1984 BY GEORGE ORWELL

About the author

•Eric Arthur Blair better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and
journalist. He was born in 1903 in Bengal, India and had studied to Eton (England), but
refused to go either Oxford and Cambridge and decided to enroll instead Indian Imperial
Police.

•His work is marked by keen intelligence and wit, a profound awareness of social injustice,
an intense, revolutionary opposition to totalitarianism, a passion for clarity in language and a
belief in democratic socialism

•1984, was written by George Orwell in 1948 and published in 1949. (we will focus on this
novel particularly, and we may wonder)

How does the novel 1984 depict a dystopian society?

I)

II) The use of an all-powerful figure : Big Brother

La dictature dans 1984 est basée sur le principe d’un état omniscient
qui surveille l’ensemble des citoyens grâce à la technologie, that is
to say Big Brother.

Indeed, throughout London, Winston sees posters showing a man gazing

down over the words “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU” everywhere he
goes. Big Brother is the face of the Party. The citizens are told that he is the
leader of the nation and the head of the Party, but Winston can never
determine whether or not he actually exists. In any case, the face of Big
Brother symbolizes the Party in its public manifestation; he is a reassurance to
most people (the warmth of his name suggests his ability to protect), but he is
also an open threat (one cannot escape his gaze). Big Brother also
symbolizes the vagueness with which the higher ranks of the Party present
themselves—it is impossible to know who really rules Oceania, what life is like
for the rulers, or why they act as they do.
Written by: George Orwell

Type of Work: novel

Genre: dystopian novel ; social criticism

First Published: 1949

Setting: Oceania

Main Characters: Winston Smith, Julia, O'Brien and Big Brother

Themes: Totalitarianism, psychological manipulation, physical control, control of

information and history, technology, language as mind control, and revolution.

Symbols: Big Brother, the glass paperweight and the telescreens.

Motifs: repressed sexuality; dreams

Major Symbols: Newspeak; prole woman; birds; telescreens; glass paperweight

1984 is about totalitarianism.

A totalitarian government is one that tries to control every aspect of life, how
people spend every minute of their time, even in private, who they can
associate with, what they're allowed to say.
A totalitarian government even tries to control what people think and what they
believe
George Orwell wrote 1984 in the late 1940s.
Totalitarianism was based on the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
Those governments had come into being not that long before and they were
not very well understood yet.
What Orwell was trying to do with 1984 was to give his readers a clear picture
of what life would be like if a free country like England were under totalitarian
rule.

1984 takes place in Oceania London.

The London in the book, is a depressing place, there's never enough to eat,
the food is disgusting, they aren't enough clothes or shoes or anything to go
around, and the city is pretty dilapidated.

There's some sort of war going on who no one really understands what it's
about.

Rockets frequently explode in the streets and blow people to bits.

Indeed, there is a constant pressure over the citizens : the government is

always watching everywhere, as he is spying on every citizen.

There are thought police who have hidden cameras and microphones literally
everywhere. The government can watch you in your home, through your TV
screen, and you're not allowed to turn your TV off ever.
There are a lot of things that you're not allowed to do in this society, and if you
do them, the police might take you away and throw you into a forced labor
camp.

Moreover, you're not allowed to have close friends, you're not allowed to be in
love and you can't date someone.
You're basically supposed to save all your emotional energy for the Party, the
Party being the government.
Then, there are things that you have to do, you have to watch the government
programming on TV, most of its news, some of its exercises.
You have to attend pep rallies including this one called the two minutes hate.
So, it's hard to even have time to think your own thoughts, because they are
constantly filling your head with propaganda.
Besides, they must participate to “the Hate Week” :
Hate Week is a week of events that are designed to make the citizens of
Oceania feel as much hate as possible towards certain enemies, in particular
Eurasia and Eastasia.

As you can see in this picture, a whole theater of people are screaming and
cursing at the giant screen. Then, their anthem comes on and everyone
stands and salutes.
So, Citizens of Oceania hate Eurasia and Eastasia, and the men and women
who make up the superstates, as well as Emmanuel Goldstein. It is celebrated
in late summer. During this time, there are parades, speeches, lectures, and
new videos shown to the public. New slogans are coined, spread and new
songs are put out.

The main character of 1984 is Winston Smith. He is 39, He is an employee of

the Ministry of Truth (Miniver), whose job is to write historical documents in
such a way that they correspond to the current party line, which changes from
one day to the next.
He lives this horrible dreary existence without any friends, or anyone in his life.

At the beginning of the book, he starts writing a diary to talk about how much
he hates life in his society, even though writing a diary is one of those things
you should be killed for doing if you were caught.

The diary is his place for thinking about his society. It's a place where he tries
to imagine if life could possibly be different from the way it is.
There is no way for him to know if things were ever different before, because
the government has changed all the records of the past, and rewritten all the
history books.
At the beginning of the novel, there are two other people who matter to
Winston, and he doesn't even know either of them.

Firstly, there is Julia, an attractive young woman who works in the same
building as him. She's mechanic.
Winston basically hates her, he hates her, because she's pretty and he can't
have her, but he also thinks she's the sort of person who would turn him into
the Thought Police.

So he is afraid of her but also sort of fascinated.

You can notice that Winston and Julia have a uniform consisting of blue
overalls. Therefore everybody is dressed in the same way which means they
are all slaves of this system.

