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An essay about the book george orwell in 1984
1984 analysis orwell
Literary analysis of 1984 by George Orwell
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In the novel 1984 by George Orwell, he knew how to use pain and suffering in an effective way to control a population and implement a totalitarian system. There were successful ways in psychological torture, physical abuse, and the fear of being in pain. Through traumatic torture, rebellious citizens are taught that the Party's perspective is the accurate perspective. The psychological torture that was used on Winston was the main reason as to why he lost faith in his own rebellion. The party’s main goal of mental abuse is to deindividualize him and strip Winston of his pride and identity. As soon as Winston’s sense of self was taken away, O’Brien rewired his mind so that Winston thinks how the Party wants him to think. He implements the …show more content…
Winston does not recognize himself anymore. He is a shell of who he used to be. The keeping of food was getting to him; he is a walking skeleton with recognition of who he truly is. With his sense of self lost, he places all remaining hope into O’Brien to make Winston back into somebody. He craves an identity, and a place in the world. Winston obeys O’Brien and the party without fail. Another method of physical torture that impacted Winston was the consistent beatings. There was always “four or five men”, and “there were times when it went on and on until the cruel, wicked, unforgivable thing seemed to him not that the guards continued to beat him but that he could not force himself into losing consciousness.” The men had beat Winston to a point where if one of them raised their arm, he would do anything they told him to. He would confess to whatever he had to because “the confession was a formality” and because he did not want to be brutalized anymore since “the torture was real.” At that point, O’Brien had gotten what he wanted. He had broken Winston down so much, and Winston was doing everything he had to do to stay alive. He would confess to crimes he did not commit, he participated in doublethink, and he believed that what the party said was the ultimate truth. He was playing the perfect part of a civilian in …show more content…
Citizens must constantly be in check of what they say, and what shows on their face as a reaction to a sentence. If you have children, they are what you need to watch out for. They grew up with the Big Brother control, and they are undoubtedly loyal to him, and only him. Kids will sell out their own parents in order to display their loyalty for Big Brother. All of the inhabitants of Oceania know that something terrible will happen to them if they disrespect Big Brother and the policies he stands for. They are aware that the thought police may come for them, and they would be taken to Room 101. Room 101 is where you are taken to face your greatest fears. The thought of having to face that terror head on, and the pain that could potentially arise from that, is a main contributor to Big Brothers power. For people to avoid the pain, they live in a state of denial, and do not acknowledge the oppressed state that they live in. However, they do not truly live at all. The only reason there are still people living in Oceania, is to serve Big Brother and the fact that you need people to rule over to have totalitarian
Winston commits “thoughtcrime” leading to his arrest and questioning at the Ministry of Love, the communities jail center working with matters pertaining to war. His comrade O’Brien begins torturing him in an underground room and calls it the “learning stage”. He teaches Winston the truth about the Party and their slogan; eventually he explains that “Freedom is Slavery” is easily reversed as “Slavery is freedom. Alone- free- the human being is always defeated… if he can make complete, utter submission… [and] merge himself in the Party… then he is all-powerful and immortal” (264). The Party uses this statement to illustrate that when one acknowledges the collective will, they become free from danger and desire. Those who are surrendered to INGSOC, including O’Brien, assume that when an individual has freedom they become subjugated to their senses and emotions. Moreover, Winston continues to be starved and tortured until he appears to be nothing but skin and bones when his opinions transition to align with the governments. He now accepts everything that O’Brien has expressed to him including that he is crazy and two plus two equals five. While he thinks about what he has been taught he thinks about “How easy it all was! Only surrender, and everything else followed… he hardly knew why he had ever rebelled” (278). In a sense, Winston is now free, only in a
O’Brien, the Brotherhood’s leader, turns Winston in and he goes to jail. There he is questioned by O’Brien and tortured, ...
