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redirected from Main.NineteenEightyFour

alt title(s): Nineteen Eighty Four
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.

George Orwell's dystopian vision that introduced the phrases "Big Brother Is Watching You" (not to be confused with the otherwise little-related reality show, though the show's namesake does come from this book), "thoughtcrime," "Thought Police," and "doublethink" into the English lexicon (but not "doublespeak").

Warning - Spoilers Ahead! ...

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. The year is 1984...or thereabouts. All that's definitively understood is that we're on what used to be the British Isles, a few decades after a Revolution that took place in the 'confused fighting' - including at least one 'atomic bomb' drop - following WWII. The world has been split into three superpowers still apparently locked in perpetual enmity: Oceania (implied to take in the Americas and Australia as well, with the UK now renamed 'Airstrip One'), Eurasia (the USSR down and across to North Africa), and Eastasia (China and surrounding Asian nations, down to India and Indonesia).

Oceania's society is divided into the Inner Party, the elite; the Outer Party, the white-collar workers whose intelligence can be of some use to the system, roughly corresponding to the middle class of Orwell's time; and the proles, the totally uneducated lower classes who make up the vast majority of the population, constantly monitored for signs of potential unrest but otherwise left contemptuously alone ('proles and animals are free', runs the relevant Party slogan). There are four major government ministries: The Ministry of Plenty, whose business it is to maintain shortages; the Ministry of Truth, which concerns itself with censorship and propaganda; the Ministry of Peace, whose job is to maintain the perpetual war in northern Africa; and the Ministry of Love, which... is housed in a building which has no windows.

There is no need to give the Party a name, as everyone knows there is only one Party and only one leader, the omnipresent Big Brother. There is no opposition to the Party, as everyone is conditioned through a carefully manipulated mixture of fear and gratitude to love Big Brother as their only bulwark against total chaos. To emphasise the point - as the more cynical theorise - everyone outside the Inner Party is constantly kept on the brink of starvation and exhaustion. Any resultant discontent is easily answered since "there's a war on, after all". The proles are kept sedated with lottery tickets, mindless pop songs and cheap beer, and the Outer Party members survive on a principle called 'doublethink' - the need to believe in the Party line and reality at the same time.

To that end the Party has moved well beyond the social experiments of past totalitarian regimes, and are aiming to quite literally reshape their subjects' ability to perceive the world around them. History is continually rewritten - often outright made up - by the Party so that Big Brother is always right, has always made the right predictions, and always implemented the right policies, for which the citizenry are always appropriately grateful. No evidence to the contrary, in any media, is allowed to remain. As part of this effort, a new language, Newspeak, is being constructed, with the express intent of removing all 'superfluous' shades of meaning. The ultimate goal is the elimination of the ability even to think an anti-Party concept, let alone express it intelligibly.

There are no longer any laws, but everyone in the Party is hyper-aware that the faintest glimmer of discontent or even individuality, known as "thoughtcrime," might lead to their being "vaporized." Surveillance cameras, hidden microphones and two-way "telescreens" exist in every home and in every street, spying on citizens, monitoring their every move and showering them with propaganda slogans. Only members of the Inner Party are able to (temporarily) turn their telescreens off. The list of thoughtcrimes includes sex for pleasure; women have been literally trained to lie back and think of the Party when — and only when — they marry.

Winston Smith, a member of the Outer Party, is a longtime secret rebel, although since his dreams of defiance are the mundane and often petty ones typical of the common man, they apparently haven't yet been discovered. What finally drives him over the intellectual edge into becoming the hero of the piece is his constant, instinctive feeling that there must be more to life than the uniformly dull and dreary present and bleak future. If the Party can constantly reshape the collective memory, including your very existence, on an ever-changing whim...what meaning is there in anything? As the novel opens, Winston commits the decisive act of thoughtcrime: writing all this down in a diary.

His heresy next expands to take in a boldly attractive, down-to-earth young co-worker of his named Julia, who one day passes him a note that rocks his world: I love you. Sexually eager and shrewd in all the small day-to-day rebellions, she joins him on secret trysts in an upstairs room he rents from what he thinks is a kindly old prole pawnbroker.

