1984 Book By George Orwell (PDF-Summary-Review-Online Reading-Download)

1984 Nineteen Eighty-Four Novel By George Orwell: often published as 1984, is a dystopian novel by the English novelist George Orwell. It was published in June 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell’s ninth and final book completed in his life. The story was written primarily in Barnhill, a farm on the Scottish island of Jura, sometimes while Orwell suffered from severe tuberculosis. Thematically, Nineteen Eighty-Four focuses on the risks of government overreaching, totalitarianism, and repressive regulation of all people and behaviors within society.

The story takes place in an imagined future, the year 1984 when much of the world has been the victim of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance, historical denial, and propaganda. Britain, known as Airstrip One, has become a province of a superstate called Oceania that is governed by the Party that employs the Thought Police to pursue individuality and independent thinking. Big Brother, the party leader, enjoys an intense personality cult despite the fact that it may not even exist. The protagonist, Winston Smith, is a diligent and skilled worker and member of the Party who secretly hates the Party and dreams of rebellion. He enters into a forbidden relationship with a co-worker, Julia.

Nineteen eighty-four has become a classic literary example of political and dystopian fiction. Many terms used in the novel came into common use, including Big Brother, double thought, crime, Newspeak, Room 101, telescreen, 2 + 2 = 5, offspring, and memory hole. Nineteen eighty-four also popularized the adjective “Orwellian”, connoting things like official deception, secret surveillance, blatantly misleading terminology, and manipulation of history recorded by a totalitarian or authoritarian state. Time included it in his one hundred best English novels from 1923 to 2005. He placed himself in the 100 best novels of the Modern Library, reaching number 13 in the list of publishers and number 6 on the list of readers. In 2003, the novel was listed in n. ° 8 of The Big Read survey conducted by the BBC.

1984 Summary

The book is set in 1984 in Oceania, one of the three totalitarian states in perpetual warfare (the other two are Eurasia and Eastasia). Oceania is governed by the Party that controls everything, which has brainwashed the population so that it obeys without thinking of its leader, Big Brother. The Party has created a propaganda language known as Newspeak, which is designed to limit free thinking and promote Party doctrines. His words include double thought (belief in contradictory ideas at the same time), which is reflected in the Party’s slogans: “War is peace”, “Freedom is slavery” and “Ignorance is strength”. The Party maintains control through the Thought Police and continuously monitors.

The hero of the book, Winston Smith, is an official of a minor party that lives in a London that is still shattered by a nuclear war that took place shortly after World War II. It belongs to the Foreign Party, and its job is to rewrite history in the Ministry of Truth, aligning it with current political thinking. However, Winston’s longing for truth and decency leads him to secretly rebel against the government. They embark on a forbidden adventure with Julia, a woman of like-minded ideas, and rent a room in a neighborhood populated by Proles (short for proletarians). Winston is also increasingly interested in the Brotherhood, a group of dissidents. Without the knowledge of Winston and Julia, however, they are being watched closely (ubiquitous posters throughout the city warn residents that “Big Brother is watching you”).

When O’Brien, an Interior Party official who appears to be a secret member of the Brotherhood, approaches Winston, the trap is set. O’Brien is actually a Party spy, looking for “criminals of thought,” and Winston and Julia are finally caught and sent to the Ministry of Love for violent reeducation. The ensuing imprisonment, torture, and re-education of Winston are destined not only to physically break him or make him subdue but to eradicate his independence and destroy his dignity and humanity. In-room 101, where prisoners are forced to undergo exposure to their worst nightmares, Winston panics when a rat cage is attached to his head. He yells at his torturers to say “Do it to Julia!” And he says he doesn’t care what happens to him. With this betrayal, Winston is released. Later he meets Julia, and neither is interested in the other. Instead, Winston loves Big Brother.

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1984 Review

1984 is a dystopian novel by George Orwell published in 1949, which follows the life of Winston Smith, a low-ranking member of “The Party”, who is frustrated by the omnipresent eyes of the party, and his ominous ruler Big Brother.

“Big Brother” controls all aspects of people’s lives. He has invented the “Newspeak” language in an attempt to completely eliminate political rebellion; He created ‘Throughtcrimes’ to prevent people from thinking about things considered rebellious. The party controls what people read, talk, say, and do with the threat that if they disobey, they will be sent to the dreaded Room 101 as an imminent punishment.

Orwell effectively explores the issues of media control, government surveillance, totalitarianism, and how a dictator can manipulate and control history, thoughts, and life in such a way that no one can escape it.

The protagonist, Winston Smith, begins a subtle rebellion against the party by keeping a diary of his secret thoughts, which is a deadly crime. With her lover Julia, a predestined struggle for freedom and justice begins, in a world where no one else seems to see or dislikes, the oppression that the protagonist opposes.

