Nineteen Eighty-Four
Based on Wikipedia: Nineteen Eighty-Four
The Book That Gave Us a Word for Our Fears
When we call something "Orwellian," everyone knows what we mean. We're describing surveillance that feels too invasive, propaganda that twists language, or authorities who seem to punish people for their thoughts rather than their actions. But where did this word come from? It emerged from a single novel, published in 1949, written by a dying man who wanted to warn us about where politics could lead.
George Orwell finished Nineteen Eighty-Four while suffering from tuberculosis on a remote Scottish island. He would die less than a year after its publication. The book became his final testament—a fever dream of a future that hasn't quite arrived but never seems safely distant either.
A World Divided Into Three
The novel imagines Earth split among three totalitarian superstates locked in perpetual war. Oceania controls the Americas, Britain, and Australasia. Eurasia spans continental Europe and Russia. Eastasia encompasses China, Japan, and surrounding territories.
These empires don't fight to win. They fight because war itself serves a purpose: it consumes surplus production and keeps populations fearful enough to accept oppression. The wars shuffle endlessly. Oceania battles Eurasia, then suddenly Eastasia becomes the enemy, and the records are altered to suggest it was always this way.
Britain, renamed "Airstrip One," has become merely a province of Oceania. London remains, but transformed into a gray, decaying city where posters of a mustached face watch from every wall. The caption reads: "Big Brother Is Watching You."
Meet Winston Smith
Our protagonist is profoundly ordinary. Winston Smith is thirty-nine years old, thin, varicose-veined, and employed at the Ministry of Truth. His job involves altering historical records.
When the government changes its economic predictions, Winston revises old newspaper articles to match the new figures. When a person falls out of favor, Winston helps erase every trace of their existence—photographs doctored, articles rewritten, the person transformed into what the Party calls an "unperson." This concept of damnatio memoriae, the condemnation of memory, dates back to ancient Rome, where disgraced emperors had their names chiseled off monuments. The Party has industrialized this erasure.
Winston drops the original documents down tubes called "memory holes." They lead to an enormous furnace. History burns daily.
He knows this is wrong. That awareness makes him dangerous.
The Architecture of Oppression
Orwell constructed his fictional government with terrifying precision. The state operates through four ministries, each named for the opposite of what it does.
The Ministry of Truth produces lies. The Ministry of Peace wages war. The Ministry of Plenty manages rationing and scarcity. The Ministry of Love conducts torture and maintains order through fear.
This inversion of language extends throughout society. The ruling ideology is called "Ingsoc," a compressed form of "English Socialism," though it bears no resemblance to socialism as traditionally understood. The Party's three slogans express its philosophy:
War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.
These aren't mere propaganda. The Party genuinely believes—or demands belief in—the possibility that contradictory things can both be true simultaneously. This mental discipline is called "doublethink." A loyal Party member must hold two contradictory beliefs and accept both completely. They must know they are altering reality while believing the altered version is genuine.
The Thought Police and Their Tools
Surveillance in Oceania operates through devices called telescreens. Imagine a television that watches you back. Every home and workplace contains one. They cannot be turned off. They broadcast propaganda constantly while simultaneously recording everything in their range—every sound, every facial expression.
The Thought Police monitor these feeds, watching for signs of unorthodoxy. But they cannot watch everyone constantly. Their real power lies in uncertainty. You never know when you're being observed, so you must behave as though you're always being observed. The surveillance becomes internal. You police yourself.
Even your face can betray you. The Party has identified something called "facecrime"—wearing an improper expression that suggests doubt or displeasure. A furrowed brow during a propaganda announcement might attract attention. People learn to control their features, to project enthusiasm and hatred on command.
Children are encouraged to inform on their parents. The novel features a neighbor's children who eventually report their father for murmuring against Big Brother in his sleep.
Newspeak: Shrinking the Mind by Shrinking Language
The Party's most ambitious project involves language itself. Linguists at the Ministry of Truth are developing Newspeak, a simplified version of English designed to make unorthodox thought literally impossible.
The principle is straightforward: if you eliminate the words for a concept, people eventually lose the ability to think it. Remove "freedom" from the language, and future generations won't understand what they're missing. Reduce vocabulary to the minimum necessary for obedience and work, and rebellion becomes not just dangerous but unimaginable.
Newspeak combines words into compressed forms. "Goodthink" means orthodoxy. "Crimethink" covers all forbidden ideas. "Doubleplusgood" replaces "excellent" or "wonderful." The language grows smaller each year as new editions of the Newspeak dictionary eliminate more words.
