Nineteen Eighty-Four

This is the most frightening book I have ever read. I probably feel this way because I am living through the first four weeks of the Donald Trump presidency in the United States. I see so many parallels in this book with the direction our new government is going that this book almost seems like nonfiction rather than the dystopic fiction it was meant to be. I am terrified that my country is becoming a dictatorship. This book gives an outline of just how such a situation can happen.

The story takes one man, Winston Smith, who longs for freedom of thought and shows how he is slowly deprived of his ability to think for himself because his life is under control of Big Brother.

"How does one man assert power over another, Winston?"
Winston show more thought. "By making him suffer," he said. show less

First things first. This is not a happy book, nor is it a quick jaunt through the meadow of careless reading. "1984" is the sum of two things: George Orwell's immense grasp of worldbuilding, and George Orwell's appreciation for his own intellectual farts.

If you are hoping to read this classic middle-century critique of fictional totalitarianism for a hopeful twinge at the end, you will be sorely disappointed. This is a tale of a hero who is not a hero, a government that is not a government, and a fundamentally unnecessary essay-style recap of the "events as they stand" bridging the gap between two major plot points.

1984 is a story about Winston Smith, an unassuming man nearing the age of forty in a world utterly dominated by a show more governmental system known only as the Party. You are immediately treated to a wealth of worldbuilding around Newspeak—a form of verbal information control masquerading as a language—and Ingsoc—English Socialism, Orwell's invention as inspired by socialist movements in Russia / Germany / China. There's a lot of onboarding, a lot of words thrown at you to be defined at some nebulous later date.

Despite being one of the chief "calling cards" of 1984, there is a profound LACK of Newspeak. We are treated to handful of words, or more accurately, UNwords which reduce the scope of English down to the bare essentials. Terms like BLACKWHITE, DOUBLETHINK, and CRIMESTOP. We are given definitions for these terms, and occasionally direct translations of full Newspeak sentences used in day-to-day life, but the actual prevalence OF Newspeak is cavernous in its absence. Like, if I can be honest, having DOUBLETHINK explained five separate times is immersion-breaking, man.

This is not because the concept of DOUBLETHINK, to believe in a pair of conflicting things at once, is boring. This is because the main character, Winston, reiterates his deductions on the meaning and role of Newspeak words such as DOUBLETHINK within the safety of his own mind three times too many. As a protagonist, Winston is hard to connect with. While I certainly did my best to meet at his level, Orwell makes it profoundly hard to connect with Winston Smith each time he uses the poor man as an authorial mouthpiece for political theory. Much of the meandering socio-economic conversations 1984 has with itself exist outside the characters' collective thought-space, pushing against their natural conclusions as story-telling devices.

What this means is that Winston will launch into an internal diatribe directed at nobody but himself, but he is supposed to be the reader, and the reader is also supposed to be lurking over his shoulder watching things happen, and the reader is also a nonentity whose impact is merely observational. Even the introduction of a firebrand such as Julia, a young woman brought up within the boundaries of the Party and no comprehension of the things outside it, fails to knock Winston out of a perpetual injured-wing death spiral. From the beginning of the book, things are simply happening to Winston and every matter is considered a rote expectation from him.

This is furthered by the ending, in which he is—to summarize down to the barest bones—is brainwashed into a state of passive obedience through tactics of mind control, reality control, stimulus control, and fear implantation. It is implied that Winston has not had a single thought which is his own, yet he is treated like a sort of pariah for behaving exactly as "irrationally" as the Party expected him to. THOUGHTCRIME, the idea that wrongdoing begins in the mind and the physical crime is merely secondary, is touted as the reasoning for Winston's ultimate fate. Yet conversely, the protagonist swears to die hating the figurehead overlord BIG BROTHER, master of the Party, even if only for a moment. Then he suffers for a chapter or so of implied timeskipping, and dies loving BIG BROTHER.

There's a message here, sure, but it is hidden by the heavy-handed theological ninja death shits that Orwell is unleashing in this public bathroom, one stall over from mine. I'm not even going to touch the fact that roughly one-half of a loooong chapter is just a recap of the political theory as established by the preceding 180ish pages, written by an invented heretic against the Party, which spans completely unbroken for paragraph after paragraph after paragraph. Winston doesn't even engage with this stuff. Like me, he admits that it just regurgitates all the things he already thought while being wordier—snootier—about the delivery. A disproportionate amount of this could have been a 3 sentence email!

Orwell subjects the reader to more of this meandering Socialism & Faults In Hierarchical Society 101 by pretending that his protagonist is reading this to his lover, with the intent of explaining it to her younger and less-theologcally-inclined mind. Winston does not, in fact, read this to his lover. We read it, as Emmanuel Goldstein drags on and on and on about the concept of reality control—something WELL established by this point in the story. Joy! I checked to see when this diatribe ended, or when the story actually picked up again, just to give myself the strength to forge on. Five more pages... Four more pages...

