1984: Literary Analysis

Nineteen Eighty-Four may be misread if we do not consider its context: a postwar world divided in different and opposed powers. It has been read as a kind of prophecy, only a dystopian world, in a science fiction idea about the future. As Raymond Williams argues, the main question is not what Orwell was writing, but what wrote Orwell.

The novel is less allegorical or futuristic, it is a reading and warning of that period in time. Nineteen Eighty-Four is inserted in Huxley’s Brave New World, Zamyatin’s We and H. G. Wells’s The Sleeper Awakes tradition; and we need to consider the echoes of all these books in the novel.

Huxley, for instance, was satirizing equality and as we can see in Brave new world, equality, in the idea of happiness, is taken to another level, ending in a enforced and obligatory happiness. On the other hand, Orwell followed the tradition of an anti-utopian novel, but the novel not only destroys human relations, but also focus on the problem of hierarchy, and, Wilston himself, is the example of an ambiguous position in the hierarchic power, a middle class man who ends up following the path of the higher classes and ignoring a possible union with the proles.

What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself. The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition. They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another. For the first time in his life he did not despise the proles or think of them merely as an inert force which would one day spring to life and regenerate the world. The proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened inside. They had held on to the primitive emotions which he himself had to re-learn by conscious effort.

Winston wants to establish human relations and to constitute an individual himself, but he wouldn’t join the proles, even though they were the ones who had not become hardened inside. Winston chooses allying himself to O’Brien, a high class individual which also is part of hierarchical ideology against the party. Winston wants freedom, but he is selfish at the same time; he does not want to lose his position in the relations of power, as the best choice to a revolution would be, but he wants changes in hierarchy, which exposes this paradox perspective of the novel. 

 The loyalty to one another that people have in the proles is essentially related to collective values, shared knowledge and the sense of community, and, in other words, to a collective memory. Memory is also one of the important issues in the novel. Memory is not only the element which constitutes an individual and his or her world’s perception, but it is the element that defines and builds history, individually and collectively. The creation of ways of control, such as Big Brother, is also present in the world of no shared values and where thinking is seen as thought crime. ‘Big Brother’ does not mean what the name suggests, is a not a brother watching and taking care of you, it is the institution and the representation of the broken human relations, no one is reliable, family, in the emotional idea, has disappeared.

The first chapter’s narration point of view, an omniscient narrator and a diary, is not just the result of the thought police that does not allow Winston to communicate his ideas and, therefore, change possibility of narration. It is, above all, the first attempt of memory and the constitution of Winston as an individual. In writing, Winston creates himself, while rebelling against the social system and the thought police. The diary is the first attempt to develop Winston’s subjective, which will be further developed when he meets Julia and totally destroyed in the end of the novel.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is less a weapon against the left of the right, as it has been used by politic parties, but a more a warning of how politics and social structure may reduce the status of human beings, even more than the reification of capitalist system. The appendix in the end of the novel suggests not only the possibility of change, which is related to Orwell’s political engagement, but also defends implicitly the idea of progression and the need of political engagement.