argumentative thesis of 1984

1984 Themes – Meaning and Main Ideas

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Main Theme of 1984 – Introduction

The novel takes place in a futuristic and dystopian version of London, UK. The citizens of this nation, Oceania, are ruled by Big Brother and The Party. They are under constant surveillance and the information that they receive is controlled by The Party before it reaches any citizens. The novel was written in 1949 but the exact year of the story is unknown. Even the main character, Winston, is unsure of the exact date anymore because The Party keeps its citizens uninformed and he lost track. We know that it is “the future” because of all of the technology and the title leads us to guess it may be in the year 1984, which shows Orwell’s intentional message that a government takeover with advanced technologies could be more imminent than anyone would want to believe.

There are several very strong themes in this short novel, and a couple of motifs that back those themes up and support the overall message Orwell intended to create. Doublethink is a motif in the novel—it occurs when The Party suddenly changes the information that they’ve been giving the citizens. The citizens agree to just go along with the changes and are able to believe whatever they need too, even if it is all directly contradictory. For example, when a speech is being given, the orator randomly changes which nation he refers to as their enemy. The people believe it right away and feel bad that they made the wrong signs to bring to the speech. Another motif is the decay of the city as a result of the violent revolution that occurred some years prior. The city is in a state of decay, but The Party ignores this, mismanaging a city of the size completely. This leaves the proles (lower class citizens) largely unmonitored, which is an oversight on the part of the government because it poses the potential for revolution.

Main Themes in 1984

Here’s a list of major themes in 1984.

• Totalitarianism
• State control of expression
• Control over information

Individual Identity

The inherent destruction in totalitarianism.

Psychological Manipulation Through Technology

State Control Over Expression

Since The Party is always watching, they also control how citizens use their bodies. They cannot have sex outside of procreation, and even a misgiving facial twitch could lead to an arrest and subsequent torture to break that individual into submission. The Party also requires daily exercises from all citizens, and they will be yelled at through their telescreens if they do not exercise hard enough. When people turn to anti-Party activities, they will be tortured by officials until they relent and show full brainwashed support for The Party.

Control Over Information

The Party has decided to control all information, being very careful what kinds of history the citizens are able to access. They develop Newspeak, which is a modified form of English that eliminates any words that could threaten The Party’s control over its people. People’s memories become fuzzy, they lose track of the year, and eventually they just comply because they don’t know any better.

The novel centers on Winston’s various acts of resistance that start small but then become bolder and bolder until he is finally arrested and tortured for it. He dreams of revolution, imagining that the proles will be the key to overthrowing The Party and giving future generations freedom. He finds inspiration in items that remind him of the past, which he can barely remember. He starts up a love affair with the beautiful Julia. All of these things lead Winston to seek out an anti-Party movement. Ultimately, though, he is arrested by double agents and this desire to resist is tortured out of him. The Party does not treat any opposition lightly, making sure to use every method they can possibly find to brainwash and remove desire for resistance in their citizens.

Doublethink Is Stronger Than Orwell Imagined

What 1984 means today

No novel of the past century has had more influence than George Orwell’s 1984 . The title, the adjectival form of the author’s last name, the vocabulary of the all-powerful Party that rules the superstate Oceania with the ideology of Ingsoc— doublethink , memory hole , unperson , thoughtcrime , Newspeak , Thought Police , Room 101 , Big Brother —they’ve all entered the English language as instantly recognizable signs of a nightmare future. It’s almost impossible to talk about propaganda, surveillance, authoritarian politics, or perversions of truth without dropping a reference to 1984. Throughout the Cold War, the novel found avid underground readers behind the Iron Curtain who wondered, How did he know?

It was also assigned reading for several generations of American high-school students. I first encountered 1984 in 10th-grade English class. Orwell’s novel was paired with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World , whose hedonistic and pharmaceutical dystopia seemed more relevant to a California teenager in the 1970s than did the bleak sadism of Oceania. I was too young and historically ignorant to understand where 1984 came from and exactly what it was warning against. Neither the book nor its author stuck with me. In my 20s, I discovered Orwell’s essays and nonfiction books and reread them so many times that my copies started to disintegrate, but I didn’t go back to 1984 . Since high school, I’d lived through another decade of the 20th century, including the calendar year of the title, and I assumed I already “knew” the book. It was too familiar to revisit.

Read: Teaching ‘1984’ in 2016

So when I recently read the novel again, I wasn’t prepared for its power. You have to clear away what you think you know, all the terminology and iconography and cultural spin-offs, to grasp the original genius and lasting greatness of 1984 . It is both a profound political essay and a shocking, heartbreaking work of art. And in the Trump era , it’s a best seller .

