1984 (Signet Classics) by George Orwell
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Book Reviews of 1984 (Signet Classics)
Book Review: Dystopia
Summary: 5 Stars
The slogan Big Brother is Watching derives from this work. Winston Smith decides to keep a diary, (against all regulations prevalent in Oceania). He detects that a man named O'Brien is a fellow dissident. Smith works at the Ministry of Truth. The really scary organization is the Ministry of Love. The danger of history is not knowing history. Winston Smith has a problem. He remembers. Ingsoc may have dated back to 1960. Newspeak has a vocabulary that grows smaller every year. There is a Ministry of Plenty, but there is rationing. Winston separated from his wife eleven years earlier. The Party prefers celibacy.
Winston believes the best chance for the future is the proletarians, (proles). He decides to wander among them. The one thing they pay attention to is the lottery. There are big prizes. The book shows Orwell's mastery of the uses of propaganda, the perils of bureaucracy, and an understanding of totalitarian trends as exemplified by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany and in smaller ways by the modern democracies of England, the United States, and the colonies of India and Burma. Orwell was a student of the uses and abuses of authority. Winston Smith's descent among the proletariat resembles Orwell's experiences, THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER and DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON. Loving details of the scene reflect also Orwell's love of Dickens and Kipling.
A girl from the Fiction Department writes a love note to Winston. He is amazed. They arrange to meet at a crowded square. Even though there are telescreens, it should be okay. (Not only is the Party Puritanical, but it is expected that Party members engage in wholesome communal activities. Sexual privacy induces hysteria.) Surveillance of citizens is carried on with the cooperation of other citizens rather in the way of Stasi or the block captains of Chairman Mao. Winston rents a room above a shop. Julia brings Inner Party coffee to the meeting, not the victory coffee everyone else drinks. Winston and Julia know their conduct is suicidal, but they continue. Winston is no longer bored with life.
Julia believes that everyone secretly hates the Party. As under Stalin, there are show trials. (Taking things a step further, there are hate campaigns. One means of civil control by the Party is mass demonstrations.) Children are encouraged to spy on their parents. Winston explains to Julia that the past is actually being abolished. Suddenly Oceania is at war with Eastasia. All information concerning Oceania's war with Eurasia has to be obliterated.
The Party has an enemy, Emmanuel Goldstein, a Trotsky-like figure. There is an anti-Party organization, the Brotherhood. Goldstein has a book, although most copies have been destroyed. O'Brien endeavors to get a copy of it for Winston and Julia. Reading Goldstein's book, Winston learns that the three superstates are permanently at war. Even if war hysteria is continuous, war takes place on the margins, and is the product of specialists. War cannot be decisive because the parties are too evenly matched. War uses up surpluses. A war that is continuous ceases to be dangerous. Party weapons are doublethinks and the mutability of the past.
The end is nightmare. There is a Cold War flavor to this, (Orwell seems to have anticipated everything). Beyond politics there is the point, raised recently in a journal, that the author of this masterpiece was dying of tuberculosis during its composition. It is his testament. Our clever author has left us with a prized gift at the end of the volume, an Appendix detailing the Principles of Newspeak. Bravo--this is a book to be read and reread only by the strong-minded.
Book Review: deep, dark, and disturbing
Summary: 5 Stars
1984 is the chilling story of a world in which the actions, thoughts, and even emotions of every person are controlled by the government. It is also the story of one man's fight to maintain his freedom in the face of totalitarianism. Through this book, George Orwell depicts, in horrifying detail, a world that is becoming increasingly similar to our own.
The book follows a man named Winston Smith, a resident of Oceania, which is a huge country under the power of Ingsoc (English Socialism), commonly known as "the Party." In Oceania, the Party has the ability to monitor everyone at every time, so that not even one's own thoughts are private.
Winston seems to be the only person alive who (secretly) hates the Party and longs for its demise. He alone believes in truth, in external reality; everyone else is content to let the Party dictate reality. And dictate it does: in order to keep its hold on Oceania's citizens secure, history has to be rewritten, the past continually altered, in order to prove the Party infallible and to erase the memory of the days before Ingsoc took over. Thus, one day Oceania is at war with Eurasia; Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia. In the next moment, Oceania is at war with Eastasia, and suddenly Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Whatever the Party calls truth, becomes truth. If the Party says that two and two are five, it becomes fact. What's disturbing about this is the fact that the people of Oceania not only agree with the Party when it alters reality; they believe the party. Through a process called "doublethink," they are able to consciously change or erase their memories, then forget having erased them, then forget the act of forgetting.
