"Nineteen-Eighty-Four" By George Orwell - POV: "You got executed for your shoes..."

 

Fun fact: The only reason Noah read this book was because his little sister wouldn’t stop nagging him to finish a reading challenge so that she could take his Jarlings coupons.

Context

George Orwell wrote “Nineteen-Eighty-Four” directly after World War Two, because apparently he was fascinated by the large totalitarian regimes at the time, and aspired to capture their fear-filled, controlling essence within a novel, very fun.

The premise of this novel is pretty simple:

• You are being watched at all times

Those who say anything, do anything, eat anything, wear anything, go anywhere, or talk to anyone that is not aligned with the mission of The Party disappear in the dead of night, “vaporized” they call it. Even as far as if you accidentally sleep-talk something that could be seen as treason, if you look at someone for too long, if you don’t scream loud enough during the so-called “hate-week”, if you wear "weird" shoes. Commit any of these “thought-crimes” and you are liable to be vaporized.

Enter Winston Smith. Winston works for the Ministry of Truth and his job is—get this—to burn any forms of media that are not aligned with The Party’s goals and make up a new version that aligns with The Party’s narrative, even if the original version was published by The Party themselves.

And The Party’s Narrative is simple:

• The Party is always right (even if they’re not...)

And their motto is easy to remember:

• War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery

—

Review

(Spoilers) So the basic plot of the story is Winston is a member of The Party, he starts to realize that he hates The Party, and he’s going to join a scheme to destroy The Party, by ANY MEANS NECESSARY.

One of the main points that I found interesting was the manipulation of language. In the book The Party launched an initiative to create a new language system to replace the old one, called "Newspeak." The goal of newspeak was seemingly to remove as many words from speech as possible. "Good" is "good", but "great" is "double good", "bad" is "ungood." You don't say murder, you say "unperson."

They even have a word for yapping, guess what it is...

"Duckspeak"

This book is just a really great argument/warning to all of the totalitarian societies that were being created in those times. ‘Cause I mean… this is the result of full control over the populace and the abduction of individual freedoms, and I just thought it was really well done.

(Warning) I legit had to skip over full chapters of this book because in a few areas it gets a little weird and just look up a few book summaries to understand what I’m saying.

- Noah