Others suggest a nod to Jack London's novel The Iron Heel (in which a political movement comes to power in 1984), or perhaps to one of his favourite writer GK Chesterton's story, "The Napoleon of Notting Hill", which is set in 1984.

In his edition of the Collected Works (20 volumes), Peter Davison notes that Orwell's American publisher claimed that the title derived from reversing the date, 1948, though there's no documentary evidence for this. Davison also argues that the date 1984 is linked to the year of Richard Blair's birth, 1944, and notes that in the manuscript of the novel, the narrative occurs, successively, in 1980, 1982 and finally, 1984. There's no mystery about the decision to abandon "The Last Man in Europe". Orwell himself was always unsure of it. It was his publisher, Fred Warburg who suggested that Nineteen Eighty-Four was a more commercial title.

Freedom of speech: How '1984' has entrusted our culture

The effect of Nineteen Eighty-Four on our cultural and linguistic landscape has not been limited to either the film adaptation starring John Hurt and Richard Burton, with its Nazi-esque rallies and chilling soundtrack, nor the earlier one with Michael Redgrave and Edmond O'Brien.

It is likely, however, that many people watching the Big Brother series on television (in the UK, let alone in Angola, Oman or Sweden, or any of the other countries whose TV networks broadcast programmes in the same format) have no idea where the title comes from or that Big Brother himself, whose role in the reality show is mostly to keep the peace between scrapping, swearing contestants like a wise uncle, is not so benign in his original incarnation.

Apart from pop-culture renditions of some of the novel's themes, aspects of its language have been leapt upon by libertarians to describe the curtailment of freedom in the real world by politicians and officials - alarmingly, nowhere and never more often than in contemporary Britain.

George owes his own adjective to this book alone and his idea that wellbeing is crushed by restrictive, authoritarian and untruthful government.

Big Brother (is watching you)

A term in common usage for a scarily omniscient ruler long before the worldwide smash-hit reality-TV show was even a twinkle in its producers' eyes. The irony of societal hounding of Big Brother contestants would not have been lost on George Orwell.

Some hotels have refused to call a guest bedroom number 101 - rather like those tower blocks that don't have a 13th floor - thanks to the ingenious Orwellian concept of a room that contains whatever its occupant finds most impossible to endure. Like Big Brother, this has spawned a modern TV show: in this case, celebrities are invited to name the people or objects they hate most in the world.

Thought Police

An accusation often levelled at the current government by those who like it least is that they are trying to tell us what we can and cannot think is right and wrong. People who believe that there are correct ways to think find themselves named after Orwell's enforcement brigade.

Thoughtcrime

See "Thought Police" above. The act or fact of transgressing enforced wisdom.

For Orwell, freedom of expression was not just about freedom of thought but also linguistic freedom. This term, denoting the narrow and diminishing official vocabulary, has been used ever since to denote jargon currently in vogue with those in power.

Doublethink

Hypocrisy, but with a twist. Rather than choosing to disregard a contradiction in your opinion, if you are doublethinking, you are deliberately forgetting that the contradiction is there. This subtlety is mostly overlooked by people using the accusation of "doublethink" when trying to accuse an adversary of being hypocritical - but it is a very popular word with people who like a good debate along with their pints in the pub. Oliver Marre

• George Orwell
• The Observer
• David Astor

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1984 Book Summary – George Orwell

06 Mar 1984 Book Summary – George Orwell

This review aims to dissect and analyze “1984” in its entirety, offering insights into its thematic richness, narrative style, and Orwell’s vision of a world subsumed by tyranny and propaganda.

Suggested Reading Age “1984” is best suited for readers aged 15 and above due to its complex themes and some mature content.

Thesis Statement Orwell’s “1984” is not just a novel but a warning, an intricate exploration of the dangers of political extremism and the loss of personal freedom.

