1984 by George Orwell
An Introduction
MAGALLONA SEE1108
ORWELL’S 1984
“BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU”
ORWELL’S 1984
OVERVIEW
• Author
• Genre
• Context
• Themes
• Student Research (Optional)
MAGALLONA
AUTHOR
George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair to an English family
in Bihar, British India on June 25, 1903.
He studied in Eton, joined the Imperial Police and was posted
at Burma (modern-day Myanmar); by 1932, he was back in
England, working as a teacher in a school for boys
In 1936, he set out for Spain where a civil war raged; he was
wounded a year later and returned to England to recuperate
Unfit for military service during the Second World War
(1939-1945), Orwell worked with the British Broadcasting
Company (BBC) where he introduced a literary program, Voice
AUTHOR
In 1943, he resigned from the BBC and began work on a text
which was published in 1945 as Animal Farm. It is a satirical
novel on a farm of animals who overthrow the human farmer
and attempt to be governed only by animals.
In the end, a pig named Napoleon dominates the animals
and terrorizes them far more than the humans did.
The 1940’s is the decade which shaped Orwell’s taste for
dystopian literature.
GENRE
Dystopian literature seeks to open up the imagination by
heightening the shock of the consequences of a broken system
(Hemmingsen, 2015)
The term “dystopia” was originally coined by the philosopher
John Stuart Mill in 1868 as an antonym to the word “utopia”
created by Sir Thomas Moore in 1516 in his book Utopia. While
utopia describes an ideally perfect society, its opposite,
dystopia, describes an imaginary place “in which everything is as
bad as possible.” (Little, 2007)
Characteristics of a Dystopian Society
Propaganda is used to control the citizens of society.
Information, independent thought, and freedom are restricted.
A figurehead or concept is worshipped by the citizens of the society.
Citizens are perceived to be under constant surveillance.
Citizens have a fear of the outside world.
Citizens live in a dehumanized state.
The natural world is banished and distrusted.
Citizens conform to uniform expectations. Individuality and dissent are bad.
The society is an illusion of a perfect utopian world.
(FROM www.readwritethink.org)
CONTEXT
In 1941, Orwell read James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution,
which horrified him with its description of “a world ruled by three
super-states, and the idea that the overlords of the future would
not be demagogues or democrats, but managers and
bureaucrats.” (Aaronovitch, 2013)
History would prove Burnham’s fictional prophecies correct: in
1945, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, leaders of Great Britain, the
US and the USSR met to discuss the world’s political and economic
fate after World War II (“three super-states”)
CONTEXT
“The urgency of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and of much of
Orwell's wartime and post-war writing, springs clearly from
his sense that totalitarianism was already proving
dangerously attractive to many…
When Animal Farm was published, and when Nineteen
Eighty-Four was being conceptualised and then written,
Orwell's overwhelming preoccupation was to warn against
Stalinism and its onward march.” (Aaronovitch, 2013)
CONTEXT
At the height of the Cold War between the US and the former USSR
, with espionage, surveillance, wire-tapping, 1984 captured the
world’s imagination.
Orwell himself died in 1950, just a year after Mao Zedong gained
power in China and three years before Stalin passed away.
When the Cold War ended with the collapse of the USSR in 1991, “
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.” (Packer, 2019)
CONTEXT
The week of Donald Trump’s inauguration [in January 2017], 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.” (Packer, 2019)
Today, the Cold War Era seems so far away but consider: “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.” (Packer, 2019)
THEMES
1984 is essentially the story of how the protagonist,
Winston, struggles against a totalitarian regime.
However, we can explore the setting, characterization, plot
and language to uncover the complexities of a society
ruled by Big Brother, who constantly watches over
everyone in the country.
THEMES
Some themes you might want to explore while reading and analyzing the novel:
Surveillance
Censorship
Individuality
Totalitarianism
Psychological Manipulation
Control of Information
Representation of History
STUDENT RESEARCH (OPTIONAL)
Some historical icons and events you might want to read on, for further background
information on the novel’s context (some events happened after its 1949 publication).
Central Intelligence Agency
Joseph Stalin
Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (KGB)
McCarthyism (Joseph Raymond McCarthy)
Military Intelligence, Section 5 (MI5)
The Cold War
MAGALLONA
Sources
Aaronovitch, D. 2013 “1984: George Orwell’s road to dystopia”.
Dystopias: Definition and Characteristics. http://
www.readwritethink.org/files/lesson_images/lesson926/
DefinitionCharacteristics.pdf
Hemmingsen, A. 2015. “Dystopian Literature, Emotion, and Utopian
Longing.”
Little, J. 2007. “Human Nature and Reality. Feminist Philosophy and
Science Fiction
Packer, G. 2019. “Doublethink is stronger than Orwell Imagined: What
1984 means today.”