Ultimately, I did actually enjoy this book. I liked Syme, Parsons, O'Brien, Julia, and even Winston well enough. The pacing was alright until the last 1.5 chapters, and the worldbuilding was fundamentally insane with all the details that my brain likes to meander on. There were a lot of chillingly cruel scenes, a surprisingly forward-thinking approach to partners with previous sexual experience, and some era-typical nonsense about the effectiveness of torture. I think that THE BOOK should have just been a stand-alone addendum partnered with 1984 as additional reading, and that Orwell should have released at least some semblance of the 11th Newspeak Dictionary. That would have been awesome to build a TTRPG with, and a bit more fun than the seemingly-rushed final send-off of the last chapter.

As a book that treads into commentary on the modern day, it is definitely worth a read. Many elements of CRIMESTOP, the idea of becoming deliberately stupid as to avoid being reasoned with, are used in our political landscape alongside other terms cleverly initiated by Newspeak. No matter the party that you are addressing, the matter of purposeful unknowing and the concept of unmaking words which mean things is a constant threat. It is important to know that the opposite of good is not ungood, but evil, and that UNGOOD merely means the lack of good. 1984 does not make me feel disheartened, however, despite the harrowing finality of its own tale. Rather, it is defined specifically by the role that Winston plays in his torture scenes. Mankind, refusing to be destroyed by the unreality of a broken society. Winston Smith is a character who fails, but we know in our hearts that for a split second before the bullet struck him dead, he thought: DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER. So, march on.

Favorite character? That fat old prole doing her laundry outside the Charrington shop. I hope she's doing well. If anyone has her number, let me know. show less

It is quite amazing that a novel which is so depressing and so negative has not only been read widely but is still consumed by many people today. Why? Nothing positive happens and even more, it paints a very bleak picture of a possible future. The same thing that happened to me must have happened to many people: I couldn't put it down and I can't tell you why. Perhaps George Orwell's mastery of storytelling is even more amazing than his talents for prognostication.

The year is 1984, ironically now in our past, and the entire world is split up into a very few totalitarian states. Never do we learn if in fact these states are ruled by a single dictator and to me that was part of the intrigue because you never quite know how everything show more works. An rather anonymous office worker by the name of Winston, in charge of forging the past, decides to keep a diary to note down all those facts and thoughts he wants to keep. We get the distinct feeling that Winston isn't sure himself if his memories are truly real and truly his own. Every external piece of evidence to a threatening past is constantly erased or changed. We follow him as he searches for true history and true facts and we learn how someone survives in a state where nothing you do is ever private and where paranoia is simply common sense.

The novel 1984 gives us a protagonist who has no hope, and more sadly: no apparent interest in a better future. He is not even sure if he can remember if there was such a thing as a better past. His main talent, and that thing which appears to drive us mostly in going along with his telling, is his desire to write down everything he experiences in the hopes of coming up with some explanation as to how the world ended up in such a mess. He is curious about what is happening to him and his world but he doesn't seem to have any inclination in changing it. We are told he does indeed want revolution but the true inspiration or insight isn't there. Instead he appears to be eternally searching for answers which he hopes will tell him: was I making the past up or was it really different?

I keep coming back to the central question: why do people read this novel with such great interest? It is not escapist literature in any sense and the book lacks every feel-good trope we've come to expect from works of fiction. Yet, with all the gloom and darkness we're fascinated as to what will happen next and we can't stop wondering how the somber world of Big Brother keeps on ticking. show less

This is a very sobering read. A lot of modern dystopian books I've read are YA, and tend to be very hopeful, often coming across as cutesy. Everything usually ends happily because the angsty teenage hero or heroine has saved the day simply by standing up for what they believe in. While those books are fun, they are obviously not a very realistic conception of what actual dystopian tyranny coming to power would look like. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy it from time to time, but it gets cliche all too soon.

This, however, is not hopeful. It isn't cutesy. It is a nightmare and a warning, and a very necessary one at that. What is really scary is the descriptions of "doublethink" and how easily it brainwashes the vast majority of people in show more the book. They've been so molded by the government's propaganda as to be eager to believe anything it tells them. Language is changed as well, in order to limit thought to what is declared orthodox by the party.

It definitely isn't for the faint of heart, but once ready, everyone needs to read and consider this book. show less

Because I graduated from high school in 1984, I’ve always had a connection with both the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-four by George Orwell and the rock album 1984 by Van Halen. Over the years, the former has grown in my estimation and the latter has declined. The album by Van Halen is something you outgrow. The novel by Orwell is something that grows with you.

I put Nineteen Eighty-four on my Classics Club list because I knew my daughter would be reading it in her senior high school literature class, and I wanted the chance to talk to her about it. Besides, it’s been at least twenty years since I read it, and I wanted to experience it again with more life behind me. I’m glad I did.