Short Synopsis of 1984

“1984” by George Orwell is a dystopian novel that delves into the horrors of a totalitarian society under constant surveillance. Set in the superstate of Oceania, it follows Winston Smith, a member of the Outer Party, working at the Ministry of Truth. The Party, led by the elusive Big Brother, exercises absolute control over all aspects of life, including history, language, and even thought. Winston, feeling suppressed and rebellious, begins a forbidden love affair with Julia, a co-worker, as an act of defiance against the Party’s oppressive regime. However, their rebellion is short-lived as they are caught and subjected to brutal psychological manipulation and reconditioning by the Party. The novel explores themes of totalitarianism, propaganda, and the crushing of individuality, culminating in Winston’s tragic acceptance of the Party’s dominance. “1984” remains a powerful warning about the dangers of unchecked government power and the erosion of fundamental human rights.

1984 Detailed Book Summary

“1984” is set in a dystopian future where the world is divided into three superstates constantly at war: Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia. The story unfolds in Airstrip One (formerly Great Britain), a province of the totalitarian superstate of Oceania, which is under the control of the Party led by the figurehead Big Brother.

Winston Smith : The novel’s protagonist, Winston Smith, is a 39-year-old man who works at the Ministry of Truth, where his job is to alter historical records, thus aligning the past with the ever-changing party line of the present. Winston lives in a world of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance, and public manipulation.

Early Acts of Rebellion : Despite outwardly conforming, Winston harbors deep-seated hatred for the Party. He begins to express his subversive thoughts by starting a diary, an act punishable by death if discovered by the Thought Police. Through his writing, Winston explores his fragmented memories of the past, pondering the Party’s control over reality and truth.

Julia and the Love Affair : Winston becomes involved with Julia, a younger Party member who secretly shares his loathing of the regime. Their love affair is initially an act of rebellion. They meet in secret and dream of a life free from the Party’s control. Their relationship represents a profound act of personal freedom and rebellion against the regime.

O’Brien and the Brotherhood : Winston and Julia are drawn to O’Brien, an Inner Party member whom Winston believes to be secretly a member of a clandestine opposition group known as the Brotherhood, led by the legendary Emmanuel Goldstein. O’Brien inducts them into the Brotherhood, providing a copy of Goldstein’s subversive book which outlines the ideology of freedom and rebellion against the Party.

Capture and Betrayal : The illusion of rebellion is shattered when Winston and Julia are arrested in their sanctuary. It is revealed that their rebellion was a trap orchestrated by the Thought Police, with O’Brien as one of its agents.

Winston’s Imprisonment and Torture : In the Ministry of Love, Winston is separated from Julia and subjected to psychological and physical torture. The aim is to force him to confess his crimes against the Party and to break his spirit completely. Winston resists as much as he can, holding onto his inner sense of truth and loyalty to Julia.

Room 101 : The climax of Winston’s torture occurs in Room 101, where he is confronted with his worst fear – rats. In a moment of utter despair and terror, Winston betrays Julia, begging that she be tortured in his place. This ultimate betrayal represents the complete destruction of Winston’s resistance.

Re-education and Acceptance : Following his experience in Room 101, Winston undergoes a process of “re-education” where he learns to accept the Party’s version of reality and to love Big Brother. He is released back into society, a hollow, obedient citizen.

Final Encounter with Julia : After his release, Winston encounters Julia one more time. Both admit to betraying each other and realize that their feelings for each other have been eradicated. The Party’s victory is complete, with any trace of personal loyalty or love eradicated.

Winston’s Final Submission : The novel ends with Winston completely accepting the Party’s doctrine and viewing his execution as a victory – he has conformed entirely to the Party’s ideals. His final thoughts are of unquestioning love and loyalty to Big Brother, signifying the total and absolute triumph of the Party’s control over the individual mind and spirit.

Orwell’s “1984” is a powerful and chilling portrayal of a totalitarian world where freedom of thought is suppressed under the guise of state security, and the truth is what the Party deems it to be. It remains a poignant and cautionary tale about the dangers of unchecked political power and the erosion of individual liberties.

The novel delves into Winston’s life as he begins a forbidden love affair with Julia and gets involved with what appears to be an underground resistance movement. However, this rebellion is short-lived as they are betrayed and subjected to the Party’s ruthless tactics of psychological manipulation and physical torture, leading to Winston’s ultimate surrender to the Party’s orthodoxy.

