1984 by George Orwell

1984 by George Orwell Some readers have felt that, even allowing for the bleakness of the

times in which he lived, Orwell’s vision in Nineteen Eighty Four is

excessively grim and pessimistic. Explore various aspects of the novel

from this perspective, explaining how far you would agree with such a

view.

Orwell’s views throughout ‘1984’ are grim and pessimistic in relation

to his personal experiences and how he interprets the world, as we

know, and what it may become. The possibility of a totalitarian

society, which he so fears, is the reason that his views in the novel

are as bleak as they are, and why he has created this dystopia for the

reader to fear.

From the first page of the novel it is already clear in the readers’

minds Orwell’s bleak picture of the places he describes. The continent

of Oceania entails only sordid living conditions and strict government

controls, a situation far away from the world that we live in today.

There are very few positive images in the novel, and even then these

are ambivalent. Julia is described as beautiful, but previously in the

novel Winston thinks about her; “Winston had disliked her from the

very first moment of seeing her”. It is clear that Orwell was intent

on setting a grim tone for the novel to reflect the highly grim

content. I believe he created this world to reflect the mood of the

time as realistically as possible. The Second World War had only

recently finished and the situation was improving but still bleak.

Readers would have recognised the world Orwell so vividly describes
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in the book are constantly referred to as powerless and their eventual

death creates an onslaught of pessimism from Orwell; the Party and its

surroundings are consistently grim and relationships and love do not

prevail; this is realism in its most disillusioned form. I believe

that despite the harsh surroundings and grimness, it is not overly so.

This is due to the fact that Orwell tries to create a political

warning for the world that he believes to be a realistic situation in

the future, and to an extent he succeeds. The world has seen

televisions in every household and ongoing war and dictators’ attempts

at continental domination in every year since the book was written. It

is because of Orwell’s selfless intentions in the book that he

succeeds in making a pessimistic yet possible view for the future.