Jhosman Eli A.
Velasquez February 19, 2018
III-ABEL-B
1st Paper (European Literature)
1984 is not about Winston’s rebellion, revolution or tragic love. The character of Winston
serves to represent the effect of the Party’s total control over a human being on what they were
doing and on what they were to trying to do to in 1984 or in the past history. The objects and
people around Winston symbolizes different conflicts or prolonged armed struggle such as war,
campaign battle, and fighting. Maybe Big Brother is the Party in its public manifestation, a
reassurance to most people even though the Party ensures that every single home has a
telescreen which monitors party member’s behaviour. But to Winston, he is more of a threat as
there is no way to escape from his overwhelming gaze. The omnipresent telescreens are the
most direct symbol of the Party’s constant monitoring of its subject, anywhere and anytime.
Winston is a Peculiar or strange individual in the totalitarian state, and he can’t resist the urge to
rebel. So he is expressing his feelings, telling the happenings and the feelings of the other
people suffering and experiencing the Big Brother’s propaganda and bombardment of the party
through writing in a diary. So this literature can be called protest literature because the literature
of this story has the three requirements for protest literature: empathy, shock value, and
symbolic action, in which empathy encourages, understand and share the feelings of another,
shock value inspires emotions, desires, and its usefulness to surprise and usually upset the
people or reader and symbolic action which promotes interpretation.
Through propaganda or misleading nature and bombardment of political information, the
Party deprives people of their ability to think. It symbolizes how totalitarian government abuses
technology for its own ends instead of exploiting its knowledge to improve civilization. The story
tells what the happenings and the experiences in past history. I do not know why he titled the
story “1984” because I have asked my mother about 1984 wars and she answers me that there
is no war that time. Maybe the 1984 of George Orwell’s story shows or tells insights or a deep
understanding to us about what is war, totalitarianism and autocratic state. So by the time
George Orwell wrote the story of 1984, he surely created the whole story with lots of imagination
cause as I have said that there is no war that time. So the concept of fictive truth was applied in
the story of George Orwell’s 1984.The Glass Paperweight, an artifact Winston bought in the
prole district symbolizes the past that can’t be altered by any force. In buying a paperweight,
Winston attempts to reconnect with the past. However, this magical thing that seems to possess
the power of preserving the past is eventually destroyed by the Thought Police. All in all,
George Orwell portrays the perfect totalitarian society the most extreme realization imaginable
of a modern-day government with absolute power to warn the readers in the other places of the
danger of totalitarianism.
1984 of George Orwell represent a dystopian society, an imagined place or state in
which everything is unpleasant, bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one.
Yes, an environmentally degraded one as the Big Brother’s party members treated the people
so bad and also people on that time were disrespected. There is no freedom, maybe they are
married without love, they work not for their family, and they can’t seek pleasure in recreation.
They were surveilled by the government almost all the time and have no freedoms. The people
of Oceania knew that Thought Police were always around, but could never know which certain
individual or individuals were actually one of them. This caused them to be suspicious of
everyone and focus on not committing any violations. So there is no freedom, there is no
humanity, people died in vain on that time so that concludes to environmentally degraded one.
Today, let us say that some citizens in other places or countries are being watched but
not in the similar way like the people experiencing in 1984 by George Orwell. Maybe they are
being watched through different technological and personal ways in society than 1984. Today’s
government is also able to monitor most aspects of people’s life. Nowadays, almost every single
public place has cameras spread all over, where every single move one makes can be watched.
These surveillance cameras relate to the telescreens from 1984, where "it was conceivable that
Big Brother watched everybody all the time. The advancement in technology has caused
phones to have the ability to be "tapped" at anytime without knowing so, which means that a
conversation over the phone could be heard from beginning to end when something is found
suspicious within a person. Society has that natural feeling within them of being watched, and
though they may think they are not, they really are in some unknown way. But these statements
coming from me is also just an insights. Although George Orwell's prediction of the year 1984
did not necessarily come to reality at that point in time, it eventually came closely in our present
year but not that degraded one. There are apps on phone this time that can monitor your place
and movements. The human technology is improving so it is possible to be monitored everyday
like what 1984 story does and is more powerful or it is managed perfectly. If the government
force to make a surveillance camera to manage the people, the government can so 1984 will be
mirrored to us this time and it is possible. But, it will take years and years to have that kind of
surveillance camera that can monitor us everywhere we go .Surely that the government will do
that if it is necessary, like having some trouble with terrorist and also if the future government
has a kind of a ruler or same as 1984 propaganda. And maybe this 1984 is a social document
on the past history, maybe 1940’s.