Character Descriptions:

• Winston Smith: Age: Approximately 39 years old. Occupation: Works at the Ministry of Truth, where he alters historical records to align with the Party’s current propaganda. Personality Traits: Initially, Winston exhibits intellectual curiosity, internal rebellion, and skepticism towards the Party’s doctrine. He is contemplative, introspective, and carries a sense of melancholy. Character Arc: Winston evolves from a quiet dissident to an active rebel, seeking truth and love in a society devoid of both. His relationship with Julia deepens his rebellious spirit. However, after his capture and torture, he becomes a defeated, loyal follower of Big Brother, losing his individuality and spirit of dissent.
• Julia: Age: In her mid-20s. Occupation: Works on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department at the Ministry of Truth. Personality Traits: Julia is practical, sensual, and outwardly conforms to Party norms while secretly despising its control. She is bold and pragmatic in her approach to rebellion, focusing more on personal freedom than on broader political change. Character Arc: Julia engages in an affair with Winston as a form of personal rebellion. She is less interested in the theoretical aspects of their rebellion and more in the personal joy it brings. After their capture, like Winston, she is broken by the Party, ultimately betraying Winston and accepting Party doctrine.
• O’Brien: Occupation: A member of the Inner Party. Personality Traits: O’Brien is intelligent, articulate, and initially seems sympathetic to Winston’s skepticism of the Party. He exudes a certain charm and civility. Character Arc: O’Brien reveals himself as a loyalist to the Party and plays a key role in Winston’s torture and re-education. He embodies the Party’s manipulative and brutal nature. His interactions with Winston highlight the Party’s deep understanding of human psychology and its use in breaking down resistance.
• Big Brother: Role: The symbolic leader and face of the Party. Description: Big Brother is more a symbol than a character, representing the omnipresent, all-seeing Party. He is depicted as a mustachioed man appearing on posters and telescreens with the slogan “Big Brother is watching you.” His actual existence is ambiguous, but his presence is a powerful tool in the Party’s arsenal for instilling loyalty and fear.
• Mr. Charrington: Occupation: Owner of an antique shop in the Proles district. Personality Traits: Initially appears as a kindly, old shopkeeper interested in history and artifacts from the past. Character Arc: Revealed to be a member of the Thought Police, his character highlights the Party’s extensive surveillance network and the deception employed to trap dissidents like Winston and Julia.

In-depth Analysis

• Strengths : “1984” excels in its haunting portrayal of a society stripped of freedom and individuality. Orwell masterfully uses a bleak and concise prose style to convey the oppressive atmosphere of Oceania. The intricate depiction of the Party’s manipulation of truth and history remains particularly chilling and relevant.
• Weaknesses : For some, the despairing tone and the inevitability of Winston’s defeat may come across as overly pessimistic, offering little in the way of hope or resistance against such a powerful system.
• Uniqueness : The novel’s concept of “Newspeak,” the language designed to limit free thought, and “doublethink,” the ability to accept two contradictory beliefs, are unique contributions to the lexicon of political and philosophical thought.
• Literary Devices : Orwell’s use of symbolism, foreshadowing, and irony are noteworthy. For instance, the figure of Big Brother symbolizes the impersonal and omnipresent power of the Party.
• Relation to Broader Issues : The book’s exploration of surveillance, truth manipulation, and state control has clear parallels with modern concerns about privacy, fake news, and authoritarianism, making it perennially relevant.
• Potential Audiences : “1984” is a must-read for enthusiasts of political and dystopian fiction. It is also highly valuable for those interested in political theory, sociology, and history.
• Comparisons : “1984” often draws comparisons with Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” another dystopian masterpiece, though Huxley’s work envisages a different form of control through hedonism and consumerism.
• Final Recommendations : This novel is an essential read for understanding the extremes of political control and the fragility of human rights. It’s a cautionary tale that remains profoundly relevant in today’s world.

Thematic Analysis and Stylistic Elements

The themes of “1984” are deeply interwoven and reflect Orwell’s concerns about totalitarianism. Themes include the corruption of language as a tool for oppressive power (“Newspeak”), the erosion of truth and reality in politics, and the loss of individuality. Stylistically, Orwell’s direct and terse prose serves as a mirror to the stark world he describes, emphasizing the theme of decay and dehumanization.

Comparisons to Other Works

Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” a satirical allegory of Soviet totalitarianism, shares similar themes with “1984,” but differs in its approach and style, using a fable-like structure. “1984” is more direct and visceral in its depiction of a dystopian society.