The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 , by the British music critic Dorian Lynskey, makes a rich and compelling case for the novel as the summation of Orwell’s entire body of work and a master key to understanding the modern world. The book was published in 1949, when Orwell was dying of tuberculosis , but Lynskey dates its biographical sources back more than a decade to Orwell’s months in Spain as a volunteer on the republican side of the country’s civil war. His introduction to totalitarianism came in Barcelona, when agents of the Soviet Union created an elaborate lie to discredit Trotskyists in the Spanish government as fascist spies.

Left-wing journalists readily accepted the fabrication, useful as it was to the cause of communism. Orwell didn’t, exposing the lie with eyewitness testimony in journalism that preceded his classic book Homage to Catalonia —and that made him a heretic on the left. He was stoical about the boredom and discomforts of trench warfare—he was shot in the neck and barely escaped Spain with his life—but he took the erasure of truth hard. It threatened his sense of what makes us sane, and life worth living. “History stopped in 1936,” he later told his friend Arthur Koestler, who knew exactly what Orwell meant. After Spain, just about everything he wrote and read led to the creation of his final masterpiece. “History stopped,” Lynskey writes, “and Nineteen Eighty-Four began.”

The biographical story of 1984 —the dying man’s race against time to finish his novel in a remote cottage on the Isle of Jura , off Scotland—will be familiar to many Orwell readers. One of Lynskey’s contributions is to destroy the notion that its terrifying vision can be attributed to, and in some way disregarded as, the death wish of a tuberculosis patient. In fact, terminal illness roused in Orwell a rage to live—he got remarried on his deathbed—just as the novel’s pessimism is relieved, until its last pages, by Winston Smith’s attachment to nature, antique objects, the smell of coffee, the sound of a proletarian woman singing, and above all his lover, Julia. 1984 is crushingly grim, but its clarity and rigor are stimulants to consciousness and resistance. According to Lynskey, “Nothing in Orwell’s life and work supports a diagnosis of despair.”

Lynskey traces the literary genesis of 1984 to the utopian fictions of the optimistic 19th century—Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888); the sci-fi novels of H. G. Wells, which Orwell read as a boy—and their dystopian successors in the 20th, including the Russian Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924) and Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). The most interesting pages in The Ministry of Truth are Lynskey’s account of the novel’s afterlife. The struggle to claim 1984 began immediately upon publication, with a battle over its political meaning. Conservative American reviewers concluded that Orwell’s main target wasn’t just the Soviet Union but the left generally. Orwell, fading fast, waded in with a statement explaining that the novel was not an attack on any particular government but a satire of the totalitarian tendencies in Western society and intellectuals: “The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: Don’t let it happen. It depends on you .” But every work of art escapes the artist’s control—the more popular and complex, the greater the misunderstandings.

Lynskey’s account of the reach of 1984 is revelatory. The novel has inspired movies, television shows, plays, a ballet, an opera, a David Bowie album , imitations, parodies, sequels, rebuttals, Lee Harvey Oswald, the Black Panther Party, and the John Birch Society. It has acquired something of the smothering ubiquity of Big Brother himself: 1984 is watching you. With the arrival of the year 1984, the cultural appropriations rose to a deafening level. That January an ad for the Apple Macintosh was watched by 96 million people during the Super Bowl and became a marketing legend. The Mac, represented by a female athlete, hurls a sledgehammer at a giant telescreen and explodes the shouting face of a man—oppressive technology—to the astonishment of a crowd of gray zombies. The message: “You’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’ ”

The argument recurs every decade or so: Orwell got it wrong. Things haven’t turned out that bad. The Soviet Union is history. Technology is liberating. But Orwell never intended his novel to be a prediction, only a warning. And it’s as a warning that 1984 keeps finding new relevance. The week of Donald Trump’s inauguration, when the president’s adviser Kellyanne Conway justified his false crowd estimate by using the phrase alternative facts , the novel returned to the best-seller lists. A theatrical adaptation was rushed to Broadway. The vocabulary of Newspeak went viral. An authoritarian president who stood the term fake news on its head, who once said, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,” has given 1984 a whole new life.

What does the novel mean for us? Not Room 101 in the Ministry of Love, where Winston is interrogated and tortured until he loses everything he holds dear. We don’t live under anything like a totalitarian system. “By definition, a country in which you are free to read Nineteen Eighty-Four is not the country described in Nineteen Eighty-Four ,” Lynskey acknowledges. Instead, we pass our days under the nonstop surveillance of a telescreen that we bought at the Apple Store, carry with us everywhere, and tell everything to, without any coercion by the state. The Ministry of Truth is Facebook, Google, and cable news. We have met Big Brother and he is us.