1984 exposes the danger of giving up our individuality, the ability to think for ourselves, the abandonment of the belief in truth. The only way the situation presented in the book ever could have happened is if the people of Oceania let it happen. They let themselves be controlled to the point that they no longer realized they were controlled, nor that they had at one time been free. Once they did that, they reached a point of no return. Possibly the most frightening thing about 1984 is that there appears to be no way to escape the Party, no way to overthrow it, no way to be free when "Big Brother is watching you." That is the message of 1984, and that is why the book is so horrific: once people surrendered their minds, they lost them forever. There is no revolution, no awakening, no hope of revival.
Through his book, Orwell warns us, the readers, that if we do not fight for the right to think, the right to "say that two plus two make four," we will eventually become the people of Oceania.
The world of 1984 is a horrifying, hopeless, utterly dark world, one which we must fight against at all costs. For this reason, I think everybody should read this book. It forces us to see the logical conclusion of the postmodern attitude that "truth is relative." That is perhaps the most dangerous belief in our world today, a point 1984 demonstrates all too clearly. If truth falls, so does our world, our ability to be free human beings. "Two plus two make four," wrote Winston in the book. "If that is granted all else follows." The reverse is also true. If two and two could just as easily make four or three, if truth is left up to the individual to decide, if there is no solid, external foundation on which we can lay the structure of our morals, beliefs, and our society, then it is only a matter of time before we will fall into the hands of Big Brother.
Book Review: reality then v reality now
Summary: 5 Stars
You've probably already read the other reviews on this site, so i'll just concentrate on my opinion on the relevance of this book in our contemporary society1984 is a stark warning against totalitarianism. Written in 1948, Orwell's depiction of a government-controlled society seemed absurd when published, contrasting the imnumerable amount of people that've said how real it seems now than it did then in western society
One interesting factor is the geography of the planet. We are told very little and all we're told is that there're three 'super-states', Oceania, Eastasia and Eurasia. Oceania is constantly at war with a vague and distant enemy, and is always switching between being allies and enemies with Eurasia and Eastasia. Comparing it to today, just what is this 'war on terrorism, and how threatened do you really feel about it (disregarding media opinion)?. America and Britian, both independantly throughout the years and in allegiance with each other recently, are constantly at war with an enemy. WWI, WWII, Cold war, Korean war, Vietnam war, Falklands War, Gulf war I and more recently Gulf war II. Societal opinions + perceptions are influenced by media, but who are we at war with? The "War on Terror" clearly highlights the fact that there is no tangible enemy anymore. Explained more clearly in Goldstein's passage in the book, we are constantly at war because it keeps us united, and stops us fighting one another, stops us fighting the government.
Another interesting factor in book is the issue of government surveillance. 'Telescreen' in homes, Cameras everywhere you walk, Microphones even in the countryside to detect rebellious behaviour. Although key issues stated in the book aren't as extreme, the power the government now has to keep tabs on people and spy on them has reached limits it has never reached before. The 'Party' explain that this surveillance is for the benefit of the people (note: animal farm) and they constantly reassure the citizens, or 'comrades', that life was worst off before they came along. Similarly, our governments are constantly re-assuring us how much better our lives are because of them. I.D cards are being proposed under the pretence that they will 'eliminate terrorism and benefit fraud', which are something the people are 'persuaded they want' because they media tells them they do.
The third, conclusively and i think most importantly, is the way this book challenges the fact we (society in 1948) take our freedom for granted. One passage in the book which sticks out in my mind specifically is when the main charactor walks through a lower-class area, and is terrified that the police patrols might stop him and ask him questions; 'what are you doing in this part of town? is this your usual way home'? etc. Similarly, if someone was walking down the street at 2am in a dangerous part of town for no particular reason, it would be deemed socially strange, thus encouraging this person not to do so, and do what everyone else does. If someone dresses in clothes that you do not usually see, he/she would be regarded as a weirdo, a social outcast".My point is, how free do we really think we are as a society these days? How easily are we opinionated by the media?
Our society is edging closer and closer to the reality that is 1984, and i recommend that you read it, it will change the way you perceive news articles, and you'll question all these erosions of civil liberties that have been happening.
By the way, Orwell didn't intend for this vision to be reality in the year 1984. He wrote it in 1948, so he just switched the last 2 letters around.
Book Review: Still relevant as a warning
Summary: 5 Stars
[...]
Orwell wrote 1984 in 1948. His was not strictly intended as a prediction of any kind but a warning. We thought of it as a prediction though, and in the mid-sixties when I was at UCLA there was a tendency to favor Huxley since 1984 was less than a generation away and it didn't look like the dreary hell of Oceania and the thought police had any chance of materializing that soon. Clearly the feel good, feelie, drug-infused mindlessness of Brave New World was much more likely even if probably much more than a generation away.