Chapter by Chapter Summary of 1984

• Chapter 1 : Winston Smith, a low-ranking member of the ruling Party in Oceania, returns to his flat in Victory Mansions. He begins to write a diary, an act prohibited by the Party.
• Chapter 2 : Winston recalls recent Two Minutes Hate sessions and reflects on the Party’s control over Oceania’s history and residents. He hides his diary.
• Chapter 3 : Winston dreams of his mother and sister, and then of O’Brien, an Inner Party member he believes may secretly oppose the Party. The chapter ends with Winston’s alarm waking him for the Physical Jerks, a mandatory morning exercise.
• Chapter 4 : Winston goes to his job at the Ministry of Truth, where he alters historical records to fit the Party’s current version of events.
• Chapter 5 : During lunch, Winston discusses the principles of Newspeak with a co-worker, Syme. He observes the Parsons family and considers the effectiveness of Party propaganda on children.
• Chapter 6 : Winston thinks about his wife, Katharine, and their cold, lifeless marriage, reflecting on the Party’s repressive attitude towards sex and love.
• Chapter 7 : Winston writes in his diary about the hopelessness of rebellion and the likelihood that he will be caught by the Thought Police. He ponders whether life was better before the Party took over.
• Chapter 8 : Winston visits a prole neighborhood. He enters an antique shop and buys a coral paperweight. He talks with the shop owner, Mr. Charrington, and learns about life before the Party’s rule.
• Chapter 9 : Oceania switches enemies from Eurasia to Eastasia. Winston receives Goldstein’s book and begins reading it.
• Chapter 10 : Winston wakes up from a dream shouting, “Shakespeare!” He and Julia plan to rent the room above Mr. Charrington’s shop for their clandestine meetings.
• Chapter 11 : In the rented room, Winston and Julia continue their secret meetings, but Winston feels the futility of their rebellion.
• Chapter 12 : Winston reads to Julia from Goldstein’s book, explaining the social structure of Oceania and the perpetual war.
• Chapter 13 : Winston continues reading the book, discussing the principles of war and the Party’s manipulation of the populace.
• Chapter 14 : Winston and Julia are discovered by the Thought Police in their rented room. Mr. Charrington reveals himself as a member of the Thought Police.
• Chapter 15 : Winston is detained in the Ministry of Love. He encounters other prisoners and realizes the Party’s extensive power.
• Chapter 16 : O’Brien tortures Winston, gradually breaking his spirit. He admits to various crimes against the Party, both real and imagined.
• Chapter 17 : O’Brien continues Winston’s re-education, revealing more about the Party’s ideology and the concept of doublethink.
• Chapter 18 : Winston is taken to Room 101, where he is confronted with his worst fear—rats. He betrays Julia, proving his complete submission to the Party.
• Chapter 19 : Winston is released and spends his time at the Chestnut Tree Café. He is a changed man, devoid of rebellious thoughts.
• Chapter 20 : Winston meets Julia again, but their feelings for each other have vanished. They both admit to betraying each other.
• Chapter 21 : The novel concludes with Winston, completely broken, confessing his love for Big Brother, accepting Party orthodoxy fully.

Potential Test Questions and Answers

• Answer: It signifies the omnipresent surveillance of the Party and the constant monitoring of individuals’ actions and thoughts, instilling fear and obedience.
• Answer: “Newspeak” is designed to diminish the range of thought by reducing the complexity and nuance of language, making rebellion against the Party’s ideology linguistically impossible.
• Answer: The Thought Police serve to detect and punish “thoughtcrime,” any personal and political thoughts unapproved by the Party, thereby enforcing ideological purity and suppressing dissent.
• “George Orwell: The Prophet of the Dystopian Future,” The Literary Encyclopedia.
• “Totalitarianism and Language: Orwell’s 1984,” Journal of Modern Literature.

Awards and Recognition

“1984” has received critical acclaim since its publication and has been listed in various “best novels” lists, including the “100 Best Novels of the 20th Century” by the Modern Library.