Winston’s conversion is troubling for the adherent of the existence of free will. Winston’s conversion, facially, seems to show that outside forces determines a behavior and not the self. Our actions are determined by mechanistic laws that one can manipulate to result in a specific action. In fact, Winston’s conversion to the party ideas has provided a firm arguing point for the determinist who believes all our volitions are caused by an external event and thus do not truly belong to us. In a scene between O’Brien and Winston, O’Brien shows Winston four fingers demanding Winston to tell him that there were five fingers. At first, Winston denies that there are five fingers even as O’Brien gradually turns up the dials that inflict an excessive pain on Winston. O’Brien hurts Winston so badly that Winston cannot take it anymore and exclaims, “Five, five six- in all honesty I don’t know” seemingly surrendering his free will to O’Brien replacing his own beliefs with O’Brien’s beliefs (Orwell ...
Every human being has natural rights that can never be taken away. In an attempt to create a world where every person if offered a fair opportunity to live life, the United Nations passed a bill called The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in 1948. The document outlines the all the rights provided to everyone in the world, despite age, gender, religion etc. Civil liberties including, right to life, liberty and security of person; the right not to be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family or home; and right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, are incorporated in the Declaration. Despite the positive moral of the implemented civil rights, there have been numerous instances when essential civil liberties have been taken away from innocent people. By taking away natural rights from other people, the offenders attain the desired power and control. In the book, 1984, George Orwell presents the idea of how the world would become if all natural rights seized to exist. The omnipresent ruler of Oceania, named Big Brother, seizes all the natural rights of the citizens, to gain unconstrained power over everything and everyone. Big Brother’s dominants the lives of the citizens by strongly executing the idea of ‘mind over matter’ or doublethink to control the minds of the people, by the creation of groundbreaking technology to control the actions of the citizens and by controlling and modifying the English spoken and written language to express authority over freedom of thought and speech. The combination of the three methods helps Big Brother to create a never-ending rein on the minds and hearts of the citizens of Oceania.
His actions prove that despite what he thought before, even in believing that he’d be tortured and almost murdered in the end, he betrayed his own tongue after uttering the quote that was placed above. He, after fighting and fighting, eventually gave into the fact that he was going to die in such a horrendous way. The thought that it’d be from one of his greatest fears made it even worse. After surviving the torture from O’Brien, the rejection from Julia, and the mind battles brought upon himself after all of it, Winston couldn’t take it anymore, despite his past confessions never to give into the wrath of Big Brother. He betrayed Julia, which in turn caused him to betray himself. He performs the greatest betrayal of all, he stops loving her, and in turn, stops loving himself as well (Katherine K). He knows he’s been defeated by the end of the book. That blank face he has, thinking about how great the Party is even though it’s not, just goes on to prove that very point. Winston is defeated, after betrayal had taken over his life and altered his mind.
Keep in mind, Winston was used as a pawn throughout the novel for the reader to replace with him or herself to empathize and understand the social constructs throughout the piece. From the very beginning, Winston’s foremost admiration for O’Brien is made very clear, “In spite of his formidable appearance, he had a certain charm of manner. He had a trick of resettling his spectacles on his nose which was curiously disarming - in some definable way, curiously civilized …- He felt deeply drawn to him” (Orwell, 10-11). The author establishes this intense connection to firstly root trust with this character, and to foreshadow and set red flags off in the reader 's mind that this character will be brought up again. To really establish the bond between Winston and O’Brien, after he betrays Winston, Winston still believes in his hero, the mighty O’Brien. Winston starts by meeting O’Brien again, and is elated. He cries out to him, “‘They’ve got you too!’ He cried. “They got me a long time ago.” Said O’Brien with a mild, almost regretful irony” (Orwell,238).Yet again, in the end, at Winston’s lowest state, he has an intense and almost fatherly/paternal connection to O’Brien. During his visit in room 101, Winston is faced with his worst fear - and in that moment, all he can imagine is “He was falling backwards, into enormous depths, away from the rats. He was still
Both are taken into custody and tortured and beaten so that they can be rebuilt to obey the Party and to sell out each other. Winston takes many days of torture and pain before he is put into room 101 where he is encountered with his worst fear,which is rats. Winston the breaks down and yells, “Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! I don’t care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me” (Orwell 286). The only thing that kept Winston going was the fact that he hadn’t yet betrayed Julia, and he felt determined to never betray her. With Julia, O’Brien told Winston that she gave him away almost instantly. She was all about saving herself,and did not care about what could happen to Winston now that they were caught and their relationship would not continue.