[...] Not that we personally, as privileged members of the great American middle class had been reduced to drinking victory gin and going to rallies for two minutes of hate or had girl friends who were members of the Anti-Sex League. What we knew though was that a football rally, with just a little malevolent direction, could easily turn into a hate rally; and the Big Brother of Oceania was not at all that different in some respects from the Johnson administration that had (we believed) killed Kennedy and was now engaged in a senseless war in Vietnam from which we were spared as long as we maintained our college deferments. Orwell's idea that by reducing the words that one could legally speak, by a government imposed reduction in vocabulary through Newspeak, and by an indoctrination of our thoughts through the enforced concept of "thoughtcrime," and by maintaining a constant state of war from without, the populace could be controlled--this was something that seemed so very true. We had only to witness the relatively recent examples of what had happened in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. The twentieth century was indeed the century of totalitarianism, and although it did not seem to affect us now, with flower children in the streets and free love and doobies on our waterbeds, it was clear that the danger was there lurking in the distance.
Furthermore we greatly identified with the secret and illegal tryst of Winston and Julia, who like us, stole hours away from Big Brother (actually we stole them away from parental authority) to meet and make forbidden love. But what I think really sold us on the psychological truth of 1984 and shocked us greatly were the rats about Winston's face that forced him to betray the only love of his life and in doing so lose his humanity and whatever smidgin of self-respect he had left. In other words what we saw was the overwhelming power of torture to completely subdue, and as it eventually happened, transform the vital human being into some kind of compliant animal filled with fear and the wretched worship of brute, physical power--humans reduced to defeated creatures glued to the telescreen, smoking government issue cigarettes, drinking government issue gin and cheering government issue soldiers on to the slaughter of distant, hated peoples, while all the while over every vacant space on a wall or billboard was pasted not the Marlboro Man but the face of Big Brother whom the populous had come to love as a beaten dog might love the sadistic human that beats it.
[...]
One of the unanswered question about 1984 is whether it really is possible to reduce the human ability to think by restricting vocabulary and distorting history. If some words are not allowed to exist and if history is constantly erased and rewritten in order to conform to the current party line, is it not true that we will more and more lose our ability to think independently and become more and more like cogs in a great repressive social/political machine?
[...]
Book Review: The kind of distressing book you NEED to read...
Summary: 5 Stars
Eric Arthur Blair was an important English writer that you probably already know by the pseudonym of George Orwell. He wrote quite a few books, but many believe that his more influential ones were "Animal farm" (1944) and "1984" (1948).In those two books he conveyed, metaphorically and not always obviously, what Soviet Russia meant to him.
I would like to make some comments about the second book, "1984". That book was written near his death, when he was suffering from tuberculosis, what might have had a lot to do with the gloominess that is one of the essential characteristics of "1984". The story is set in London, in a nightmarish 1984 that for Orwell might well have been a possibility, writting as he was many years before that date. Or maybe, he was just trying to warn his contemporaries of the dangers of not opposing the Soviet threat, a threat that involved a new way of life that was in conflict with all that the English held dear.
Orwell tried to depict a totalitarian state, where the truth didn't exist as such, but was merely what the "Big Brother" said it was. Freedom was only total obedience to the Party, and love an alien concept, unless it was love for the Party. The story is told from the point of view of Winston Smith, a functionary of the Ministry of Truth whose work involved the "correction" of all records each time the "Big Brother" decided that the truth had changed. The Party slogan said that "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past", and they applied it constantly by "bringing up to date" the past so as to make it coincide with whatever the Party wanted.
From Winston Smith's point of view, many things that scare us are normal. For example, the omnipresence of the "Big Brother", always watching you, and the "Thought Police" that punishes treacherous thoughts against the Party. The reader feels the inevitability of doom that pervades the book many times, in phrases like "Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you".
Little by little, Winston begins to realize that things are not right, and that they should change. We accompany him in his attempt at subversion, and are unwilling witnesses of what that attempt brings about. This book is marked by hopelessness, but at the same time it is the kind of distressing book we all NEED to read...
Why do we need to read "1984"?. In my opinion, basically for two reasons. To start with, Orwell made in this book many observations that are no more merely fiction, but already things that manage to reduce our freedom. Secondly, and closelly linked to my first reason, this is a book that only gets better with the passing of time, as you can read in it more and more implications. One of Orwell's main reasons for writting this "negative utopia" might have been to warn his readers against communism, but many years after his death and the fall of communism, we can also interpret it as a caution against the excessive power of mass media, or the immoderate power of any government (even those who don't defend communism).
Technological innovation should be at the service of men, and allow them to live better lives, but it can be used against them. I guess that is one of Orwell's lessons, probably the most important one. All in all, I think you can benefit from reading this book. Because of that, I highly recommend it to you :)
Belen Alcat