This wasn't pure invention on Orwell's part. He had spent years analyzing the relationship between language and thought, particularly how political language could corrupt thinking. In his essay "Politics and the English Language," published three years before the novel, he argued that vague or euphemistic language enables atrocities by hiding their nature. Newspeak represents this insight taken to its logical extreme.
The Forbidden Diary
Winston's rebellion begins small. He purchases a blank book—an antique, as such things are no longer manufactured—and begins writing in it. This simple act is revolutionary. The Party controls the present and the past. Winston's private thoughts, recorded on paper, represent an attempt to create an unauthorized record of reality.
He hides the diary in his apartment's one blind spot, an alcove that the telescreen cannot quite observe. He writes his doubts, his memories, his hatred of Big Brother. He knows this will eventually lead to his destruction, but he cannot stop himself.
The act of writing becomes an act of sanity. By recording his perceptions, Winston tries to hold onto what he knows to be true even as the Party insists otherwise.
Julia: Rebellion of the Body
Julia appears first as a threat. Winston notices her watching him and assumes she's an informer. She wears the sash of the Junior Anti-Sex League, an organization promoting chastity and the elimination of pleasure from reproduction. The Party wants sex to feel like a duty, nothing more.
Then Julia passes Winston a note. It says: "I love you."
They begin a covert affair, meeting in the countryside and later in a rented room above an antiques shop. Julia's rebellion is primarily physical rather than intellectual. She isn't interested in overthrowing the system or understanding its philosophical foundations. She simply wants to live—to enjoy wine, cosmetics, real coffee, and physical pleasure.
This contrast illuminates different modes of resistance. Winston rebels with his mind, keeping a diary, seeking forbidden knowledge, wanting to understand. Julia rebels with her body, seeking forbidden pleasures, enjoying what she can steal from the system. Both approaches are dangerous. Both are ultimately crushed.
The Brotherhood: Real or Imaginary?
Rumors persist of an underground resistance called the Brotherhood, led by Emmanuel Goldstein. Once a leading figure in the Party, Goldstein allegedly turned against it and now leads efforts to overthrow Big Brother. His face appears during the daily Two Minutes Hate, a mandatory ritual where citizens scream at images of Goldstein and enemy soldiers, working themselves into frenzy.
Winston becomes convinced that O'Brien, a member of the elite Inner Party, secretly belongs to the Brotherhood. O'Brien is intelligent, subtle, and seems to communicate wordlessly with Winston—a shared glance suggesting shared doubt.
Eventually O'Brien makes contact. He gives Winston a copy of Goldstein's book, "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism," which explains how the Party maintains power. The book describes the nature of perpetual war, the purpose of controlling the past, the role of ignorance in maintaining hierarchy.
Winston reads it as revelation. Finally, someone has articulated what he dimly understood. The system makes sense, terrible sense.
But he never finishes the book. Before he can read the crucial chapter explaining why the Party wants power, the trap springs shut.
The Trap
Mr. Charrington, the kindly antique dealer who rented Winston and Julia their love nest, is revealed as an officer of the Thought Police. The room contained a hidden telescreen. Every whispered conversation, every intimate moment, was recorded.
Armed men arrest the lovers. They are separated, taken to the Ministry of Love.
And O'Brien? He was never a member of the Brotherhood. He was Thought Police from the beginning. The book attributed to Goldstein was written by the Party itself. The entire resistance might be a Party operation, a honeypot to catch thoughtcriminals who would never have acted without the illusion of organized opposition.
The reader never learns whether the Brotherhood exists at all. Perhaps there is no resistance. Perhaps the Party has so thoroughly dominated reality that opposition itself is their creation, manufactured to identify and destroy anyone capable of independent thought.
Room 101
The Ministry of Love's interrogation chambers are designed not merely to extract confessions but to genuinely transform belief. The Party isn't satisfied with obedience. It demands love.
O'Brien oversees Winston's torture personally. He explains the Party's philosophy with scholarly precision while administering electric shocks. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. Not power as a means to improve society or achieve ideological goals, but power as an end in itself. The pleasure of domination. The boot stamping on a human face forever.
Winston resists longer than expected. He confesses to crimes, real and imaginary. He accepts that the Party controls reality, that if the Party says two plus two equals five, then it equals five. But deep within himself, he maintains one secret rebellion: his love for Julia. He has not betrayed her in his heart.
So they take him to Room 101.
Room 101 contains each prisoner's worst fear. For Winston, it is rats. They threaten to strap a cage of starving rats to his face. At the moment of pure terror, Winston screams what the Party wants to hear: "Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia!"
He has betrayed her.
Victory Over Himself
The novel's final pages show Winston months after his release. He sits in a café, drinking gin, watching the telescreen announce military victories. His mind is blank, peaceful. He has stopped fighting.
