Examples Of Dystopia In 1984 By George Orwell

Utopia is commonly defined as a perfect world: a flawless land in which there is no crime, injustice, or anger. While utopia is dreamed of by many, it has yet to be achieved and hardly seems possible. In a perfect society, power would be equally distributed among those who have proven themselves worthy of the responsibility; however, humankind is greedy and craves supremacy. If control were to fall into the wrong hands, an attempted utopia could very quickly become tainted. Numerous authors have considered the possibility of a negative utopia, or a dystopia, and have written on the subject. Most of the novels have similar central themes, such as abuse of power and broken citizens, but above all, these novels suggest that trying to perfect society

The book deals largely with the idea of constant government surveillance and severe oppression by technology. In the novel, citizens of the nation Oceania are monitored at every moment, waking or sleeping, and can be arrested for unacceptable thoughts if their face gives them away. However, the authorities of Oceania, known collectively as the Party, do more than monitor their citizens to control them: they lie to them by physically changing history. If a government official makes a misstep, history is literally rewritten so that it seems like the official was correct in his statement. History is falsified so often to make the Party appear in control that the lines between fact and fiction become blurred. Citizens are so frequently lied to that they cannot distinguish between truth and lie, nor do they care to. They simply accept the supposed facts and move on. The narrator of the novel notes, “Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth” (Orwell 75). If the Party is never wrong, there is no reason for anyone to doubt it. Furthermore, the Party strives to make every citizen the