George Orwell's 1984: A Tale of Control and Rebellion

1. 1984 George Orwell’s

2. *//bookstats • Written in 1949 in England, first published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. the same year. • Set in 1984, London (‘Airstrip One’ in the book’s alternate universe), England • 3rd person omniscient narrator that never enters the action

3. George Orwell • Eric Arthur Blair was born in India, 1903 • Family moved to England in 1907 • Worked in the police force in Burma for several years and lived in Paris for two years before returning to London. • Was wounded fighting for the republicans in Spain in 1986. • Served in the home guard during WW2, working for the BBC. • Regularly contributed political and literary commentary in several papers. • Gained fame from Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). • Died in London January 1950. 1903-1950

4. *//plotsynopsis Winston Smith

5. *//theme CONTROL • ”History is written by the victors” • “Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past” • “…if the facts say otherwise then the facts must be altered.” • “History has stopped. Nothing exists except in an endless present in which the Party is always right.” • “…process of continuous alteration.” • ” The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.”

6. *//theme CONTROL • ” Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.” • “Keeping the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world was achieved by continuous warfare.” • “The discontents produced by his bare, unsatisfying life are deliberately turned outwards and dissipated by such devices as the Two Minutes Hate…” • ”... belief that BIG BROTHER is omnipotent and that the Party is infallible.” • ” …to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out.” • “Power is not a means, it is an end.”

7. *//CONTROL offreedom&technology • Facecrime/thoughtcrime • ”... no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.” • ”... everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers” • “If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them.”

8. *//CONTROL of language • "The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought.“ • “…make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.” • ”... eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained.” • “…seemed not merely to have lost the power of expressing himself…”

9. *//self - CONTROL • “…anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous.” • “…just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it.” • “…possible that his features had not been perfectly under control. It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away.”