Hi, Folks:
This is the first of several essays on Orwell's
"1984" by some young "hornets"
on http://www.123helpme.com.
Regards.
Carl
Themes of Nineteen Eighty-Four 1984
Nineteen Eighty-Four is an expression
of George Orwell's moral and intellectual
indignation at the concept of totalitarianism,
where a country is ruled utterly and
completely by a few people.
It is also a warning of the consequences of
the political paths that were being
followed at the time the book was written.
Nineteen
Eighty-four is not simply a
criticism of what Orwell saw happening
in his national government with the coming
of English Socialism, but a warning of the
consequences of contemporary
governmental practices, and what they where
threatening to bring about. The main
character, Winston leads a pitiful existence.
He cannot remember his childhood, or
for that matter, even his mother.
In addition to this constant pain of loss Winston
must live through lengthy episodes of
other psychological pains, and physical pain.
It is "The Party" that inflicts the
psychological and physical pain on Winston
and the rest of society as it turns children
against parents, friends against friends, and
although Winston discovers the beauty of
a love between a man and a woman, "The Party"
eventually destroys 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
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 the
unpopulated countryside, they have gone through
the trouble to place hidden
microphones disguised as flowers in those areas.
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 literary work has inspired people with
such love of liberty and hatred of
tyranny. Humans have a basic desire to be free
and not controlled. Perhaps the book
seems so bleak because the events in the book
are a somewhat logical projection of
the path that many of the world's nations are
following. Perhaps we would all be
more comfortable with the book if we could
rule out of our minds the possibility of
the prophecy becoming a reality.
Visit the Revelations home page at:
http://www.oocities.org/carlzim/index.html