In order for the Party to survive in 1984, the people of Oceania must be dehumanized. This cruelty is achieved by removing the people's freedom of thought and emotion, to the point of elimination of all love and connections to everything but the Party. George Orwell drew inspiration from regimes such as Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. These units of government, including Oceania, live in a fragile balance of power, in which total control is necessary for survival.
George Orwell paints torture as an unavoidable means to an end; complete ideological control of the population a government controls. Any form of torture will subdue anyone into thinking inside of the box, because it works by depersonalizing, dehumanizing, and completely stripping any sense of individuality in order to attain control of anyone. He does so by describing in exhaustive detail the physical and psychological effects of the brainwashing of Winston Smith, rebranded, “becoming sane” by The Party.
The Party in 1984 uses pain to torture its enemies. Great torment inflicted in the Ministry of Love, the interior ministry that enforces loyalty to Big Brother, “convinces” political criminals to see the light. In the Ministry of Love, or Miniluv for short, they break you down into a shell of your once beloved humanity. Through beatings, torture devices, and starvation, the Party forcefully unravels their enemies in order to build them back up from scratch. The protagonist Winston experienced extreme cases of torture because he was caught as an enemy to the Party. To break him down, they put him on a torture device that bent his back from extreme amounts of pressure to the point where he would black out from the pain. When he woke up, the extreme intensity of the pain from this type of torture was enough for him to submit to whatever the Party wanted him to submit to. Winston even eventually submitted to the idea that 2+2=5 because he was repeatedly told that that was the case.To get Winston further, the Party found out his greatest fear, rats, and threatened him with a cage of hungry rats eating through him. The anticipation of that great pain was enough for Winston to crumble into the Party’s
Winston is unable to “turn off” his brain. In the book it is demonstrated when O’Brien advises Winston at the end that he must not say that one two and another two make five but actually believe it, Winston cannot grasp that concept at all. In Winston’s mind, he feels as if it is five, and even acts as if he knows it is; however, he cannot possibly believe it because his brains fails to work as a human’s should in such a
One wrong move and these citizens will be subjected to copious amounts of torture as a curing method. They live in constant fear as they are slowly being manipulated every day. In 1984, George Orwell explores psychological manipulation of society while living in Oceania under control of the Party.
The novel 1984 and film “V for Vendetta” both stories use torture as a way to brainwash the victim, to keep control over them and to take their identity away from them. Replacing it with another identity that is more beneficial to the party of the interrogator. The meanings of torture start of the similar, for the purpose of the creation of a new identity, but each story leads on to a different take on the verdict of a dystopian society run by a totalitarian government. Despite the themes expressed in each story and the purpose of torture being similar, the meaning and overall message conveyed to the readers from 1984 differ from those of “V for Vendetta”.
O’Brien begins to “improve” Winston’s mind through physical pain; by using cruel methods of torture, he succeeds in weakening and molding Winston’s mentality. In their early sessions, O’Brien tries to convince Winston of his “truth” that two plus two equals five. He subjects Winston to physical pain until Winston’s mind begins to question itself. Eventually torture wears him down to the point of madness, as “the scenery of his mind changed”. He saw five fingers and there was no deformity.”
In today’s world we still cite George Orwell’s novel 1984 when talking about psychological manipulation and how we are affected by it. Winston Smith and the rest of the citizens of Oceania are controlled daily by the use of psychological manipulation done by the overpowering government. They are constantly monitored by telescreens and filled with the fear that the thought police will come after them for thinking and saying radical thoughts. A known fact in Oceania citizens lives is that Big Brother is always watching you. The government of Oceania is the epitome of psychological manipulation and by maintaining power it causes distress on society.