Trump’s election brought a rush of cautionary books with titles like On Tyranny , Fascism: A Warning , and How Fascism Works . My local bookstore set up a totalitarian-themed table and placed the new books alongside 1984 . They pointed back to the 20th century—if it happened in Germany, it could happen here—and warned readers how easily democracies collapse. They were alarm bells against complacency and fatalism—“ the politics of inevitability ,” in the words of the historian Timothy Snyder, “a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done.” The warnings were justified, but their emphasis on the mechanisms of earlier dictatorships drew attention away from the heart of the malignancy—not the state, but the individual. The crucial issue was not that Trump might abolish democracy but that Americans had put him in a position to try. Unfreedom today is voluntary. It comes from the bottom up.

We are living with a new kind of regime that didn’t exist in Orwell’s time. It combines hard nationalism—the diversion of frustration and cynicism into xenophobia and hatred—with soft distraction and confusion: a blend of Orwell and Huxley, cruelty and entertainment. The state of mind that the Party enforces through terror in 1984 , where truth becomes so unstable that it ceases to exist, we now induce in ourselves. Totalitarian propaganda unifies control over all information, until reality is what the Party says it is—the goal of Newspeak is to impoverish language so that politically incorrect thoughts are no longer possible. Today the problem is too much information from too many sources, with a resulting plague of fragmentation and division—not excessive authority but its disappearance, which leaves ordinary people to work out the facts for themselves, at the mercy of their own prejudices and delusions.

During the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, propagandists at a Russian troll farm used social media to disseminate a meme: “ ‘The People Will Believe What the Media Tells Them They Believe.’  — George Orwell.” But Orwell never said this. The moral authority of his name was stolen and turned into a lie toward that most Orwellian end: the destruction of belief in truth. The Russians needed partners in this effort and found them by the millions, especially among America’s non-elites. In 1984 , working-class people are called “proles,” and Winston believes they’re the only hope for the future. As Lynskey points out, Orwell didn’t foresee “that the common man and woman would embrace doublethink as enthusiastically as the intellectuals and, without the need for terror or torture, would choose to believe that two plus two was whatever they wanted it to be.”

We stagger under the daily load of doublethink pouring from Trump, his enablers in the Inner Party, his mouthpieces in the Ministry of Truth, and his fanatical supporters among the proles. Spotting doublethink in ourselves is much harder. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” Orwell wrote . In front of my nose, in the world of enlightened and progressive people where I live and work, a different sort of doublethink has become pervasive. It’s not the claim that true is fake or that two plus two makes five. Progressive doublethink—which has grown worse in reaction to the right-wing kind—creates a more insidious unreality because it operates in the name of all that is good. Its key word is justice —a word no one should want to live without. But today the demand for justice forces you to accept contradictions that are the essence of doublethink.

For example, many on the left now share an unacknowledged but common assumption that a good work of art is made of good politics and that good politics is a matter of identity. The progressive view of a book or play depends on its political stance, and its stance—even its subject matter—is scrutinized in light of the group affiliation of the artist: Personal identity plus political position equals aesthetic value. This confusion of categories guides judgments all across the worlds of media, the arts, and education, from movie reviews to grant committees. Some people who register the assumption as doublethink might be privately troubled, but they don’t say so publicly. Then self-censorship turns into self-deception, until the recognition itself disappears—a lie you accept becomes a lie you forget. In this way, intelligent people do the work of eliminating their own unorthodoxy without the Thought Police.

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Orthodoxy is also enforced by social pressure, nowhere more intensely than on Twitter, where the specter of being shamed or “canceled” produces conformity as much as the prospect of adding to your tribe of followers does. This pressure can be more powerful than a party or state, because it speaks in the name of the people and in the language of moral outrage, against which there is, in a way, no defense. Certain commissars with large followings patrol the precincts of social media and punish thought criminals, but most progressives assent without difficulty to the stifling consensus of the moment and the intolerance it breeds—not out of fear, but because they want to be counted on the side of justice.

This willing constriction of intellectual freedom will do lasting damage. It corrupts the ability to think clearly, and it undermines both culture and progress. Good art doesn’t come from wokeness, and social problems starved of debate can’t find real solutions. “Nothing is gained by teaching a parrot a new word,” Orwell wrote in 1946. “What is needed is the right to print what one believes to be true, without having to fear bullying or blackmail from any side.” Not much has changed since the 1940s. The will to power still passes through hatred on the right and virtue on the left.

1984 will always be an essential book, regardless of changes in ideologies, for its portrayal of one person struggling to hold on to what is real and valuable. “Sanity is not statistical,” Winston thinks one night as he slips off to sleep. Truth, it turns out, is the most fragile thing in the world. The central drama of politics is the one inside your skull.

This article appears in the July 2019 print edition with the headline “George Orwell’s Unheeded Warning.”

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

1984 Themes

‘ Theme ’ is an overarching idea, philosophy, and belief used in the literary works by a writer to show these concepts directly or indirectly. In George Orwell ’s Nineteen Eighty-Four now mostly published as 1984 , themes are diverse, yet they can be related to the current governments and social structures. Some of the major ideas have been discussed below.

