Nineteen Eighty-Four (sometimes 1984) is a darkly satiricalpoliticalnovel and love story by George Orwell. The story takes place in a nightmarishdystopia, in which an ever surveillant State enforces perfect conformity among citizens through indoctrination, fear, lies and ruthless punishment. The bulk of the novel was written in the year 1948 (although Orwell had written small parts of it since 1945), and it was first published on June 8, 1949. It is Orwell's most famous work, and is the source of the word "Orwellian."
The novel introduced the concept of the ever present all-seeing Big Brother, the notorious Room 101, the thought police who use telescreens (televisions that contain a surveillance camera — found in almost every room of the apartments of members of the party), and the fictional language Newspeak (pronounced 'new-speak').
Orwell had originally chosen the year 1980 for his work. But as the writing dragged on due to illness, Orwell changed it to 1982 and then to 1984, simply switching around the year 1948.
Along with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, the world of 1984 is one of the first and most cited characterizations of a realistic dystopia to have appeared in English literature. It has been translated into many languages. Orwell acknowledged the influence on 1984 of Yevgeny Zamyatin's Russian language novel We, completed in 1921.
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The book starts on April 4th, 1984 (the first entry in Winston Smith's diary), at 1:00 PM ("It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen..."). The book is divided into three sections. Part One deals with the world of 1984. Part Two deals with Winston's forbidden sexual relationship with Julia, as well as Winston's eagerness to rebel against The Party. Part Three deals with Winston's capture and torture by O'Brien. The time frame for the book is from April 1984 to the spring of 1985, although Winston is never quite sure how much time had passed during his imprisonment.
Orwell is also reported to have said that the book described what he saw as the actual situation in the United Kingdom, where he lived, in 1948, where rationing was still in place, and the British Empire was dissolving at the same time as newspapers were reporting its triumphs. The structure of the government also resembled that of the British government, at least in nomenclature: the government in Nineteen Eighty-Four has four major ministries, each focused on an object which is, in exquisite irony, utterly antithetical to its name. "The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture, and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation."
The mysterious head of government is the omniscient, omnipotent, beloved Big Brother or "BB". Big Brother is described as "a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features." He is usually displayed on posters with the slogan "BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU".
His nemesis is the hated Emmanuel Goldstein, a Party member who had been purged early in the Party's history. Goldstein is said to be a major part of the Brotherhood, a vast underground anti-Party fellowship. The reader never truly finds out whether the Brotherhood exists or not, but the implication is that Goldstein is either entirely fictitious or was eliminated long ago.
The three slogans of the Party, visible everywhere, are
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
While by definition these words are antonyms, in the world of 1984 the world is in a state of constant war, no-one is free, and everyone is ignorant. Through the universality of the extremes the terms become meaningless, and the slogans become axiomatic.
The world is controlled by three functionally similar authoritarian superstates engaged in perpetual war with each other: Oceania (ideology: Ingsoc (English Socialism)), Eurasia (ideology: Neo-Bolshevism) and Eastasia (ideology: Death Worship or Obliteration of the Self). In terms of the political map of the late 1940s when the book was written, Oceania covers the areas of the British Empire and Commonwealth, the United States of America and Latin America; Eastasia corresponds to China, Japan, Korea, and India, and Eurasia corresponds to the Soviet Union and Continental Europe. The United Kingdom's placement in Oceania rather than in Eurasia is commented upon in the book as an undisputed historic anomaly.
London, the novel's setting, is the capital of the Oceanian province of Airstrip One, the renamed Britain and Ireland. Goldstein's book explains that the three ideologies are basically the same, but it is imperative to keep the public uninformed about that. The population is led to believe that the other two ideologies are detestable.
Newspeak, the "official language" of Oceania, is extraordinary in that its vocabulary decreases every year; the state of Oceania sees no purpose in maintaining a complex language, and so Newspeak is a language dedicated to the "destruction of words". As the character Syme puts it:
"Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well... If you have a word like 'good', what need is there for a word like 'bad'? 'Ungood' will do just as well... Or again, if you want a stronger version of 'good', what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like 'excellent' and 'splendid' and all the rest of them? 'Plusgood' covers the meaning, or 'doubleplusgood' if you want something stronger still.... In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words; in reality, only one word." (Part One, Chapter Five)
The true goal of Newspeak is to take away the ability to adequately conceptualize revolution, or even dissent, by removing words that could be used to that end. Since the thought police had yet to develop a method of reading people's minds to catch dissent, Newspeak was created so that it wasn't even possible to think a dissenting thought. This concept has been examined (and widely discounted) in linguistics: see Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.
To understand why Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, one only has to look at his less famous writings: most significantly, Homage to Catalonia does a lot to explain his distrust of totalitarianism and the betrayal of revolutions; Coming Up For Air, at points, celebrates the individual freedom that is lost in Nineteen Eighty-Four; and his essay "Why I Write" explains clearly that all the "serious work" he had written since the Spanish Civil War in 1936 was "written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism" [1].
The atmosphere of control and change inspired the British TV show The Prisoner, the filmBrazil directed by Terry Gilliam and A Clockwork Orange directed by Stanley Kubrick. Nineteen Eighty-Four has been made into a cinematic film twice, in 1956 and in 1984, and has been made into a television adaptation rather more often. The 1984 cinematic film is a faithful adaptation of the novel and was critically acclaimed. It is notable as Richard Burton's final performance before his death.
The term Big Brother was borrowed by a reality television programme first produced in the Netherlands in 1999 and later copied by many other countries around the world. A group of contestants live in a house under constant surveillance, they are set many tasks and their progress is broadcast on television and the internet. The viewing public then get to vote contestants off the programme one by one over several weeks. The last remaining contestant wins a large cash prize. As all the contestants (especially those voted off last) have a high media exposure they are sometimes able to use their brief celebrity to launch themselves into a career in the media.
Room 101 is also the title of a BBC TV programme presented by Paul Merton. Guests on the show talk about the people or items they wish to send to Room 101.
Apple Computer parodied 1984 in its world famous commercial by the same name. It aired nationally only once, during Super Bowl XVII (1984), introducing the Macintosh due to be released. In the commercial, Big Brother symbolised IBM. A young heroine, with a Macintosh logo on her chest, throws a sledgehammer into the screen where Big Brother is preaching propaganda to an audience of bald-headed "zombies".