Bibliographic Information

• Publisher: Signet Book
• Publish Date: July 01, 1950
• Type: Mass Market Paperbound
• ISBN/EAN/UPC: 9780451524935

Summaries of Other Reviews

• The Guardian: Highlights the novel’s prophetic nature and its enduring relevance in the digital age.
• The New Yorker: Discusses the novel’s profound impact on language and political thought.

Notable Quotes from 1984

• This paradoxical slogan of the Party encapsulates the use of doublethink, a process of indoctrination that requires citizens to accept contradictory beliefs, fostering a disconnection from reality and thus ensuring loyalty to the Party.
• This omnipresent warning is emblematic of the government’s pervasive surveillance in Oceania. It instills fear and obedience in the populace, reminding them of the Party’s constant monitoring of their actions and thoughts.
• This reflects the Party’s manipulation of truth and its control over what is considered knowledge. It reveals the theme of reality control and the dangers of a society where objective truth is subjugated to political agenda.
• This quote grimly summarizes the Party’s vision for the future: a world where the individual is utterly powerless, and the state exerts total control, both physically and psychologically.
• This highlights the Party’s manipulation of history to maintain its grip on power. It underscores a central theme in “1984” — the control of information and history as a means of controlling the populace.
• This defines the concept of doublethink, a crucial method by which the Party breaks down individual understanding of truth and reality, ensuring unconditional loyalty.
• This statement underscores the significance of objective truth and the resistance against the Party’s distortion of reality. It signifies the importance of individual thought and rationality as a form of rebellion.
• This conundrum highlights the challenge faced by those living under totalitarian rule, where the lack of consciousness about their oppression prevents rebellion, yet without rebelling, they cannot become fully aware of their subjugation.

Spoilers/How Does It End?

Warning: This section contains major spoilers about the ending of “1984” by George Orwell.

“1984” culminates in a harrowing and profoundly impactful conclusion that starkly illuminates the depths of the Party’s control over the individual.

• Winston’s Transformation and Betrayal : After Winston Smith and Julia are captured by the Thought Police, they are separated and taken to the Ministry of Love for interrogation and re-education. The person responsible for Winston’s capture and subsequent torture is O’Brien, whom Winston had previously believed to be a fellow dissident. This betrayal is a crucial turning point in the novel, as it shatters Winston’s last hope for an organized rebellion against the Party.
• The Room 101 Experience : Winston endures severe physical and psychological torture under O’Brien’s supervision. The climax of his torture occurs in Room 101, where prisoners are confronted with their worst fears. For Winston, this is a face cage filled with ravenous rats. Faced with this terror, Winston betrays Julia by begging for her to be tortured in his place. This moment is pivotal as it represents the complete breakdown of Winston’s resistance and the success of the Party in breaking his spirit.
• Winston’s Reintegration into Society : After his release, Winston is a shell of his former self. He has been thoroughly brainwashed and now genuinely loves Big Brother. He spends his time at the Chestnut Tree Café, where other broken rebels gather. One day, he meets Julia again. They acknowledge that they betrayed each other and that their feelings for each other have been eradicated. This meeting underscores the Party’s complete victory in destroying individual loyalty and emotion, replacing them with loyalty to the Party alone.
• The Final Act of Submission : The novel ends with Winston’s final submission to the Party’s ideology. He has a vision of being executed but realizes that he has won the victory over himself – he loves Big Brother. This chilling conclusion signifies the total and irrevocable triumph of the Party over the individual. Winston’s love for Big Brother is a symbol of the Party’s successful eradication of independent thought and the total reprogramming of the human psyche.

Orwell’s ending is stark and dystopian, offering no hope of rebellion or change. It serves as a powerful warning about the dangers of totalitarianism and the fragility of human rights and freedom under such regimes. The ending is deliberately unsettling, leaving the reader to contemplate the consequences of unchecked political power and the importance of safeguarding democratic values and individual liberties.

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1984 by George Orwell, book of a lifetime: An absorbing, deeply affecting political thriller

The novel creates a world so plausible, so complete that to read it is to experience another world, says jonathan freedland, article bookmarked.

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So much of it has entered the language, becoming a settled part of our common cultural inheritance, that it's easy to forget that 1984 was ever a book at all. From Big Brother to Doublethink, the landscape of the dystopia George Orwell created in 1949 exists in the minds even of those who've never picked up the novel. It has become a shorthand for totalitarianism, for the surveillance state, for the power of the mass media to manipulate public opinion, history and even the truth – and, in the process, has allowed people to forget that it remains a story to be read.