Themes in 1984

Totalitarianism

Totalitarianism is one of the major themes of the novel , 1984. It presents the type of government where even the head of the government is unknown to the public. This theme serves as a warning to the people because such regime unleashes propaganda to make people believe in the lies presented by the government. Throughout the novel, there is no proof of Big Brother’s existence in Oceania. The Party exercises complete control not only on the sexual lives of their citizens such as Julia’s and Winston Smith but also on their thoughts, feelings and even writing a diary. The overall monitoring and surveillance of the people through telescreens and subversion of history through the Ministry of Truth are some of the common casualties of such regimes. The third casualty of the totalitarianism is the truth through language. This happens in the shape of mottos such as “ War is Peace .”

Propaganda is another major theme of 1984. The novel clearly shows the way propaganda is used to control people, along with its impacts and pitfalls. Orwell has presented this theme through an organized propaganda machine of the Ministry of Truth in Oceania. Winston Smith is also involved in this propaganda. His work requires distortion of facts and truths and altering historical facts and then propagate them throughout the country. It means that the Party wants to have complete control over the thoughts and actions of the public. This propaganda has also invented new information and new words such as ‘Two Minutes Hate’, ‘Big Brother is watching’ and new mottos. The objective of propaganda is to make people loyal to the Party and the country.

Subversion of Reality

Subversion of reality is another major theme of this novel. The novel has presented most people living in abject poverty , while others are engaged in working against each other. The children are spying on the adults with what they have learned in “Spies” groups. Winston Smith has been taught not to enjoy a life of love and sex in romance . The language is turned topsy-turvy to make people believe in what they do not know. The facts are turned into lies, and then these lies are disseminated as truths. The public memory is being manipulated with new information that further alienate the people from reality.

Subversion of Love and Feelings

Another theme of 1984 is the subversion of love and feelings. It means that the people are taught not to love, and to curb their feelings or any passions of love. According to the regime, sex just as a duty of the government or “duty to the Party.” It means Winston Smith needs to engage in sex only to produce children for the Party. This has led to his failed marriage with Katherine and his rebellion by loving Julia and thus engaging with her intimately. The memory of his mother realizes Winston about the love of parents from which the Party has deprived him. In fact, his loveless life shows how the totalitarian regimes destroy family, love and individual’s lives to make the ruling class strong.

Loss of Identity and Independence

Totalitarian governments often adopt strategies that make people lose identities and independence so that the citizen will not question the supremacy of the governing class. Thus, proving that totalitarianism, which is one of its major themes in the novel has ripped people of their own personality. The uniformity in food, clothes and what the people hear and absorb in 1984 shows that the Party and its supposed head, Big Brother, are engaged in erasing the individualities and identities. Winston Smith’s feeling of criminality in writing his dairy is a dangerous act. The final torture scene when O’Brien confronts Winston to erase his integrity and his significant resistance brings out response from O’Brien. He explains Winston Smith that he is the last man on earth if he is harboring rebellious thoughts. This is an example of how individuality and identity are not tolerated in totalitarian regimes.

Political Loyalty

Political loyalty is another overarching theme that pervades 1984. It is present from the beginning to the end of the novel. Winston Smith is a loyal employee, yet he harbors thoughts against the Party and questions most of the information he is asked to feed. However, loyalty in Oceania does not expect only work dedication; they want every person to become loyal to the point of submissiveness with unconditional obedience. O’Brien, a secret ‘Thought Police’ is an example of such a loyal person. He senses rebellion in Winston Smith and befriends him, then hands him over to the police to brainwash him. He warns Winston that it is the Party whose perspective will prevail what he might do or not do. This is the loyalty that the omnipresent Big Brother wants from the people.

Class System

Another pervasive theme of the novel is the class system. It means Oceania is divided into different classes. There is Inner Party that is considered the elite class, having servants and luxury lifestyle. The ordinary members like Winston Smith, on the other hand, live in state-run small apartments with no permission to enjoy conjugal or familial lives. The poor are living in the no-go area with constant propaganda to feed them with lies and program their minds to believe them as truths. That is why O’Brien thinks that the society beyond the suburban areas is living in a single moment, for the Party defines and controls this society based on a class system.

Controlled Information and Rewriting of History

In the state of Oceania, there is a single party system where only the Party rules with its leader, Big Brother. It broadcasts, manages and distributes information and control the people. Though the information is taken from history, it is rewritten to suit the current occasion. Even Winston Smith has a hard time, thinking why the diary writing is punishable. The people are becoming unsure, and then sure that they are members of a great government, the Party. O’ Brien also harbors the same notions due to the subversion of information and rewriting of the history.

