1984 by George Orwell

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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 ... ... middle of paper ... ...her characters 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.

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