Even those who manage to look beyond its place in the folk memory, and do it the honour of assessing it as a novel, rarely see it for what it is – which is a political thriller. Not just a political thriller, but an exemplar: the very model of the form. It does what every novel in the genre should do – combining the illumination of an intriguing idea and the telling of a cracking story. When people discuss 1984, they tend to talk about Orwell's achievement of the former – his fully realised portrayal of life under a brutal one-party dictatorship – but when people read the book, as I did as a young teenager, what holds them is the fate of its protagonist, Winston Smith, his lover Julia, and their doomed attempt to taste freedom. The book succeeds because it is no manifesto, but an absorbing, deeply affecting story.

It has its defects, of course. Generations of young readers, and not just them, have surely yearned to skip at least some of the treatise by Emmanuel Goldstein, the Trotsky-esque dissident and public enemy whose forbidden work comes into Winston's hands. But little of that matters. The novel creates a world so plausible, so complete that to read it is to experience another world. And what higher goal can fiction reach for than that? And yet it rests on that simple, two-word question on which most political thrillers are built: what if? Orwell asked himself what Britain would look like if it fell prey to either one of the totalitarian creeds that dominated the mid-20th century. From that basic inquiry, 1984 was born.

Robert Harris's Fatherland sprung from asking, "What if Britain lost the war?" Michael Crichton created Jurassic Park by wondering, "What if we could bring dinosaurs back to life?" My new novel asks, "What if China dominates the world? What will life be like?" It's not only journalists who should be in awe of George Orwell. Anyone embarking on a political thriller should look to 1984 – to see how it's done.

Jonathan Freedland's new novel 'The Third Woman' is published by HarperCollins

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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.

4 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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The Making of ‘1984,’ George Orwell’s Nightmare Vision of a World Without Truth

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By Lev Mendes

• June 5, 2019

THE MINISTRY OF TRUTH The Biography of George Orwell’s “1984” By Dorian Lynskey

Shortly after the presidential inauguration of Donald Trump and his counselor’s invocation of “alternative facts ,” anxious readers, bracing themselves for the worst, propelled George Orwell’s “1984” back to the top of the best-seller lists . Published in 1949, under the shadow of Hitler and Stalin, the novel projects a nightmare vision of a future in which truth has been eclipsed. Its inventive vocabulary of state power and deception — Big Brother, Hate Week, Newspeak, doublethink, the Thought Police — clearly resonated with the despair of present-day Americans. As does the very term “Orwellian,” used increasingly to describe any number of troubling developments: from Trump’s habitual lying to the toxic politicization of the news media; from the expansion of campus speech codes to Silicon Valley’s hijacking of our data and attention (the citizens of “1984” are monitored continuously by “telescreens”).

Orwell’s novel is the subject of Dorian Lynskey’s wide-ranging and sharply written new study, “The Ministry of Truth.” Lynskey, a British journalist and music critic, believes that “1984” — one of the 20th century’s most examined artifacts — is actually “more known about than truly known” and sets out to reground it in Orwell’s personal and literary development. This is just as well, since Orwell, ever suspicious of armchair intellectualism, made a practice of writing directly from experience, to the point of plunging himself into many of the crises of his day.

In 1936, he joined a coalition of left-wing forces opposing Franco in Spain. Intending to fight fascism, Orwell discovered its diabolical twin, Soviet communism, and became, in Lynskey’s words, acutely aware of how “political expediency corrupts moral integrity, language and truth itself.” He left Spain a committed anti-communist — and lifelong adversary of Stalin’s defenders — and spent the World War II years back home in England. In 1946, Orwell moved to the island of Jura, where, at the age of 45, he completed “1984” shortly before succumbing to tuberculosis.

Lynskey focuses much of his book on the origins and the afterlife of “1984.” He devotes several early chapters to the rise of utopian and dystopian fiction, told through compressed portraits of figures like H. G. Wells (who “loomed over Orwell’s childhood like a planet”) and Yevgeny Zamyatin, the author of “We” — a sort of precursor to “1984.” And he documents the various political and cultural responses to the novel, which was a sensation from its first publication.