Use of Technology

Orwell has shown another theme that is the use of technology for governing the people. In this novel, the writer shows that the party uses telescreens and some other apparatuses as one of the primary tools control the public. The use of technology to monitor people is very much present in this century as George Orwell had predicted through 1984.

Use and Abuse of Language

Language is very important for mental and physical control. The Party has employed language to control the masses. The use of words such as Newspeak, doublethink, Ingsoc and various other words speak volumes about this tactic. O’Brien and Winston Smith are engaged in the Ministry of Truth to use and abuse language to rewrite history and distort facts for the public consumption.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — 1984 — George Orwell’s 1984 Compared To Today

George Orwell’s 1984 Compared to Today

• Categories: 1984 Dystopia George Orwell

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Published: Feb 8, 2022

Words: 953 | Pages: 2 | 5 min read

• Federspiel, W. (2007). 1984 Arrives: Thought (crime), technology, and the constitution. Wm. & Mary Bill Rts. J., 16, 865. (https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/wmbrts16&div=41&id=&page=)
• Luegenbiehl, H. C. (1984). 1984 and the Power of Technology. Social Theory and Practice, 10(3), 289-300. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/23556567)
• Ducker, T. (2021). Orwell's 1984" Big Brother" Concept and the Government Use of Facial Recognition Technology: A Call to Action for Regulation to Protect Privacy Rights. Belmont Law Review, 8(2), 10. (https://repository.belmont.edu/lawreview/vol8/iss2/10/)
• Loevinger, L. (1984). Earl F. Nelson Lecture: Law, Technology, and Liberty. Mo. L. Rev., 49, 767. (https://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/mlr/vol49/iss4/4/)
• Armer, P. (1975). Computer technology and surveillance. Computers and People, 24(9), 8-11. (https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:zf198qx6952/zf198qx6952.pdf)

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In the novel 1984 George Orwell demonstrates how the government maintains power through mind control and manipulation of the masses. Orwell hints that when the government (Big Brother), holds too much power they become crooked and devious towards the rest of the population. In a nutshell Orwell is conveying that a corrupt government destroys all chances for an ideal society. Collectively, George Orwell made a prediction of what was going to happen, and it has become a reality to some extent. Overall this is a great book for the current political state.

George Orwell 's 1984 Power

In George Orwell’s 1984 Power is gained most effectively through control, fear and violence. Compared to a government like that of America’s, 1984 creates a more threatening structure of government where the public is limited from freedom and happiness. 1984 shows a world of a society where only the upper class has power and freedom from the harsh treatment that the general population receives. The idea of Big Bother makes the population of Oceania believe they are being watched over by a powerful force and oppresses them so they feel powerless and unable to do anything against a “great” force like Big Brother. The well-being of others depends on their willingness to agree with Big Brother and abide by their laws, if you think otherwise then you will be an accuser of thought-crime will be vaporized and removed from society or harshly punished through rigorous treatment and torture methods as was Winston and Julia. Power creates problems for others in which they do not deserve.

The Novel 1984 by George Orwell Essay

1984, Orwell’s last and perhaps greatest work, deals with drastically heavy themes that still terrify his audience after 65 years. George Orwell’s story exemplifies excessive power, repression, surveillance, and manipulation in his strange, troubling dystopia full of alarming secrets that point the finger at totalitarian governments and mankind as a whole. What is even more disquieting is that 1984, previously considered science fiction, has in so many ways become a recognizable reality.

Argumentative Essay On 1984 By George Orwell

George Orwells novel, 1984, takes place in a futuristic dystopia. In the book the life of a man named Winston is followed. Winston works for the ministry of truth, in this ministry there are people that go back into things like the newspaper and edit them to make the government look like everything they did was flawless. Orwells story is surprisingly accurate in the terms of the technology and the governments ability to spy on their citizens. The are that he made the biggest flaws in the story were where there was any talk about mind control and manipulation of a person. Also, there is a possibility that Orwell was referring to many of the manipulation aspects of the book in more of a religious way.

1984 Argumentative Essay

The novel 1984, written by George Orwell, takes place in a dystopian society where a small upper class assumes complete control over the masses by means of intimidation and propaganda. The common folk are left in a state of fear and anxiety due to this as demonstrated by the main character Winston in the novel. The 1984 simulation game at our school attempted to emulate this dystopian society through the anonymous placement of thought police amongst students. The presence of these thought police and the strict rules they enforced invoked much fear, some paranoia, and a loss of identity within me and kept me following the rules.

