George Orwell?S 1984 Essay, Research Paper

In this following essay from George Orwell’s 1984, you can expect to see that Big

Brother is in many ways similar to numerous dictators, both past and present. As you read, you

will be able to see the comparisons to Adolf Hitler, Nicolae Ceausescu and _______.

1984 by George Orwell is a story of a man’s struggle against a totalitarianstic government

that controls the ideas and thoughts of its citizens. They use advanced mind reading techniques to

discover the thoughts of the people and punish those who show signs of rebellion against the

government. The novel is supposed to be a prophetic story, however, it was somewhat wrong in

the date. Although some of the things described in the book are going on today, several things are

not going to happen for some time to come.

I believe that Orwell’s purpose for writing 1984 was to express his feelings of how the

governments would come to control everything and anything it wished to do. It is also possible

that he wanted t tell of how mind control and torture techniques could be used to make an

individual or an entire nation do what the government wanted.

In his novel Orwell used the image of a man who stood in a shadow that covered his face.

This was to make him animas and unrecognizable. The figure was called “Big Brother” and this

figure was placed on posters and put all over the place with the saying, “BIG BROTHER IS

WATCHING YOU.” This was used to let the people know that no matter where they go the

could not escape the watching eyes of the controlling government.

The government itself was very mysterious and had several parts that were very suspicious

to the main character, Winston, who worked in one part of the government. It was divided up into

four parts. The Ministry of Truth, where Winston worked, was in charge of education and the

arts. The Ministry of Peace, which was in command of war. The Ministry of plenty, which

controlled economic affairs. And finally the Ministry of Love, which concerned itself with law and

order.

Orwell also uses description of technology to show how the government controlled it’s

citizens. He constantly refers to telescreens that are in all areas and even in peoples homes. They

have been placed there by the government in order to see what is being said and discussed by the

citizens. He also tells of an occurrence that happens everyday called, “The Two Minutes Hate.”

This event happens everyday at a specified time in which people assembled in front of a large

telescreen where they were show pictures of terrible events in their history and then the face of a

man who is their equivalent to Adolf Hitler. The mans name was Emmanual Goldstein and was

considered an enemy of the people. The assembled people go through several different reactions,

some boo him, others scream and become violent. I feel that George Orwell accomplished his goal

of telling how he viewed the world of the future. He used excellent description of places, events

and people that I can’t even attempt to repeat. He used the prospective of several different people

through Winston’s interaction of them, and their discussions. He also used his imagination

extremely well to describe the technology that is used to control the people of the world. Even

today we are making things that Orwell described like the telescreens. He also used comparisons

of the real world to the world of his story. The image of Emmanual Goldstein was an excellent

likeness to Hitler. Along with the large numbers of countries that join together to form an alliance

for a common good, similar to the United Nations or NATO. It is in this way that we can better

understand what the author was saying and the idea that he wanted to convey.

Big Brother was also very similar to the totalitarian, Nicolae Ceausescu. Both of these

dictators were highly digusted by the people of that nation. Big Brother and Ceausescu both

agreed with the Macheavellian theory in which you have to do whatever it takes to become or in

this case, remain, as powerful as you can be.

One other example of Big Brother would be ___________. They believed that one makes

a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship. They presented this and therefore believed that if

there was much havoc going on amongst them, then the people would constantly be depending

upon that leader. They end up giving him enough power by their trust that this leader soon

becomes a dictator.

George Orwell’s 1984 Orwell envisions a world devastated by war and poverty, where the West

has fallen under the spell of a totalitarian socialist dictator, Big Brother. A political revolutionary

and religious cult leader all rolled into one, Big Brother’s power and is so immense that one may

wonder if he even exists at all. Big Brother’s Ingsoc Party has perfected the uses of big technology

to monitor the lives of its people, and to insure loyalty through surveillance, propaganda and

brainwashing. The governments most brilliant project is the actual deconstruction of the English

language into Newspeak, the language of the Party. Each edition of the Newspeak Dictionary has

fewer words than its predecessor. By removing meaning from the vocabulary, the government

hopes to get rid of anti-social thinking before it even has the chance to enter a persons mind.