“1984” has inspired writers, artists and other creative types, from Margaret Atwood to David Bowie to Steve Jobs, whose commercial introducing Apple’s Macintosh computer famously paid homage to the novel. Its political fate, however, has been somewhat cloudier. What Orwell observed of Dickens, that he is “one of those writers who are well worth stealing,” has proved no less true of Orwell himself. Socialists, libertarians, liberals and conservatives alike have vied to remake him in their own image and claim his authority. Orwell’s contested legacy may be rooted partly in his self-divisions. He was a socialist intellectual who hated socialists and intellectuals; an alienated soul who “lionized the common man,” as Lynskey puts it. Still, the filial (and often proprietary) attachment that Orwell’s work tends to evoke in his admirers points to something else: the morally urgent yet highly companionable nature of his writing, which can leave one with the feeling of having been directly addressed by a mind worthy of emulation.

Lynskey largely refrains from participating in the quarrel over Orwell’s and his novel’s true teachings and rightful heirs. If anything, “The Ministry of Truth” can seem too remote at times from its subject matter. For a “biography” of “1984,” it contains surprisingly little sustained discussion of the work itself, mostly referring to it in brief, though insightful, asides that are dispersed throughout. There could have been more in-depth analysis of the dynamics of power in Orwell’s totalitarian state, whose leaders, we are told, are the first to have dispensed with even the pretense of serving humanity. (They pursue power as an end in itself, not as a means to some alleged ideological goal, and exercise it by inflicting pain on others.)

Nor does Lynskey illuminate the literary or intellectual qualities that distinguish Orwell’s novel from its many predecessors and descendants in the dystopian genre. In short, while we learn a great deal about the evolution and influence of “1984” as a cultural phenomenon, we sometimes lose sight, in the thick of Lynskey’s historicizing, of the novel’s intrinsic virtues — of what makes it distinctive and accounts for its terror and fascination in the first place.

Lynskey is surely right, however, to note that the meaning of Orwell’s novel has shifted over the decades along with the preoccupations of its readers; and that in our low, dishonest moment, it is “most of all a defense of truth.” Reflecting back on the Spanish Civil War and the falsification of its record, Orwell worried that the “very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.” Yet he never seems to have resigned himself completely to hopelessness.

Winston Smith, the doomed protagonist of “1984,” inhabits a world in which individuality has been made almost obsolete, history is daily rewritten and reality is fabricated according to the whims of the state. Winston attempts, despairingly and bravely, to rediscover what life was like before the rise of Big Brother. He is shocked that his lover, Julia, is indifferent to the state’s assault on truth — the unreality of the present is all she has known and all she believes ever was or will be. Her complacency is the counterpart to Winston’s energizing despair. In this way, “1984” elevates despair into a sort of necessary condition of truth-seeking. It is here if nowhere else, Orwell suggests, that hope for humanity may lie.

Lev Mendes has written for The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker, among other publications.

THE MINISTRY OF TRUTH The Biography of George Orwell’s “1984” By Dorian Lynskey 355 pp. Doubleday. $28.95.

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“1984” at Seventy: Why We Still Read Orwell’s Book of Prophecy

By Louis Menand

George Orwell’s “ 1984 ,” published seventy years ago today, has had an amazing run as a work of political prophecy. It has outlasted in public awareness other contenders from its era, such as Aldous Huxley’s “ Brave New World ” (1932), Ray Bradbury’s “ Fahrenheit 451 ” (1953), and Anthony Burgess’s “ A Clockwork Orange ” (1962), not to mention two once well-known books to which it is indebted, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s “ We ” (1921) and Arthur Koestler’s “ Darkness at Noon ” (1940). “1984” is obviously a Cold War book, but the Cold War ended thirty years ago. What accounts for its staying power?

Partly it’s owing to the fact that, unlike “Darkness at Noon,” Orwell’s book was not intended as a book about life under Communism. It was intended as a warning about tendencies within liberal democracies, and that is how it has been read. The postwar Sovietization of Eastern Europe produced societies right out of Orwell’s pages, but American readers responded to “1984” as a book about loyalty oaths and McCarthyism. In the nineteen-seventies, it was used to comment on Nixon and Watergate. There was a bounce in readership in 1983-84—four million copies were sold that year—because, well, it was 1984. And in 2016 it got a bump from Trump.

