George Orwell's 1984

In the novel 1984 George Orwell depicts a dystopia with his use of a futuristic setting while incorporating the fear of technology. A dystopia is a society where people lead dehumanized and often fearful lives. In a dystopia social and/or technological trends have contributed to a corrupted or degraded state of deprivation and oppression. Governmental tyranny and an exploitation of the people are also prominent in a dystopia.

George Orwell depicts a dystopia by using a futuristic setting with the Thought Police and vaporization. The Thought Police constantly monitors the thoughts of the citizens of Oceania ensuring that they will not disobey The Party or Big Brother. This ensures that the currently established government will stay in control. If the citizens even contemplate betraying The Party they will be vaporized which is where the Thought Police captures the citizen and they completely disappear. No one knows where they go only that they are erased from all memory and databases. He clearly generates fear by using these forms of technology currently impossible to enhance the theme of a dystopia.

Montage, the main character, fights his urge to fight The Party because he knows what his consequence will be but decides to join the Brotherhood for the common good of all mankind. This is how Orwell places his main character in dissent with society to enhance the overall theme of a dystopia.

In conclusion, Orwell creates a “perfect” dystopia by using a futuristic setting, the fear of technology and by placing the main character in dissent with society.

PLOT SUMMARY

The book starts in the year 1984 (what a surprise), set in Airstrip One, what we know as England. Airstrip One itself is the mainland of a huge country, called Oceania, which consists of North America, South Africa, and Australia. The country is ruled by the Party, which is led by a figure called Big Brother. The population of Oceania is divided into three parts:The Inner Party, the Outer Party and the Proles (the commoners & workers)

The narrator of the book is all-knowing and he is not participating in the action of the book himself. We are introduced to the protagonist of the story, Winston Smith.

Winston is a member of the Outer Party, working in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth. His job is to rewrite documents and alter records and newspaper articles. The action starts when Winston begins to become skeptical of the ruling dictatorship of the party. Doing so he buys himself a book, a rare thing these days, to use it as a diary. As individual expression was forbidden by the Party, having a diary was a crime, which could be punished with death. There were so-called telescreens in each room, showing propaganda and political pamphlets, which had a built in camera and microphone to watch over the citizens. Keeping a secret book was not only forbidden, but also very dangerous. When Winston makes the first entry in the diary, he thinks about an experience he has made during the Two Minute Hate, a propaganda film that repeats each day. During this Film he caught the eye of O'Brien, a member of the Inner Party, of whom he thought that he might also stand critic to the regime. After the reflection, he finds that he has written the sentence: "Down with Big Brother" all over the page.

In the same night, Winston dreams about his mother and sister, who had starved to death in the war, because he had been so greedy. Then he dreams of being with a girl he has seen in the Records Department, during the Two Minute Hate. Early in the morning Winston is awaken by the harsh voice from the telescreen. During the performance of the exercises, Winston's thoughts move back to his childhood. The last thing he remembers clearly, is the World War. After the war, the party took control of the country, and from then on it was difficult to remember anything, because the party changed the history permanently to their own benefit.

After the exercises Winston goes to the Minitrue (Ministry of Truth), where his job is to alter records, and once altered, to throw them into the Memory Hole where they are destroyed. At dinner Winston Smith meets Syme, a philologist, who is working on the 11th edition of The Newspeak Dictionary. The goal of the Party is to eliminate "Oldspeak" and replace it with the robotic Newspeak. As he looks around in the dining room he catches the eye of the dark-haired girl he had dreamed of the same night.

Back home, Winston makes an entry into his diary about his meeting with a prostitute three years ago . He remembers her ugliness, but nevertheless he had sex with her. Winston had a wife, but she was very stupid and blindly followed the orders of the Party, which said that there may only be sex to produce "new material" for the Party. Sex for personal pleasure is a crime.
Winston beings to think that the only hope lies in the Proles who comprise over four-fifths of Oceania's population. Later he remembers another fact of his past: Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford, the last three survivors of the original leaders of the Revolution. They were arrested in 1965, and confessed to all sorts of sabotage on trial. They were pardoned, reinstated but not long after were arrested again, and finally executed. During the brief period Winston has seen them in the Chestnut Tree Cafe. In the same year a half page torn out of The Times came to Winston trough the transport tube in the Minitrue. This page of The Times showed the three men in Eastasia on a certain day. But Winston remembered clearly that they have confessed being in Eurasia on that day (At this time Eurasia was at war with Oceania, and Eastasia was an ally). Winston could have proved that the confessions were lies. The last entry Winston writes in his diary is that freedom is to say that two and two makes four. If this is granted everything else follows.

