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1984 is about totalitarianism. A totalitarian
government is one that tries to control every how
people spend every minute of their time, even in private; who they can
associate with; what they are allowed .
A totalitarian government even tries to control what
people think and what they believe. George Orwell wrote 1984 in
the late What he knew about totalitarianism was based on the Soviet Union and . Those
governments had come into being not that long before and they were not
very well understood yet.What Orwell was trying to do with 1984 was to
give his readers a clear picture of what life would be like if a free country
like England were under rule.
1984 takes place in London.
The London
in the book is a . There is
never enough to eat. The food’s disgusting. There are not enough clothes or shoes or anything to
go around, and the city is pretty dilapidated—except for these giant
pyramid-shaped that
rise above the landscape. There's some sort of war going on, though no one
really understands what it is about. Rockets frequently explode in the streets
and blow people to bits.
The worst part is that the government is always
watching everything . There
are these posters of Big Brother—who is supposedly the leader of the
government—that say Is
Watching You. There are Thought Police who have hidden cameras and
microphones literally everywhere. The government can watch you in your home
through your TV screen, and you’re not allowed ever. There are a lot of things you’re not allowed
to do in this society—and if you do them the police might take you away and
throw you into a forced labour camp. You're not allowed to have close
friends. You're not allowed You
can't date or have sex with someone you like. You're basically supposed to
save all your emotional energy for the Party—the Party being the government.
Then there are things you have to do. You have to
watch the government programming on tv—most of its news, some of its
exercises. You have to attend pep rallies, including this one called the . So it's hard to even have time to think your
own thoughts because they’re constantly filling your head with propaganda.
The main character of 1984 is Winston Smith. He's ,
he has a job in the government bureaucracy, and he lives this horrible dreary
existence without any friends or anyone in his life. At the beginning of the book he starts writing
to
talk about how much he hates life in his society, even though writing a diary
is one of those things you would be killed for doing if you were caught. The diary is his place for thinking about his
society. It's a place where he tries to imagine if life could possibly be
different from the way it is. There's no way for him to know if things were
ever different because the government has changed all the records of the past
and rewritten all
At the beginning of the novel, there are two other
people who matter to Winston, and he doesn't even know either of them. One of
them is Julia. Julia is this attractive young woman who works
in the same building as him—she's some kind of mechanic. Winston basically He
hates her because she's pretty and he can't have her, but he also thinks
she's the sort of person who would turn him in to the Thought Police. So he's
afraid of her but also sort of .
The other person he's interested in is this portly
guy named O'Brien, who's a member of the Inner Party. That means he's a boss,
much higher up than Winston.Winston should this
guy, but he gets the sense that O'Brien is intelligent, so he has this
yearning to be friends with him. He thinks O'Brien would understand how
he feels about life. The book takes a turn one day when Julia slips
Winston a note that says This
note completely rocks Winston's world. Of course he's interested—he can't
wait to get in touch with her, but it's very hard for them to say two words
to each other in private with all these spies and cameras everywhere. Finally they do manage to get out to the
country, and they start this mad love affair. The love affair makes them both very happy. It's
dangerous, because they could be killed or sent to labour camps if they get
caught. But that makes it . At last Winston has someone who understands
him and who hates the Party as much as he does. But Winston needs to go that
extra step. H'’s rebelling against the party privately by having the secret
affair. Now he wants to go to the next level and be an
active rebel against the government.
He gets his chance one day when O'Brien invites him to
look at something work-related. Winston takes a leap of faith and guesses that
O'Brien must be part of the rebellion, because no one invites people over to
their home—it just isn't done. So he and Julia go to O'Brien's house
and confess that they want to be rebels, and O'Brien says “yes, I'm a rebel
too, and we all read this book that explains why things are the way they are.” Winston reads the book, and he's blown away by it.
Unfortunately, right after he reads it, bust
in and arrest him and Julia and carry them off to the Ministry of Love to
torture them. So we learn that O'Brien wasn't a rebel after all—he
just wanted Winston.
In the Ministry of Love, they torture Winston in all
sorts of horrible ways. They break his bones and his teeth, they use they
starve him, and on and on.He tells them everything he knows, he
confesses to everything they ask him, and he tells them everything he knows
about Julia.
After him
over and over, O'Brien finally tells Winston what it is that the government
really wants. What they want is to have total power over the minds of people
like Winston. They want people like Winston to say
and really believe it, not just say it to avoid a beating.
For the government it's purely an exercise in power.
They're not trying to control his mind for some other purpose—they just want
to exercise total power over peoples' minds. They finally do break Winston completely, in this
place called , where they do
whatever it is you're most afraid of. They lock his face into a cage and
threaten to let these rats eat their way through his face. He has a phobia of rats, so he loses it and
says “do it to Julia, not me”—which is a complete betrayal of what’s most
important to him. The government has taken his last shred of .
After he does that, they let him and Julia go. The
Thought Police don't care about them anymore. The two of them meet on the outside, but they can't
love each other anymore. Winston and Julia are basically broken people after
they get out. Winston has changed to the point that he doesn't even
want to think about anything that might be rebellious. He just sits in a café listening to the news and smiling.
The last words of the novel are ""
So, one of the points the book makes is that a human
being can be broken down completely until he'll believe whatever you tell
him—even if it is that 2 + 2 = 5.
At the same time, the book has a positive message,
which is that it is really hard to get inside someone's head to that extent.
The government has to go to incredible lengths Winston
successfully.
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