Perhaps the most powerful, effective, and frightening notion of 1984 is that complete control of an entire nation under a totalitarian state is perfectly possible. If the world fell under the control of one or even several dictators, the future could easily become a twisted and cruel world in which every movement, word, and breath is examined by an omnipotent and omnipresent power that no one can stop, or even oppose without him. The fear of death.

Orwell’s novel is a warning to the human race. It stresses the importance of resisting mass control and oppression.

1984 Analysis

Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four as a warning after years of meditating on the twin threats of Nazism and Stalinism. His description of a state in which he dares to think differently is rewarded with torture, where people are monitored every second of the day, and where the party’s propaganda triumphs over freedom of expression and thought is a sobering reminder of evils. of responsible governments. Winston is the symbol of the values ​​of civilized life, and their defeat is a moving reminder of the vulnerability of such values ​​amidst all-powerful states.

1984 Characters

Main characters

Winston Smith – The protagonist is a phlegmatic common man and is curious about the past before the Revolution.

Julia: Winston’s mistress who is a “rebel disguised from the waist down” who publicly defends the Party’s doctrine as a member of the fanatical Junior Anti-Sex League.

O’Brien: A member of the Inner Party posing as a member of The Brotherhood, the counterrevolutionary resistance, to trick, trap, and capture Winston and Julia. O’Brien has a servant named Martin.

Secondary characters

Aaronson, Jones, and Rutherford, former Inner Party members whom Winston vaguely remembers as one of the original leaders of the Revolution, long before he ever heard of Big Brother. They confessed to treacherous conspiracies with foreign powers and were later executed in the political purges of the 1960s. Between confessions and executions, Winston saw them drinking at the Chestnut Tree Café, their noses are broken, suggesting that their confessions had been obtained through torture. Later, in the course of his editorial work, Winston sees evidence from the newspaper that contradicts his confessions but drops it into a memory hole. Eleven years later, he is faced with the same photograph during questioning.

Ampleforth – a former colleague from the Winston Archives Department who was jailed for leaving the word “God” in a Kipling poem because he couldn’t find another rhyme for “rod”; Winston finds him in the Miniluv. Ampleforth is a dreamer and intellectual who takes pleasure in his work and respects poetry and language, traits that cause him to disagree with the Party.

Charrington – A Thought Police officer posing as a sympathetic antique dealer among the Hatchlings.

Katharine Smith, the emotionally indifferent wife Winston “can’t get rid of.” Although she did not like sexual intercourse, Katharine married Winston because she was her “duty to the Party”. Although she was a “good thinking” ideologist, they separated because the couple could not conceive children. Divorce is not allowed, but couples who cannot have children can live separately. For much of the story, Winston lives in the vague hope that Katharine will die or that he will “get rid of her” so he can marry Julia. He regrets not having killed her by pushing her over the edge of a quarry when she had the opportunity of her many years before.

Tom Parsons – Winston’s naive neighbor and an ideal member of the Outer Party – is a suggestive and uneducated man who is absolutely loyal to the Party and fully believes in the perfect image of it. He is socially active and participates in Party activities for his social class. He is friendly with Smith and, despite his political conformity, punishes his stalking son for firing a catapult at Winston. Later, as a prisoner, Winston sees that Parsons is in the Ministry of Love, as his daughter had reported him to the Thought Police, saying that she overheard him speak against Big Brother while he slept. Even this does not lower his faith in the Party, and he claims that he could do a “good job” in the forced labor camps.

Mrs. Parsons-Parsons’s wife is a pale, hapless woman who is intimidated by her own children.

The Parsons children, members of the Party’s Youth League, represent the new generation of citizens of Oceania, with no memory of life before Big Brother and without family ties or emotional feelings; the model society imagined by the Inner Party.

Syme: Winston’s colleague at the Ministry of Truth. She was a lexicographer who helped develop the Newspeak language and dictionary. Although he is enthusiastic about his work and his support for the Party, Winston notes that he “is too smart. He sees too clearly and speaks too clearly.” Winston predicts, correctly, that Syme will become a person.

Invisible characters

Whether these characters are real or Party propaganda fabrications is something that neither Winston nor the reader can know:

Big Brother: the leader and figurehead of the Party that governs Oceania.

Emmanuel Goldstein – Apparently a leading Party figure who became the counterrevolutionary leader of the Brotherhood and author of the book The Theory and Practice of Oligarchic Collectivism. Goldstein is the symbolic enemy of the state, the national nemesis who ideologically unites the people of Oceania with the Party, especially during the Two Minutes of Hate and other acts of terror.

About the Author George Orwell

GEORGE ORWELL (1903-1950) was born in India and served with the Imperial Police in Burma before joining the Republican Army in the Spanish Civil War. Orwell was the author of six novels, as well as numerous essays and nonfiction works.

1984 PDF

1984 Quotes

Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.

If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.