For a few months the lovers meet and live like a heartbreakingly ordinary couple. Partly through Julia's influence and partly out of his own fierce longing, Winston dares to hold on to the belief that the Party can somehow be toppled. The major hope lies in the Brotherhood, a rumored underground organization seeking to overthrow Big Brother, which the masses have been trained to yell curses against in the daily "Two Minutes Hate."

Winston's golden opportunity seems to come in the form of O'Brien, a member of the Inner Party who through various subtle signals to Winstson appears to be harboring rebellious thoughts of his own.

Alas, it's only a cruel delusion: soon after Winston and Julia believe they have enlisted in the Brotherhood through O'Brien, it is revealed that the Party had known of their defection all along. Winston is imprisoned for weeks and then tortured under the watch of O'Brien into believing that two plus two make five, because Big Brother says so. Gradually Winston becomes the perfect Big Brother devotee, except for the fact his heart remained free. That spark is smashed out from him for once and all by a scarring visit to the dreaded Room 101. He betrays Julia, and with that relinquishes the last of his humanity. After his public confession and release, while awaiting his inevitable assassination, Winston realizes that he loves Big Brother.

In spite of it suffering from a bad case of Twenty Minutes Into The Future, as the title alone testifies, Nineteen Eighty-Four remains one of the best and most horrific dystopian works ever.

The BBC adapted the book for television in 1954 with Peter Cushing as Winston Smith. Questions were asked in the House of Commons when it was alleged that one viewer had actually died of shock while watching.

Two film versions were made, in 1956 and (appropriately) 1984. The 1956 version changed the ending, completely ignoring Orwell's point. The brilliant and depressing 1984 version of Nineteen Eighty-Four, starring John Hurt as Winston and Richard Burton in his final role as O'Brien is far more true to the original novel, but is often compared unfavorably to Terry Gilliam's surreal dystopian movie Brazil (which came out one year later, in 1985), which takes a much more subversive and blackly humorous view of Orwell's themes. According to IMDb, Tim Burton is working on another adaptation of this movie.


Tropes:

  • Alternate Character Interpretation (Given that the Party's doctrine is that of Alternate Reality Interpretation, and that the viewpoint character is repeatedly mind-raped, it can be argued that we don't know what really happens post-Room 101. All that can be trusted is what Winston sees with his own eyes up until the cage snaps shut.)
    • Also, since he doesn't leave Airstrip One, we have no clue as to the state of the world - is Oceania real? Is it the entire world? Or is it just Britain? Is there a Brotherhood? Nothing can be taken for granted, even the Info Dump book that pops up halfway through (especially the book, given that one of the Inner Party members claims credit for its authorship, and hands out copies).
    • A common suggestion is that the 'scholarly' appendix on Newspeak is written in a manner that deliberately subverts this Downer Ending, given that it is written in the past tense.... Word of God is pretty clear on the subject though; Orwell intended the appendix to be considered separately from the book.)
      • It should be noted that when 1984 was to first be published in America, the group responsible wished to remove the appendix, but Orwell refused to have it published without the appendix, saying that the book would have to be reworked if such a large chunk was to be cut out. This incident, along with a few hand-picked statements of Orwell around the time the book was written, form the basis for including the appendix into the work.
  • Anvilicious
  • Author Tract (Orwell was never the slightest bit shy in admitting that he wrote primarily in defense of democratic socialism and against totalitarianism.)
  • The Bad Guy Wins (The whole point of this book is that the good guys can't, and never will win. Ever. Refer to the quote above.)
  • Big Brother Is Watching (Trope Namer)
  • Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu
  • Card Carrying Villain/ For The Evulz (In discussions with Winston during his 're-education', O'Brien drops all pretense that the Party is out for anything other than pure, unadulterated Power. See the page quote for a sampler.)
  • Complete Monster (nearly all the party Members)
  • Crapsack World (Perhaps one of the best known examples of the trope. Oceania may be bad, but the implication is that the two other superstates, Eurasia and Eastasia, are almost exactly identical. Eastasia's policy is actually translated as 'death-worship'. The three states are ALWAYS at war with each other, nobody ever winning. If you live in one of the areas the three states are always fighting over, you are a slave to whoever has power over the area at the current time.)
    • Emphasised at one point during a rally, when the Party, having always been at war with Eastasia, suddenly has always been at war with Eurasia. As in mid-speech (the speaker is handed a note). And — as Winston notes with horror — his audience instantly goes along with it, because Big Brother is watching and Big Brother is always right.
  • Doomed Moral Victor Cruelly, relentlessly, absolutely subverted.
  • Downer Ending (And How!)
    • For the protagonists, at least; there is a single spot of hope left for the world, as indicated subtly by the fact that the proletarian woman's symbolic recurring love song outlasts the popularity of the Hate Song. The Party might fall after all, eventually.
      • And also within the 'Oranges and Lemons' motif. When O'Brien continues Winston's recitation of the rhyme a couple of lines beyond Winston's recollection of it, he exclaims 'You knew the last line!', and O'Brien agrees. But the rhyme as normally told continues a little more ("I do not know / Says the great bell of Boe", followed by the bit Winston does recall about candles and and chopping heads off), suggesting that the Party is not as omniscient as it believes.
      • And the appendix talks of Newspeak in a past tense.
  • Dystopia
  • The Eighties (Subverted, Orwell was writing in the 1940s, with the book being published in 1948, and using the year 1984 as a Twenty Minutes Into The Future setting.)
  • Electric Torture
  • The Evils Of Free Will
  • Fictionary
  • Freud Was Right (At one point, a character theorises that all the marches and party speeches and rallies are really just intended to siphon off energy that might otherwise go into sex, which diverts attention away from the mass to the individual. This is an overtly Freudian, and to some extent discredited, idea.)
  • Genius Bruiser (O'Brien)
  • Heel Face Mole (O'Brien)
  • Hope Spot (Pretty much the entire second part.)
  • Ironic Nursery Tune "Here comes a candle to light you to bed/ here comes a chopper to chop off your head"
  • It Was His Sled (Some editions even put the incredibly important final four words on the back of the book. For the record, they are: "He loved Big Brother.")
  • Kicked Upstairs: Winston's ultimate fate. To keep him out of trouble, he was assigned to a sub-committee of a sub-committee to determine whether commas should be placed in or out of brackets.
  • Light Is Not Good: "The place where there is no darkness" is so not a place you ever want to end up. Ever.
  • Malevolent Mugshot
  • Meaningful Name - Winston Smith, from "Winston Churchill" and "Smith", The Everyman. Julia from Romeo And Juliet. Goldstein from "Bronstein", which was the surname Trotsky was born with.
  • Misaimed Fandom - If you think Orwell was solely attacking Dirty Communists, you've missed the point. Fascist totalitarian regimes can grow from other political movements as well.
