The Novel 1984 by George Orwell

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The book that my group decided to read is 1984 by George Orwell. I looked up the amount of chapters in the book to determine how I would split the amount of the story I talked about in these recap entries, and found out that the book was originally split into 3, and that my copy had the parts labelled. Because of this I have decided that I am going to be doing 3 recap entries, one for each of the parts. The story begins in dystopian London, which is now a part of a province known as Airstrip 1, which is itself part of a country called Oceania. In the first few chapters, we are introduced to a man named Winston Smith, who is a low ranking member of the Party, a group which rules Oceania with a totalitarian might. Although Winston is a member of the Party, his low, insignificant position within it makes it so that he is also under the strict rules of the Party. The Party uses psychological as well as physical control in order to brainwash citizens of Oceania into strictly obeying the Party. Winston works in one of the departments of the government known as the Ministry of Truth, and his job is basically to rewrite history to match the ideals of the party. If someone who the Party makes “disappear” happened to be in any forms of newspaper, magazine, book, etc., Winston and others in the same position would have to ensure that any form of media which references them is altered so that they never exist, and that the original media was destroyed so as to not leave any trails behind. This method is also used by the Party to alter history. Through doing this the party is able to make it seem like before they came into power after an event known as the Revolution, life was horrible and not worth living. They are able to make it so th... ... middle of paper ... ... the idea of the book within a book that Orwell did with Goldstein’s manifesto. I’ll be completely honest though, it took me around 3 reads to comprehend the entire thing because the language and subject matter he discusses is rather dry and dense. That’s not to say that I didn’t find it interesting, because I did. I am glad that at least a small amount of the history behind the nations in 1984 and the war in which they are involved is explained, specifically the economics and control-based reasoning behind it. I was completely shocked by Mr. Charrington’s revelation that he is a member of the Thoughtpolice, I had absolutely no suspicions that he was remotely involved with them. Because Charrington turned out to be antagonistic, my suspicions about O’Brien still stand, regardless of whether or not he told Winston and Julia he was a member of the Brotherhood.

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