Contradictions In The Book 1984

George Orwell’s novel 1984 is a classic that continues to open the eyes of citizens to the world they are living in today. This novel was written to serve as a warning to Western nations about the frightening repercussions of a totalitarian government. It depicts a super-state called Oceania, which is ran by the Party, who monitors and controls the actions and even the thoughts of its citizens. George Orwell does a tremendous job of depicting a dystopian society where freedoms and civil liberties are essentially nonexistent. The Party’s three slogans were WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

Essay about 1984 By George Orwell

Things to know: 1984 was a book written about life under a totalitarian regime from an average citizen’s point of view. This book envisions the theme of an all knowing government with strong control over its citizens. This book tells the story of Winston Smith, a worker of the Ministry of Truth, who is in charge of editing the truth to fit the government’s policies and claims. It shows the future of a government bleeding with brute force and propaganda. This story begins and ends in the continent of Oceania one of the three supercontinents of the world. Oceania has three classes the Inner Party, the Outer Party and the lowest of all, the Proles (proletarian). Oceania’s government is the Party or Ingsoc (English Socialism

Orwell’s Totalitarian Government in 1984 Essay

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George Orwell’s key objective throughout his novel, 1984, was to convey to his readers the imminent threat of the severe danger that totalitarianism could mean for the world. Orwell takes great measures to display the horrifying effects that come along with complete and dominant control that actually comes along with totalitarian government. In Orwell’s novel, personal liberties and individual freedoms that are protected and granted to many Americans today, are taken away and ripped from the citizen’s lives. The government takes away freedom and rights from the people so that the ruling class (which makes up the government), while reign with complete supremacy and possess all power.

Write An Essay On The Book 1984 By George Orwell

“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you”- Miranda Rights. These are every citizen’s rights if we do not want to speak when arrested we should not because we have the right . The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is abusing that right. The CIA is required to make sure that no one poses a threat to us. Instead of doing that they are the ones that people fear. In the novel 1984 people get tortured, abused, hurt they experience pain all the way when they get integrated. The novel 1984 is accurate, effective to modern society because the CIA tortures, starves , and make sure that they get a low amount of sleep.

How Does Orwell Create A Totalitarian Government In The Novel 1984

The governments in today’s society have brainwashed their citizens into believing everything their leader says and thinks is correct and everything else is wrong. This can sometimes be known as a totalitarian government. George Orwell’s novel 1984 revolves around totalitarianism. The members of the party in Oceania are taught and required to worship their leader Big Brother whether they believe in him or not. In the novel 1984, George Orwell shows the problems and the hatred with a totalitarian government through his use of symbolism, situational irony, and indirect characterization.

Essay on Analysis of George Orwell's 1984

This state of constant surveillance demands complete conformity among the population. In Oceania, there are no laws, but non-conformity is punished by death. The thought police are an omnipresent force of the government, weeding out non-conformists and making them disappear on a regular basis. Even a slight inflection in the voice or a look of the eye can be construed as thoughtcrime. Propaganda, terror, and technology are the tools of the state, used to coerce and control the thoughts and actions of the populace. Reality is denied on a regular basis if it is non-consistent with party doctrine. The main character of the novel, Winston Smith, said that "freedom is the freedom to say that 2+2=4."(Orwell,69)In fact, if the party said that 2+2=5, the population would believe this to be truth. History is actually rewritten on a daily basis so as to appear consistent with party doctrine. The enemy of today becomes the enemy of yesterday, poverty becomes progress, war becomes peace, and slavery becomes freedom. This concept of denying reality in the face of obvious contradiction is known as doublespeak. It is central to the philosophy of Ingsoc, and is the greatest tool of the government's mind-control agenda.

Essay about George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four 1984

In George Orwell’s “1984” society is manipulated and guided by an organization called the Party and an anonymous figure named Big Brother, who is used as God. One of the main aspects the Party controls is truth or tries to control is truths in the society and the truth in the minds of the individual themselves. The Party creates what they want to be true to make the individuals ignorant so they can manipulate them easier. This twist of the truth by the Party makes it seem like truth doesn’t actually exist, but for Winston it does exist or it once did. Truth does exist if the individual is rebellious to the extent to where it will not get them vaporized and Winston is one of those rebels. He and others are able to experience the

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Persuasive Essay On George Orwell's 1984

Imagine if the past was always changing to fit the views and morals of current society. What if we wrote every bad event out of textbooks to appear more progressive. That seems crazy because as a society, we can’t deny the past because it’s what formed our culture, our morals, and values. But, in 1984 by George Orwell, that’s a reality. Winston, a man who works for the government, or the Party as it’s called in the book, has the job of editing historic documents to fit the Party’s agenda. Winston becomes disenchanted by the Party’s ways of maintaining control over the people of Oceania by feeding the citizens propaganda so that they will mindlessly follow whatever the Party says is true. Therefore, Winston begins to doubt the party because of their destruction of the past and its events, ruining people's ability to think and be independent. …show more content…

