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1984

By: Norton Morgen

1984 is a political parable. While Brave New World describes a future of everyone getting exactly what they want, George Orwell takes this in the opposite direction with a description of how the world most likely will be: mindless, loveless, unfeeling followers of nothing. The first paragraph of the story already foreshadows of what is to come with a description of Victory Mansions, the home of Winston Smith, the protagonist of this story. It tells of the "swirl of gritty dust… The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats." Even the names of places are depressing. He lives in the province of Airstrip One, the city of London, and in the country of Oceania. The other two countries are Eastasia and Eurasia. Big Brother, a fictional or real person—no one really knows—is the leader of this miserable system of Ingsoc—English Socialism, that is. No one is allowed to hold ideas different from those of the official propaganda outlet: Minitruth. To enforce these laws, Big Brother uses many means, the first and foremost of these being the Thought Police, a corps of law officers who monitor the populace through undercover agents, infinite amounts of surveillance cameras and hidden microphones, and a two-way television screen that can be turned down, but never off. A new language is also being introduced to retard thought: Newspeak. This new English dialect uses shortened and compacted forms of modern day words that subconsciously facilitate the assimilation of misinformation through the omission of instances such as "science", "freedom", and "religion." This, obviously, is a very bleak existence, and Winston, the oddball out, realizes it. Two characters besides Winston are brought into the plot. O'Brian is an extremely famous party member who Winston suspects is really a traitor member of the underground "The Brotherhood" led by the ex-Party member Goldstein. The other is a young girl, Julia, who he hates for her commitment to an Anti-sex league,...