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Nineteen Eighty-Four

George Orwell

London, 1949

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Literary Classic

Dystopian fiction
Postmodernism

What It’s About

Truth and Meaning

In the modern world, “worker empowerment” can mean being fired from a job, “collateral damage” can mean war that kills innocent people and “externalities” can mean making someone else clean up the mess. English novelist George Orwell (1903–1950) would have recognized and condemned such uses of language to misdirect, confuse and misinform. Just as the Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four manipulates language to manipulate thought and changes history to change reality, it engages in the same tricks that many current politicians and polemicists use to advance their careers as they warp ordinary people’s perceptions of the world. Orwell, also the author of Animal Farm, was a tireless advocate of simple and clear language. He hoped that such clarity would aid public discourse and reveal the misdeeds of scoundrels. More than half a century after the publication of his seminal work, publicists, demagogues, spin doctors, advertisers and journalists have turned the tools of Orwell’s dystopia into the background noise of our modern lives.

Summary

Total Surveillance

It’s April 4, 1984. Or maybe it’s not? Winston Smith lost track of time long ago, and his memories seem have been deceptive ever since Ingsoc, that is, English Socialism, began to reign in Oceania. All of London, the capital of Oceania’s third most populous province, is plastered with posters of Big Brother. The streets are under constant surveillance; children spy on their parents. You can’t escape the Party’s control even in your own home, thanks to the telescreen, a device that simultaneously blasts out propaganda and watches inhabitants 24/7.

The Party dominates its subjects’ memories with the help of reality control and doublethink techniques. Yet 39-year-old Winston’s mind isn’t yet entirely remote-controlled. From time to time, he experiences brief memory spells of better times, when his parents and sister, whom the Party vaporized, were still alive. Even if he has forgotten a lot, Winston knows one thing for sure: He must leave testimony for posterity. He writes a journal in the one corner of his flat that is out of view of the telescreen. While he’s writing, he thinks about a man named O’Brien, a powerful...

About the Author

George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair in Motihari, British India, on June 25, 1903. He attended the elite English boarding schools Eastbourne and Eton. He later undertook training to become a police officer, like his father and grandfather, and joined the colonial service, where he worked for the Indian Imperial Police in Burma (now Myanmar). To protest the oppressive colonial rule, he quit the service in 1927 and subsequently struggled to make do in London and Paris, working as a dishwasher, bookseller’s assistant, teacher and journalist. In 1933, he published Down and Out in Paris and London, his autobiographic account of this phase of his life. In 1936, Orwell married Eileen O’Shaughnessy and traveled to Barcelona to join the Spanish Civil War. He fought at the front against Francisco Franco’s fascists, returning to England wounded and disillusioned in the summer of 1937. In 1944, Orwell completed the dystopian novel Animal Farm. It wasn’t published until after World War II, because readers at the time didn’t appreciate the criticism of Great Britain’s ally Stalin. In 1945, Eileen died during a routine operation. In 1948, Orwell, now an independent socialist, finished his work on Nineteen Eight-Four. His second dystopian novel with its terrifyingly hopeless ending made him famous worldwide. In this masterpiece of political-philosophical science fiction, Orwell took his pessimistic view of history to the extreme. Only three months after marrying his second wife, Sonia Mary Brownell, he died of tuberculosis on January 21, 1950, at the age of 46.