Nikki Moustaki - CliffsNotes on Orwell’s 1984

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In George Orwells 1984, Winston Smith wrestles with oppression in Oceania, a place where the Party scrutinizes human actions with ever-watchful Big Brother. Defying a ban on individuality, Winston dares to express his thoughts in a diary and pursues a relationship with Julia. These criminal deeds bring Winston into the eye of the opposition, who then must reform the nonconformist. George Orwells 1984 introduced the watchwords for life without freedom: BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.

Written by: George Orwell

Type of Work: novel

Genres: utopian literature; social criticism

First Published: 1949

Setting: Oceania

Main Characters: Winston Smith; Julia; OBrien; Big Brother/Emmanuel Goldstein

Major Thematic Topics: mutability of the past; the existence of fact through memory; memory; history; language; oppression of writers

Motifs: repressed sexuality; dreams

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

The three most important aspects of 1984:

• The setting of 1984 is a dystopia: an imagined world that is far worse than our own, as opposed to a utopia, which is an ideal place or state. Other dystopian novels include Aldous Huxleys Brave New World, Ray Bradburys Fahrenheit 451, and Orwells own Animal Farm.

• When George Orwell wrote 1984, the year that gives the book its title was still almost 40 years in the future. Some of the things Orwell imagined that would come to pass were the telescreen, a TV that observes those who are watching it, and a world consisting of three megastates rather than hundreds of countries. In the novel, the country of Eastasia apparently consists of China and its satellite nations; Eurasia is the Soviet Union; and Oceania comprises the United States, the United Kingdom, and their allies.

• Another of Orwells creations for 1984 is Newspeak, a form of English that the books totalitarian government utilizes to discourage free thinking. Orwell believed that, without a word or words to express an idea, the idea itself was impossible to conceive and retain. Thus Newspeak has eliminated the word bad, replacing it with the less-harsh ungood. The authors point was that government can control us through the words.

George Orwell is the pen name of Arthur Blair, born in 1903 in Motihari, Bengal, India, during the time of the British colonial rule. Young Orwell was brought to England by his mother and educated in Henley and Sussex at schools.

Early Years

The Orwell family was not wealthy, and, in reading Orwells personal essays about his childhood, readers can easily see that his formative years were less than satisfying. However, the young Orwell had a gift for writing, which he recognized at the age of just five or six. Orwells first published work, the poem Awake Young Men of England, was printed in the Henley and South Oxfordshire Standard when he was eleven years old.

Orwell attended Eton College. Because literature was not an accepted subject for boys at the time, Orwell studied the master writers and began to develop his own writing style. At Eton, he came into contact with liberalist and socialist ideals, and it was here that his initial political views were formed.

Adult Years

Orwell moved to Burma in 1922, where he served as an Assistant Superintendent of Police for five years before he resigned because of his growing dislike for British Imperialism. In 1928, Orwell moved to Paris and began a series of low paying jobs. In 1929, he moved to London, again living in what he termed fairly severe poverty. These experiences provided the material for his first novel, Down and Out in Paris and London, which he placed with a publisher in 1933.

About this time, while Orwell was teaching in a small private school in Middlesex, he came down with his first bout of pneumonia due to tuberculosis, a condition that would plague him throughout his life and require hospitalization again in 1938, 1947, and 1950.

In 1933, Orwell gave up teaching and spent almost a year in Southwold writing his next book, Burmese Days. During this time, he worked part time in a bookshop, where he met his future wife, Eileen OShaughnessy. He and Eileen were he married in 1936, shortly before he moved to Spain to write newspaper articles about the Spanish Civil War.

In Spain, Orwell found what he had been searching fora true socialist state. He joined the struggle against the Fascist party but had to flee when the group with which he was associated was falsely accused of secretly helping the Fascists.

By 1939, Orwell had returned to England. In 1941, he took a position with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) as the person in charge of broadcasting to India and Southeast Asia. Orwell disliked this job immensely, being, as he was, in charge of disseminating propaganda to these British coloniesan act that went against both his nature and his political philosophy. In 1943, Orwell took a job more to his liking, as the literary editor of The Tribune.

Shortly after Orwell and Eileen adopted a son in 1944, Orwell became a war correspondent for the Observer in Paris and Cologne, Germany. Tragically, Eileen died in the beginning of that year, just before the publication of one of his most important novels, Animal Farm. Despite the loss of his wife and his own battle with poor health, Orwell continued his writing and completed the revision of 1984 in 1948. It was published early the next year with great success.

Orwell remarried in 1949 to Sonia Brownell, only a year before his own death of tuberculosis. He is buried in the churchyard of All Saints, Sutton Courtenay, Berkshire.