Society’s Influence on 1984 and George Orwell

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Society’s Influence on 1984 and George Orwell

"To say 'I accept' in an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration-camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas-masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press-censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films and political murder" (Bookshelf I).

Politics, society, economy, and war during the forties had a direct impact on life at the time. A good example of this influence was the writing of Eric Arthur Blair, whose pen-name was George Orwell (Bookshelf II).

George Orwell's 1984 is written from a third person perspective-in this case, a selective omniscient, focusing mostly on the character of Winston Smith. The story was written in 1949-the same year Silly Putty was invented (Bookshelf III)-and was a prediction of the future world (as Orwell saw it). The story starts out in the residence of Winston, where he begins to write a diary. He does not know if the year is 1984, though. It must have been "around that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945" (Orwell 10). He works for the Ministry of Truth, in the Records Department. The job of the Ministry of Truth (Minitrue-in Newspeak; the native language in Oceania, where Winston lived) was to be concerned with the news, entertainment, fine arts, and education of Oceania (Orwell 7-8). The society he lives in is a totalitarian society and he works for the government, along with most of the people in the society. He has negative thoughts about the governmental system that he lives in and he starts to become curious if there is a way to over throw this...

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V-Quotations1: Jeannette Rankin (1880-1973), U.S. suffragist, politician. Quoted in: Hannah Josephson, Jeanette Rankin: First Lady in Congress, ch. 8 (1974).

*Bookshelf '95-Copyrights (from books cited on CD)

1-The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations is licensed from Columbia University Press. Copyright (c) 1993 by Columbia University Press. All rights reserved

2-The Concise Columbia Encyclopedia is licensed from Columbia University Press. Copyright (c) 1995 by Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

3-The People's Chronology is licensed from Henry Holt and Company, Inc. Copyright (c) 1994 by James Trager. All rights reserved.

Orwell, George. 1984. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1949.

Ross, William T. "Pacifism vs. Patriotism: The Case of George Orwell." Weber Studies. Ogden, Utah: Weber State University, Spring 1995

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