Without the vocabulary for revolution, there cannot be a revolution. For those who persist in

thinking for themselves, so-called Thought Criminals, the Thought Police, are there to intervene,

imprisoning the free-thinkers in the Ministry of Love, where they will be re-educated, and beaten

so that they will supposedly see who is in power. Winston Smith, the protagonist of Orwell’s

novel, becomes a Thought Criminal. His job is to actually rewrite the archives of the London

Times so that they are consistent with current Ingsoc policy. When Ingsoc changes its political

alliance with another superpower and begins waging war on a former partner, Winston’s job is to

rewrite all the prior information to show that the old alliance never existed. So confused are the

minds of the people he meets that they don’t even realize that these changes have been made. A

sad, lonely man, Winston is also smart enough to understand the manipulation being carried out

on the society. He becomes a willing victim of the government’s most ingenious trick: Winston

obtains a copy of a banned revolutionary essay by the famous enemy of the State, Goldstein.

Excited and inspired by what he reads, he pursues a love affair with a co-worker, Julia, and seems

to find an ally in the person of Inner Party official O’Brien. Longing for an escape from this

terrible world to a better life, he does not realize that everything has been a set-up. O’Brien is

actually the head of the Thought Police, and it is he who has actually written Goldstein’s book for

the very purpose of luring potential revolutionaries out of the closet and into the dreaded Room

101 – a torture chamber where one’s worst fears are made real. This book’s salient quality was its

ingenuity and cleverness. Everything was so interesting and somewhat twisted that you had to

know what fascinating things will be coming in the future of the book. And obviously the only

way to do this was to read on. An example of the creativeness of the book is the idea of room

101. When Winston was captured by the thought police and put into room 101, rats were released

on his face and that caused him to betray Julia by saying that she should receive that punishment

instead of him. The reason they released rats was because he knew that was what he feared most.

I recommend this book to people who first, are looking for something different then the legal

drama’s. And second, to people who want to read something good, and not have to apportion too

much time to reading it.

Whenever a brutal dictator comes into power, many people lose themselves and their identity

because the rest of the world is concerned with merely staying alive. No true reader could ever

pass off Winston’s experience with indifference. You have to have some kind of sympathy for a

man, even if fictional, who can not remember his childhood, or for that matter, even his mother.

That is certain to strike a nerve with almost anyone. In addition to this constant pain of loss, the

reader will also have to vicariously live through lengthy episodes of other psychological pains, and

physical pain. The reader will also be forced to endure the pains of society as “The Party” turns

children against parents, friends against friends, and although the reader will discover the beauty

of a love between a man and a woman, “The Party” will eventually destroy that too.

While “The Party” is an important theme, two other themes are far more important. The first is

the destruction of language. By eliminating more and more words from people’s vocabularies,

“The Party” eliminates the ability of people to unite or conspire against the government.

However, they are also eliminating the possibility of conceiving original thought, which has

catastrophic effects. The ultimate goal of “The Party” is to reduce the language to only one word

thereby eliminating any thought at all. The second important theme is the elimination of the past.

This is the main character, Winston’s, job in the ministry of truth, to make sure that “The Party”

always looks right about every decision it has made in the past.

This quest for total power by “The Party” is an excellent dramatization of Lord Acton’s famous

apothegm, “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” “The Party” seems

like it won’t stop until it controls the minds of everyone under it’s power, and has complete

physical and psychological surveillance on all people at all time. This is exemplified in the fact that

the government can look back at you through your television, or telescreen as it is called in the

book, and the government has set up telescreens almost anywhere you can go. While they don’t

have telescreens in unpopulated country sides, they have gone through the trouble to place hidden

microphones disguised as flowers in those areas. and while there are real no laws, the thought

police can spy on your thoughts at anytime, and can arrest and kill you on a whim. This policy is

mythical. It is not really used for punishment, but to scare everyone else into being good citizens.

No other work of this century has inspired people with such love of liberty and hatred of tyranny.

Humans have a basic desire to be free and not controlled. Therefore, to Orwell as to the Utopian

reformers, the adoption of the governmental doctrine, socialism, was less an economic decision

and more a moral decision. Nineteen Eighty-Four is an expression of Mr. Orwell’s irritation at

many of the facets of English socialism. It is also an expression of his moral and intellectual

indignation at the concept of totalitarianism, where a country is ruled utterly and completely by a

group of few. Another critic says that the book is not a criticism of English socialism at all, but a

warning of the consequences of the contemporary political paths we are following, or were at the

time the book was written. The bombs in Nineteen Eighty-Four symbolize Orwell’s rage about

everything in the political world from the disastrous state of unemployment of the 1930’s, to the

ignorance of the leftist intelligence, stupidly justifying Stalinism. Some literary critics have

attributed the book’s extreme grimness to Orwell’s declining Health, and surmise that his

pessimistic views illustrate his collapsing spirit. Whatever his inspiration or motivation, almost

fifty years after its first publication, Nineteen Eighty-Four remains one of the great novels of this

century.