He encounters Julia once. They speak briefly, without warmth. Both acknowledge betraying the other. Whatever existed between them is gone. They part as strangers.
Winston traces "2 + 2 = 5" in the dust on his table. He no longer struggles against it. The telescreen announces a massive victory over Eurasian forces. Winston weeps with joy. He loves Big Brother.
The Party has won completely. Winston has been not merely defeated but transformed. He genuinely believes, genuinely loves. There is nothing left of the man who kept a secret diary.
What Orwell Was Really Saying
Orwell was a democratic socialist who had fought alongside anarchists and communists in the Spanish Civil War. He watched Stalin's Soviet Union with horror as it betrayed leftist principles, executed former allies, and rewrote history to match current policy. He saw how language could be corrupted to justify atrocities—how "liquidation" and "re-education" masked murder and torture.
But Nineteen Eighty-Four isn't simply about Soviet communism. Orwell worried about trends in his own country and across the Western world: the growth of bureaucracy, the increasing power of propaganda, the way modern technology enabled surveillance previously impossible, the tendency of all governments to expand their control.
He described the book as a warning, not a prophecy. In a letter explaining his intentions, he wrote that he believed something resembling his fictional state could arrive—not that it inevitably would. The novel was meant to suggest what could happen if trends he observed continued unchecked.
The year 1984 came and went without Oceania materializing. But the book's concerns haven't dated. Every generation finds new reasons to read it. During the Cold War, it spoke to fears of Soviet expansion. After the September 11 attacks, it resonated with concerns about surveillance and security states. In the age of social media and information warfare, its analysis of propaganda and controlled information feels newly urgent.
The Mysterious Appendix
Careful readers notice something strange about the novel's structure. Following the main narrative, there's an appendix titled "The Principles of Newspeak." It's written as an academic analysis—and it uses past tense.
The appendix describes Newspeak as something that existed, that was expected to supersede "Oldspeak" around 2050, using language suggesting all this has already happened and been left behind. Some scholars interpret this as evidence that the Party eventually fell, that Newspeak never fully replaced English, that someone survived to write about it from the perspective of a freer future.
Orwell never clarified this ambiguity. He died before he could answer questions about it. The appendix might represent hope hidden in the novel's architecture—a suggestion that totalitarianism, however complete it seems, eventually fails. Or it might simply be a stylistic choice, an ironic scholarly tone adopted for effect.
This uncertainty feels appropriate for a book so concerned with the manipulation of truth. Even the author's intent remains partially obscured.
Living in Our Language
Nineteen Eighty-Four contributed more phrases to common English than perhaps any other twentieth-century novel. "Big Brother" now refers to any invasive surveillance, particularly television programs that watch contestants constantly. "Thoughtcrime" describes the punishment of ideas rather than actions. "Doublethink" captures the mental gymnastics required to maintain contradictory beliefs. "Memory hole" describes the deliberate erasure of inconvenient history. "Unperson" describes those written out of existence.
And "Orwellian" itself has become indispensable. We reach for it when language obscures rather than clarifies, when authorities claim to protect us by controlling us, when reality seems to bend under institutional pressure.
The novel has been adapted into films, plays, operas, and radio dramas. The most famous film version appeared, fittingly, in 1984, starring John Hurt as Winston and Richard Burton, in his final role, as O'Brien. Television formats literally named "Big Brother" broadcast worldwide, their participants volunteering for the surveillance that Winston endured by force.
Orwell's nightmare became our vocabulary. We use his words to identify and resist the tendencies he warned us about. Whether that means his warning succeeded or failed remains, perhaps appropriately, an open question.
The Question That Haunts
Winston's torture includes a question he can never answer: Why does the Party want power? O'Brien eventually explains that power is its own purpose. There is no goal beyond domination itself. The Party doesn't seek power to build a better world. The suffering is the point.
This explanation horrified Orwell's first readers, and it continues to disturb. We want to believe that evil has reasons, that oppression serves some misguided purpose we might correct through argument or reform. O'Brien offers no such comfort. Some systems may simply pursue control for its own sake, requiring no justification beyond the pleasure of domination.
Whether this represents psychological realism or philosophical pessimism, whether Orwell believed it or merely wanted us to consider it, the question remains after you finish the book. In a world that can produce Oceania, what chance does individual conscience have? Is resistance meaningful if it can be so completely crushed?
Winston's diary entry, written before his capture, contains his only answer: "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows."
The Party took even that freedom from him. But the novel preserves it. Somewhere, in every copy still read, Winston's words survive. The memory hole didn't get everything.