The next day Winston decides not to participate in the community actions, but to take a walk in the quarters of the Proles, around St. Pancras station. During the walk a Rocket-Bomb explodes nearby. After a while Winston finds himself in front of the junk-shop, where he had bought the diary. There he sees an old man just entering a pub. He decides to follow the man, and to ask him about the time before the revolution, but the old man has already forgotten nearly everything about this time, except for some useless personal things. Winston leaves the pub and goes to the Shop, where he purchases a glass with a pice of coral inside. Mr Carrington, the owner of the shop, leads him upstairs to show him an old- fashioned room. Winston likes the room because of its warmth and lack of telescreens. When Winston leaves the shop he suddenly meets the dark-haired girl in the street. He now believes that this girl is an amateur spy or even a member of the Thought Police, sent to follow him.

The next morning he meets the girl in the Ministry of Truth, and in the moment she passes, she falls down and cries out in pain. When Winston helps her up, she secretly presses a piece of paper into his hand. At the first opportunity he opens it and finds the startling message: "I love you" written on it. For a week he waits for an opportunity to speak with her. Finally he is successful, and he meets her in the canteen where they fix a meeting. Some time later they meet at the fixed place, where the girl gives Winston precise instructions how to get to a secret place on Sunday.

On Sunday, Winston is following the girl's directions and picks some bluebells for her on the way. Suddenly, she comes up behind him, telling him to be quiet because there might be some microphones hidden somewhere. They kiss and he learns her name: Julia. She leads him to another place where they cannot be observed. Before she takes off her blue party-overall, Julia tells Winston that she is attracted to him by something in his face which shows that he is against the party. Winston is surprised and asks Julia if she has done such a thing before. To his delight she tells him that she has done it scores of times, which fills him with a great hope. Evidence of corruption and abandon always gives him with hope. Perhaps the whole system is rotten, and will simply crumb to pieces one day. The more men she had, the more he loves her, and later when he looks at her sleeping body, he thinks that now even sex is a political act, another blow against the falseness of the Party.

Winston and Julia arrange to meet again. Winston rents the room above Mr Carringtons junk shop, a place where they can meet and talk without the fear of being observed. It is summer and the preparations for "Hate Week", an enormous propaganda event, are well forthcoming, and in this time Winston meets Julia more often than ever before. Julia makes him feel more alive, she makes him feel healthier, and he even puts on weight.

One day O'Brien speaks to Winston in the Ministry of Truth. He refers obliquely to Syme, who has vanished a couple of days before, and is now, as it is called in Newspeak, an unperson. In doing so O'Brien is committing a little act of thoughtcrime. O'Brien invites Winston to his house, to see the latest edition of the Newspeak dictionary. Winston now feels sure that the conspiracy against the Party he had longed to know about—the Brotherhood—does exist, and that in the encounter with O'Brien he has come into contact with its outer edge. He knows that he has embarked on a course of action which will lead , in one way or another, to the cells of the Ministry of Love. Some days later Winston and Julia meet each other to go to O'Brien's house, which lies in the district of the Inner Party. They are admitted to a richly furnitured room by a servant. To their astonishment O'Brien switches off the Telescreen in the room (normally it is impossible to turn it off). Winston blurts out that he wants to work against the Party and that he believes in the existence of the Brotherhood. Martin, O'Brien's servant, brings real red wine, and they drink a toast to Emanuel Goldstein, the leader of the Brotherhood. O'Brien asks them a series of questions about their willingness to commit various atrocities on behalf of the Brotherhood and gets their assent. They leave, and some days later Winston gets a copy of the book written by Emanuel Goldstein, simply called "The Book."