The other person he's interested in is this portly guy named O'Brien, who's a
member of the inner party, that means he's a boss, much higher up than
Winston.
Winston should be afraid of this guy, but he gets the sense that O'Brien is
intelligent, so he has this yearning to be friends with him.

He thinks O'Brien would understand how he feels about life.

The book takes a turn one day, when Julia slips Winston a note that says "i
love you".
This note completely rocks Winston's world. Of course he is interested, he
can't wait to get in touch with her, but it's very hard for them to say two words
to each other in private with all these spies and cameras everywhere.

Finally, they do manage to get out to the country and they start this mad love
affair.
The love affair makes them both very happy.
It's dangerous because they could be killed or sent to labor camps, if they get
caught.
At last, Winston has someone who understands him, and who hates the Party,
as much as he does.
But Winston needs to go that extra step, he's rebelling against the Party
privately, by having the secret affair.
Now, he wants to go to the next level and be an active rebel against the
government.

He gets his chance one day, when O'Brien invites him to his apartment to look
at something work-related.
Winston takes a leap of faith and guesses that O'Brien must be part of the
rebellion because no one invites people over to their home, it just isn't done,
so he and Julia go to O'Brien's house and confess that they want to be rebels,
and O'Brien says yes I'm a rebel too and we all read this book that explains
why things are the way they are.

Winston reads the book, and he's blown away by it.

Unfortunately right after he reads it, the Thought Police bust in and arrest him
and Julia and carry them off to the Ministry of love to torture them.

So, we've learned that O'Brien wasn't a rebel after all, he just wanted to catch
Winston.

In the Ministry of Love, they torture Winston in all sorts of horrible ways : they
break his bones in his teeth, they use electric shock, they starve him and on
and on, he tells them everything he knows, he confesses to everything they
ask him, and he tells them everything he knows about Julia.

After torturing him, over and over, O'Brien finally tells Winston what it is that
the government really wants.

What they want, is to have total power over the minds of people like Winston.
They want people like Winston to say 2+2 equals 5 and really believe it, not
just say it to avoid a beating.

For the government, it's purely an exercise in power, they're not trying to
control his mind for some other purpose, they just want to exercise total power
over people's minds.

They finally do break Winston completely in this place called room 101, where
they do whatever it is you're most afraid of.
They lock his face into a cage and threatened to let these rats eat their way
through his face.

He has a phobia of rats, so he loses it and says "do it to Julia, not me" which
is a complete betrayal of what's most important to him.

The government has taken his last shred of integrity. After he does that, they
let him and Julia go.
The Thought Police don't care about them anymore.

The two of them meet on the outside but they can't love each other anymore.

Winston and Julia are basically broken people after they get out. Winston has
changed to the point that he doesn't even want to think about anything that
might be rebellious, he just sits in a cafe listening to the news and smiling.

The last words of the novel are that he loved Big Brother. So one of the points
the book makes is that a human being can't be broken down completely until
he will believe whatever you tell him even if 2 plus 2 equals five.

(WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH)

II) The use of an all powerful figure: Big Brother

You can see a poster of Big Brother, so George Orwell was inspired by the
political regimes of the XXth century, like the Nazi and Soviet communism.
There are these posters of Big Brother everywhere in Oceania, that say "Big
Brother is watching you" .

Here, in the film, Big Brother presents an enormous face, he is very huge
compared with citizens who look like ants.

Big Brother represents an ideal, because he is not only the portrait of the man:
we can notice that he has a mustache which is an attribute of seduction and
moreover symbolizes authority, strength and virility.

Big Brother is therefore a charismatic figure, reminiscent of Hitler or Stalin,

who forever marks the minds of citizens.

​Big Brother is constantly above you, he looks at you intensely.

Moreover, the noun “brother” has a positive connotation, as it symbolizes a
paternalistic, protective and confidential figure.
So all citizens of Oceania trust in Big Brother and respect him.

la «novlangue», un langage dont le but est l'anéantissement de la pensée, la

destruction de l'individu devenu anonyme, l'asservissement du peuple.
There is no intimacy, they do things mechanically, they can’t think by
themselves,

Ingsoc — English Socialism (the political ideology of the Party)

The V symbolizes the inevitable global victory of Oceania and Ingsoc; the
three white stars symbolize the three slogans of the Party (War is Peace,
Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength)

L’État manipule la perception de la réalité des gens en inversant le sens réel

des mots. il y a donc une inversion des valeurs

((Emmanuel Goldstein est un caractère littéraire créé par George Orwell, ce dans le
roman 1984. Il est l'ennemi principal du parti qui gouverne Océanie. En raison de
son opposition à Big Brother, tous les jours à partir de 11h00, dans tous les bureaux
et les lieux publics sont des manifestations hystériques contre lieu lui: le fameux
"Deux minutes de haine».))

CONCLUSION: as a conclusion, 1984 depicts a totalitarian society which is installed

in an insidious way, through various means of oppression such as the power of
telescreens, the tools of propaganda and the disappearance of sentimental links.

The author really wants to show us that this type of regime can arrive at any time
and under any pretext. At the same time, the book 1984 has a positive message,
which is that it's really hard to get inside someone's head to this extent.
Hence, the government has to go to incredible lengths to brainwash Winston Smith
successfully.