They implemented what is called “Newspeak”, reducing the number of words available for use. Winston realizes “the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought mak[ing] thoughtcrime literally impossible” (Orwell 52). Winston believes that thought should be free, and if the government is criminalizing and limiting thought, there will be no room for change in society. People can’t demand change if they don’t have the language to do so, saying something is Ungood really doesn’t have the same impact as saying something is bad. Winston sees the implementation of newspeak as a way to control the population and get them to sit down and shut up because there is no way for them to speak out when the official language they speak is created and curated to prevent that. Winston is also of the opinion that the destruction of the past is not a healthy or safe way for Oceania to operate because he knows that the moment we stop learning about the past is the moment history begins to repeat

Examples Of Manipulation In 1984 By George Orwell

In 1984, “The Party,” their system of government, uses media manipulation to rewrite history. They change people’s perception of the past by changing the story of history, just like with Eurasia and Eastasia. Winston, the protagonist of 1984, works for The Party by rewriting articles including one that reads “Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. A large

How Does Winston Present The Past In 1984

In 1984, written by George Orwell, the past is seen or portrayed to be a very crucial part of the understanding of the novel. A few examples that illustrate this theme of the past are Winston's job as a records editor at the Ministry of Truth, O'Brien destroying the photograph of three one-time party members, and the use of Telescreens. Winston's occupation entails the destruction of past records, which solidifies the theme of purging the past in the novel. One example of this is demonstrated when Winston is describing the Records Department. He says, “the records department, after all, was itself only a single branch of the Ministry of Truth, whose primary job was not to reconstruct the past but to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, Telescreen programs, plays, novels- with every conceivable kind of information.”

Examples Of Autonomy In 1984 By George Orwell

Winston’s explanation of the Party and these beliefs illustrates the corruption they experience for they are unable to think for themselves and are forced to accept whatever they are told to believe. Orwell uses diction to convey a theme of totalitarianism

What Does Orwell Mean In 1984 Persuasive Essay

Winston and Julia sticking together is the most important thing because it shows who they are. They are in love with each other and they are the only thing either of them has going for them because of the life they live. If they did betray each other then they both would go down for the crimes they committed and so does anyone else they know that knows about there crimes. Not confessing is also important because it shows that they are human and care for each other. "If you feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any results whatever, you've beaten them" (Orwell 166).

1984 Paperweight Essay

With the Party’s propaganda and absolute control, the people of Oceania no longer have a memory of the past; however, the paperweight is beautiful and purposeless, which is a great representation of the goods in the previous time. Thus, Winston hopes he could get in touch with the past by having this paperweight which comes from the past. Under the control of the Party, it is almost impossible to get anything from the past like this paperweight, that is why the paperweight attracts Winston so much. Also, the paperweight represents Winston’s hope in rebelling against the Party, which is beautiful and useless. It is commonly believed that Winston desires to reconnect with the past because he dreams the past is like the secret world in the paperweight which has happiness and freedom rather than the government’s control.

Argumentative Essay On 1984 By George Orwell

Most people have taken a history course at some point in their life. They walk into class, take notes on the lecture, and study for an exam. No one ever questions if the information they are receiving has been altered from the truth. They memorize the data they have learned, then pass it on to others. How is everyone so sure the information we read in textbooks is true?

The Themes Of Psychological Control In George Orwell's 1984

What this is saying is in order to stay in power, they have to manipulate the records of the past. That is actually one of Winston’s jobs as a follower of the Party. There was an instance when a person turned on the Party and was soon erased from history. Winston and others went back into official documents such as speeches and literally deleted the officer. By controlling the past this way, they control the future.

Persuasive Essay On 1984 By George Orwell

“If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter”.-George Washington. Although the dystopian world of George Orwell 's 1984 does not have any laws, it doesn 't make it free. People are constantly being monitored by telescreens and their own children, they are punished for even thinking something remotely negative or expressing emotions, and they are brainwashed into thinking that their oppressors are helping them and giving them more than what they need. Freedom is having the ability to think for yourself and express your opinions. First of all the people in 1984 are constantly being monitored by telescreens and even their own children.

Rhetorical Analysis Of 1984 By George Orwell

During 1984 by George Orwell, the main character, Winston, yearns to remember what life was like before ‘the Party’ took over. However, as the government has brainwashed people and begun to control their minds, Winston finds himself unable to remember or have any proof regarding the truth about the past. In this particular passage, Winston reflects on how the party controls everyone, seemingly hopeless about ever knowing the truth instead of being controlled by the Party. He considers how ‘the Party’ possesses the capability to turn any lie into the truth, just because of the fact that they are the governing force in the society, and they declare how people should think. As people’s minds are what shape our world, when the government controls people’s minds, the government ultimately shapes the world.