As Hate Week begins, the war with Eurasia suddenly stops and a war with Eastasia starts. This of course meant a lot of work for Winston. He had to change dozens of articles about the war with Eurasia. Nevertheless Winston finds time to read The Book. The Book has three chapters titled, "War is Peace", "Ignorance is Strength" and "Freedom is Slavery", which were also the main phrases of the party. The main ideas of the book are as follows:

1. War is important for consuming the products of human labour. If this work would be used to increase the standard of living, the control of the party over the people would decrease. War is the economy basis for a hierarchical society.
2. There is an emotional need to believe in the ultimate victory of Big Brother.
3. In becoming continuous, war has ceased to exist. The continuity of the war guarantees the permanence of the current order. In other words "War is Peace."
4. There have always been three main grades of society; the High, the Middle and the Low, and no change has brought human equality an inch nearer.
5. Collectivism doesn't lead to socialism. Wealth belongs to the new "high-class", the bureaucrats and administrators. Collectivism has ensured the permanence of economic inequality.
6. Wealth is not inherited from person to person, but it is kept within the ruling group.
7. The masses (proles) are given freedom of thought, because supposedly they don't think. A Party member is not allowed the slightest deviation of thought, and there is an elaborate mental training to ensure this, a training that can be summarised in the concept of doublethinking.

So far the book analyses how the Party works. It has not yet attempted to deal with the question as to how the Party has arisen.

The next morning when he awakes the sun is shining, and down in the yard a prole women is singing and working. Winston is again filled with the conviction that the future lies with the proles, that they will overthrow the greyness of the Party. But suddenly reality crashes in. "We are the DEATH", he says to Julia. An iron voice behind them repeats the phrase, the picture on the wall falls to bits to reveal a telescreen behind it. Uniformed men thunder into the room and they carry Winston and Julia out.

Winston finds himself in a cell in what he presumes is the Ministry of Love. He is sick with hunger and fear, and when he makes a movement or a sound, a harsh voice barks at him from the four telescreens. A prisoner who is dying of starvation is brought in, his face is skull-like. Later the man is brought to "Room 101" after screaming and struggling, and even offering his children as sacrifices in his stead.

O'Brien enters. Winston thinks that they must have got him too, but O'Brien says that they got him long time ago. A guard hits Winston, and he falls unconscious. When he wakes up he is tied down to a kind of bed. O'Brien stands beside the bed, and Winston feels that O'Brien, who is the torturer, is also somehow a friend. The aim of O'Brien is to teach Winston the technique of doublethinking, and he does it by inflicting pain in ever-increasing intensity. He reminds Winston that he wrote the sentence: "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four." O'Brien holds up four fingers of his left hand, and he asks Winston how many there are. Winston answers four a couple of times, and each time the pain increases (this is not done to make Winston lie, but to make him really see five fingers instead of four).

At the end of the session, under heavy influence of drugs and agony, Winston really sees five fingers. Now Winston is ready to enter the second stage of his integration (1. Learning, 2. Understanding, 3. Acceptance). O'Brien now explains why the Party works. The image he gives of the future is that of a boot stamping on a human face—forever. Winston protests, because he thinks that there is something in the human nature that will not allow this, he calls it "The Spirit of Man." O'Brien points out that Winston is the last humanist, he is the last guardian of the human spirit. Then O'Brien gets Winston to look at himself in the mirror. Winston is horrified by what he sees. The unknown time of torture has changed him into a shapeless and battered wreck. This is what the last humanist looks like.

The only degradation that Winston has not been through is the betrayl of Julia. He said anything under torture, but inside he has remained true to her. Winston is much better now. For some time he has not been beaten and tortured, he has been fed quite well and allowed to wash. Winston realizes that he now accepts all the lies of the Party. He believes now that Oceania was always at war with Eastasia, and that he never had the photograph of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford that proved their innocence. Even gravity could be nonsense. But nevertheless Winston has some unorthodox thoughts that he cannot suppress.

Now it comes time for the last of the three steps, reintegration. Winston is taken to Room 101. O'Brien says that the room 101 is the worst thing in the world. For each person it is his own personal hell. For some it is death by fire or burial alive. For Winston it is a cage containing two rats, with a fixture like a fencing mask attached, into which the face of the victim is strapped. Then there is a lever, that opens the cage ,so that the rats can get to the face. O'Brien is approaching nearer with the cage ,and Winston gets the bad smell of the rats. He screams. The only way to get out of this is to put someone else between him and the horror."Do it to Julia," he screams in a final betrayal of himself. Winston is released.

As the story comes to a close, Winston is often sitting in the Chestnut Tree Café, drinking Victory Gin and playing chess. He now has a job in a sub-committee that is made up for others like himself. On a cold winter day he meets Julia, they speak briefly, but have little to say to each other, except that they have betrayed each other. A memory of a day in his childhood comes to Winston's mind: it is false. He is often troubled by false memories. He looks forward to the bullet; they will kill him some day. Now he realizes how pointless it was to resist. He loves Big Brother!