For those unfamiliar with the novel, it was show more published in 1949, and depicts a bleak world set thirty-five years in the future, hence the title, Nineteen Eighty-four. The protagonist Winston Smith lives in the totalitarian state of Oceania, in the province called Airstrip One (formerly known as Great Britain). Big Brother, the Party leader, watches everyone through two-way TV screens; independent thinking and individualism are snuffed out by Thought Police; and the past is constantly being rewritten to support the Party’s agenda. Winston gets curious about the world before Big Brother, and as he begins to assert his independence he has to watch his every step to evade the Thought Police and avoid being sent to the dreaded Room 101.

The last time I read Nineteen Eighty-four I was teaching Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 to seventh graders, and I was trying to educate myself in classic dystopian literature. At the time I also read Huxley’s Brave New World, and I watched Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil. Honestly, in the years that have passed since, they had all blended together like some kind of dystopian goulash. It was good to read Nineteen Eighty-four on its own.

Of course, there were some things that I remembered clearly from Nineteen Eighty-four: Big Brother, doublethink, the Thought Police. But I had no clear memory of how the novel ended, and I must say that Part III was as harrowing and disturbing as anything literature has to offer.

If you’ve never read it before, Nineteen Eighty-four is one of those books you shouldn’t miss. And if you haven’t read it since high school or college, pick it up and see how much it has to say to you now. show less

1984 is a brilliant and chilling masterpiece that offers a scarily plausible vision of a future ruled by totalitarian control. George Orwell’s portrayal of a society under constant surveillance, where truth is manipulated and individuality is crushed, feels eerily relevant in today’s world. The depth of the novel’s themes—power, freedom, and the dangers of unchecked authority—leaves a lasting impact on readers.

Winston Smith, the protagonist, is a relatable figure whose struggle for truth and autonomy in a repressive society is both heartbreaking and thought-provoking. Orwell’s writing is sharp, and his political commentary is powerful, making 1984 a must-read for anyone interested in the dark side of power. It’s a book show more that stays with you long after you finish reading it. show less

For a while there, if anybody asked me what my favourite book was, I’d say Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. And with good reason – the first time I read this book, I finished it on a moving bus, and spent the rest of the journey silently crying because I was so affected by it. I really do love this book. I don’t love it as much as I used to because I’ve come to realize that having a favourite book is not a part of my personality (because I have too many favourites), but I do love it very much still.
Every single time I read this book, I discover something new about it. The first time, the use of language struck me. The second time, the parts about sex and betrayal stuck to me even more. I’ve read this book three times in show more total, and – maybe it’s because of the political climate the world finds itself in right now, because it’s because I’m older and can appreciate this book better – I think the third time really is the charm, because this book has finally sunk in in its entirety. And I have to say that even if I read it again before I shuffle off this mortal coil, I’m sure I’ll love it just as much again.
I don’t think this book really needs an explanation or an introduction – we’ve all heard of it and the cultural impact this book has had is downright incredible. Everybody knows about Big Brother, even if it’s because of an insipid reality TV show that took its name from the book. I don’t need to go into what this book is about, but I do want to talk about what I love about this book.
First of all, I love the use of language in it. Orwell did wonderful things with the language by moulding it to a society that had evolved in an alternate reality where there were three continents that were constantly at war with each other. London, or rather Airstrip One as it’s called in this timeline, is the headquarters of the new government, and the language that it promotes is one of a nature that is, in itself, contradictory, but expects the members of the Party to be able to accept the reality it dishes out without question. If Big Brother says that two plus two is five, then you better accept that two plus two is five now, because that’s the truth and anything you heard before is a downright figment of your imagination and a lie.
Which brings me to the next thing that I love about the book, which is the way that the truth is bent to fit what the political agenda requires at the time. People are expected to believe whatever is told of them, expected to conform and simply let their minds be welded to what the current truth is. And the truth can be difficult to accept, because at one minute you’re told that the enemy is one country, and the next it’s the other country, and we were never at war with our allies, they’re the good ones! We’ve always been at war with those scoundrels and were never allies with them, and if you say so you’re going to be punished! The members of the Party, especially the main character Winston, literally go through historical sources like newspapers and books and video reels and edit them to make sure that anything that the Party says is the truth now appears to have been the truth for years, even when it wasn’t.
Thirdly, I love Winston. Winston is such a great character because he is just a man trying to survive and knowing that this isn’t the world that he should be living in. Unfortunately, he’s also gullible, and lands himself into a world of trouble. But Winston is a character who I have nothing but love for because his characterization, his interest in making the world right, and his need to do something about his situation, is all so well written. Even if he doesn’t end up having the happiest of endings, Winston is a placeholder for every freedom fighter, ever rebel, who died for their cause or were broken into submission. It happens more often than we can think, and these people aren’t cowardly – they just dealt with too much and it eventually got to them.
I think my biggest criticism of this book is that one particular chapter, which is the chapter about the Brotherhood and how it’s organized, is just too damn long. This chapter literally puts me to sleep every time. But other than that, this book is a masterpiece for a reason, and will remain a classic for along time.
All in all, this book deserves a 4/5. show less