They say a child is easier to influence than an adult; do you know why that is? A child is like a blank slate, uninformed of anything , therefore malleable contrary to an adult. 1984 is a dystopian novel written by George Orwell. The most convenient way to keep the population in check is by having an uninformed proletariat; reasons being that the proletariat cannot unite, they become easier to manipulate, and it is easiest course of action. If a person does not know an idea exists, then he cannot execute that idea.

Examples Of Censorship In 1984

As noted by the Party,“Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” exemplifies an example of what the government wanted; control over the future. Thoughts and language were just some of the everyday rights that were censored and rewritten for the government’s benefit. Winston knew of the censorship and propaganda the government was throwing at the public. “Big Brother is watching” remained a constant reminder of the one in control.

1984 Winston's Desire For Change

The aforementioned quotes illustrate the extent of Winston’s desire for change and revolution, which can be inferred by the structure, language, and context present in the quotes. For example, the leading quote displays Winston’s desperation for change, as seen by the use of “hope” and the simple sentence structure of the statement. The use of “hope” shows that Winston’s desires hinge upon the proles, thereby illustrating the extent of his nonconformity; he is willing to place the burden of his own humanity upon the undereducated masses of society, because they are not restricted by the party’s orthodoxy, as opposed to viewing them as mindless cattle. Similarly, the simple sentence structure of the leading quote displays the certainty of

Memory Holes In George Orwell's 1984

Winston reflects back on how the party alters the history of the country: “the lie passed into history and became truth” (Orwell 34). Although Winston knows that Oceania and Eurasia were in alliance before, he also believes that they did not have an actual alliance because of what the Party imposes onto the citizens’ memories of the past. Orwell’s use of the word “passed” possibly shows that the lies they create can easily to history and be masked as the truth. It can be inferred that Winston now knows exactly how the party paralyzes anyone from actual thinking, which is by changing the history.

Reality In George Orwell's Novel 1984

Winston is an inner party member in Oceania but while he seems to fall in line with party values he internally questions the party and the reliability of his own memories in George Orwell's novel 1984. Outwardly, Winston shows little to no rebellious tendencies toward the party, but inwardly he questions history and society because in his memories he recalls someplace better. Thorugh the novel one of the main points is Winston trying to infer if he can trust his own memories or if he is crazy, this is the book questioning reality. The book poses the question that if everyone around you believes one thing to be true, how can you prove that it isn’t?

Dystopia In 1984 Research Paper

For instance, he begins a diary where he pens down his thoughts because by the reason of party rules, Winston is not allowed to articulate his thoughts and feelings to other people. As he commences, he sees that the words “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER” (Orwell 20) written all over it. During the time that these words are written down, Winston starts realizing that the government is controlling everything and enhancing totalitarian, and feels that the people should have a say in what is going on in the world. The party’s in Oceania play a large role in their society. They can control everything that goes on and changes any past historical events that reveal secrets to the citizens of Oceania.

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Argumentative Thesis

As explained in Research , not all essays will require an explicitly stated thesis, but most argumentative essays will. Instead of implying your thesis or main idea, in an argumentative essay, you’ll most likely be required to write out your thesis statement for your audience. A thesis statement is a one- to two-sentence statement that presents the main idea and makes an assertion about your issue. You may have a longer thesis for much longer essays, but one to two sentences is a good general guideline. And, remember, in an argumentative essay, the assertion you present in your thesis is going to be particularly important.

When you make your assertion in your thesis, it should be clear and direct. You want your audience to have no doubt about your point. Of course, how assertive you are in your thesis and the content you choose to include depends upon the type of argumentative essay you are writing. For example, in a Classical or Aristotelian argument (explained in pages that follow), your thesis statement should clearly present your side of the issue. In a Rogerian argument (explained in pages that follow), your thesis should bring both sides of the issue together.

Still, there are some basic guidelines to keep in mind when it comes to an argumentative thesis statement.

• Your thesis statement should be one to two sentences .
• Your thesis statement should clearly present the main idea of your essay and make some kind of assertion (even if that assertion is about bringing two sides together).
• Your thesis should not make an “announcement” about what your essay will cover. Instead, it should just present your assertion. For example, a thesis like this makes an announcement:

In this paper, I will persuade you to vote for candidates who support education reform.

Instead you might write:

Because our education system is in need of reform, we should vote for candidates who are willing to make the necessary changes.

• While there is no such thing as a “required” place for your thesis statement, most academic essays will present the thesis statement early on, usually near the end of the introduction . There is a reason for this. Audience members are more likely to understand and absorb each point as readers if you have told them, in advance, what they should be getting out of your essay. Still, you should check with your professor if you would like to present your thesis somewhere else, such as at the end of your essay.
• Your thesis statement is the most important sentence in your essay. It’s your chance to make sure your audience really understands your point. Be sure your assertion and your writing style are clear.

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