    • Also, it's worth mentioning that Orwell was a Socialist himself, splitting off from the main group due to his part in the Spanish Civil War (in which the Moscow-backed Communists ruthlessly crushed a grassroots anarcho-syndicalist movement, where the common people where doing by themselves what the party bureaucrats had promised the "worker's state" would do) and considered himself to be a democratic socialist until the end of his life. To paraphrase the man "The Bolshevik socialists destroy everything the socialist movement originally stood for, and do so in the name of socialism." Orwell himself said that 1984 is his nightmare, an inversion of everything socialism meant to him, as seen in the USSR. However, the point above is valid too. Orwell said as well "I have always been against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism."
  • Mind Rape (The last third of the novel may be the the most disturbing Mind Rape ever put to paper.)
  • More Than Mind Control
  • My Girl Is A Slut
  • New Speak (Trope Namer)
  • Nightmare Fuel (The idea that if you do anything wrong, you get erased from history and nobody will remember you. And Room 101, where all your fears come true, a literal Nightmare Fuel Gas Station.)
    • Before that, you're imprisoned in the Ministry of Love, where a terrifying mix of the Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique and More Than Mind Control are inflicted upon you until you are broken down to rock bottom on a mental level before you're completely built back up as a mindless devotee of the Party.
  • No Sex Allowed - Subverted and averted. The proles seem to have the ability to have intercourse freely, and all intercourse within the Outer Party is strictly regulated only for the development of children. There's a lecture in a part of the book talking about trying to remove the orgasm to prevent any pleasure being derived from sex.
  • Only Sane Man
    Winston: Sanity is not statistical.
    • O'Brien later convinces Winston that he is more like the "Only Insane Man".
  • Peace And Love Incorporated
  • Putting On The Reich - Oceania takes a lot of elements from the USSR; historical revisionism and a Trotsky-esque hate figure are just two. The 'proles could be seen as the proletariat (industrial workers and peasants) in the Soviet Union.
  • Ret Gone - A major theme. Internally lampshaded, most notably when Winston realizes that by destroying an utterly incriminating photograph of party opposition members together, he is essentially removing that part of their lives from existence. It is, after all, his job.)
  • Room 101 (Trope Namer)
  • Secret Police - the Thought Police
  • Shadow Dictator - Big Brother
  • Shoot The Shaggy Dog
  • Sinister Surveillance
  • Some Anvils Need To Be Dropped
  • Strange Syntax Speaker - New Speak, though it isn't used often in the novel.
  • Strawman Political - The entire point of the book. Big Brother is the Strawman Totalitarian. He’s also a Strawman Communist, Strawman Liberal, or a Strawman Conservative depending on what aspects of IngSoc you focus more on.
    • There's a sort of Lamp Shade Hanging on this when O'Brien explains that, unlike previous totalitarian regimes in history, the Party is knowingly out for power for itself without any delusions of Utopia Justifies The Means.
  • Super Fun Happy Trope Of Doom - Played very un-comedically with the Ministries.
  • The Treachery Of Images - to a ridiculous extent.
  • Truth In Television - The Democratic People's Republic of Korea seems to have taken many many cues from Orwell (in the bad way.)
    • Even going so far as to build a giant pyramid building.
    • By law, North Korean libraries may not stock books older than fifteen years - the books must be re-edited and reprinted. I wonder where they got that idea...
    • During the Stalin era in the USSR, children had to paste new pages into their history books as the official view changed.
  • Twenty Minutes Into The Future
  • Two Plus Two Makes Five (though Orwell used it before in essays, this is the book its most remembered from)
  • Unperson (Trope Codifier; Josef Stalin used the term long before this book was written)
  • We Will Use Wiki Words In The Future (One of the main purposes of Newspeak; condensing words makes it easier to utter them automatically without much thought, and to make communicating against the party impossible.)
    • 'Duckspeak'.
  • Working Class People Are Morons (The proles are completely useless and indeed, according to Goldstein's book, the lower classes always have been. What makes this even more intriguing is that Orwell never bothers to explain why this should be the case; readers are expected just to accept this as fact)
    • Who said Orwell actually believed it to be the case? Anything and everything in the book might be a complete lie... that's part of the point. Also, Goldstein's book-within-a-book was apparently written by the Party and contains an unknown combination of truth and falsehood.
      • The Proles aren't stupid, just uneducated
  • World Half Empty (Starts off that way, and then relentlessly stomps any gleam of light that pops up.)
  • Why Did It Have To Be Snakes. (Winston is terrified of rats, which is used against him in the most horrible way possible in Room 101.)
  • Writer On Board
  • Xanatos Gambit (Goldstein's Resistance seems to be set up by the Party itself in order to identify possible dissidents.) This also has precedent in real life, as the Cheka, forerunner of the KGB, did the same thing in the '20s when the party was cementing its power over everyday life.
  • Zeerust - The Ministry of Truth uses 'novel-writing machines' to keep churning out low-grade literature to keep the proles busy. You can tell who works in the Fiction Department by the oil-stains on their overalls.