The fundamental premise of the novel was its most quickly outmoded feature—outmoded almost from the start. This is the idea that the world would divide into three totalitarian superstates that were rigidly hierarchical, in complete control of information and expression, and engaged in perpetual and unwinnable wars for world domination. This was a future that many people had contemplated in the nineteen-thirties, the time of the Great Depression and the rise of Stalinism and Fascism. Capitalism and liberal democracy seemed moribund; centralized economies and authoritarian regimes looked like the only way modern mass societies could be governed. This was the argument of a book that is now almost forgotten, but which Orwell was fascinated and repelled by, James Burnham’s “ The Managerial Revolution ” (1941).

It’s true that, after 1949, the world did divide into superstates—not three, but two—and their forty-year rivalry did a lot of damage around the world. But they were not twin totalitarian monsters, the Fasolt and Fafner of twentieth-century geopolitics. They may often have mirrored each other in tactics, but they were different systems defending different ideologies. Orwell, who had little interest in and no fondness for the United States, missed that.

There are some parts of the novel whose relevance seems never to fade, though. One is the portrayal of the surveillance state—Big Brother (borrowed from Koestler’s No. 1) and the telescreen, an astonishingly prescient conception that Orwell dreamed up when he had probably never seen a television. Another is Newspeak, a favorite topic of Orwell’s: the abuse of language for political purposes.

But “1984” is a novel, not a work of political theory, and, in the end, it’s probably as literature that people keep reading it. The overt political material—such as “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism,” the (very long) book that the commissar O’Brien gives to Winston and Julia as he lures them into the trap—is likely now skipped by many readers. (The book’s analogue is “The Revolution Betrayed,” Leon Trotsky’s attack on Stalinism, published in 1937, but it is also a parody of “The Managerial Revolution.”)

O’Brien’s interrogation of Winston, though meant to be the climax of the book, and though people still invoke it, is not completely satisfactory. How does O’Brien convince Winston that two plus two equals five? By torturing him. This seems a rather primitive form of brainwashing. In “Darkness at Noon,” which also ends with an interrogation, the victim, Rubashov, though he is worn down physically first, is defeated intellectually. (Both novelists were attempting to understand how, in the Moscow Trials, Stalin’s purge of the Old Bolsheviks, between 1936 and 1938, the defendants, apparently of their own free will, admitted to the most absurd charges against them, knowing that they would be promptly shot. After Stalin’s death, it turned out that those defendants had, in fact, been tortured. So Orwell was right about that.)

But who can forget this moment: “ ‘You are the dead,’ said an iron voice behind them”? Orwell created a story that had suspense and had characters whom readers identify with.

When the book came out, some people assumed that the character they were meant to identify with (with horror) was O’Brien. That’s probably what Orwell had in mind, too. O’Brien was the type he wanted to warn people against: the intellectual who becomes sadistically fascinated by power. The O’Brien figure corresponded to a popular understanding of the lure of totalitarianism at the time: that it tapped into some dark corner of the human psyche. “There is a Hitler, a Stalin in every breast,” as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., put it in his liberal manifesto, “The Vital Center,” which was published the same year as “1984.”

Much later, Schlesinger changed his mind and rejected what he called Orwell’s “mystical theory of totalitarianism.” For we are not all O’Briens, waiting for the chance to torture the Winstons of the world. We are more likely all Winstons, knowing that something is wrong, that we are losing control of our lives, but also knowing that we are powerless to resist.

A trivial example is when we click “I Agree” on the banner explaining our app’s new privacy policy. We did not know what the old privacy policy was; we feel fairly certain that, if we read the new one, we would not understand what has changed or what we are giving away. We suspect everyone else just clicks the box. So we click the box and dream of a world in which there are no boxes to click. A non-trivial example is when your electoral process is corrupted by a foreign power and your government talks about charging the people who tried to investigate this interference with treason. That’s Orwellian. And it’s no longer a prophecy. It’s a headline.

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By I-Huei Go

By The New Yorker

By Benjamin Kunkel