a good thesis statement for the book 1984

A Summary and Analysis of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four , completed in 1948 and published a year later, is a classic example of dystopian fiction. Indeed, it’s surely the most famous dystopian novel in the world, even if its ideas are known by far more people than have actually read it. (According to at least one survey , Nineteen Eighty-Four is the book people most often claim to have read when they haven’t.)

Like many novels that are more known about than are carefully read and analysed, Nineteen Eighty-Four is actually a more complex work than the label ‘nightmare dystopian vision’ can convey. Before we offer an analysis of the novel’s themes and origins, let’s briefly recap the plot.

Nineteen Eighty-Four : plot summary

In the year 1984, Britain has been renamed Airstrip One and is a province of Oceania, a vast totalitarian superstate ruled by ‘the Party’, whose politics are described as Ingsoc (‘English Socialism’). Big Brother is the leader of the Party, which keeps its citizens in a perpetual state of fear and submission through a variety of means.

Surveillance is a key part of the novel’s world, with hidden microphones (which are found in the countryside as well as urban areas, and can identify not only what is said but also who says it) and two-way telescreen monitors being used to root out any dissidents, who disappear from society with all trace of their existence wiped out.

They become, in the language of Newspeak (the language used by people in the novel), ‘unpersons’. People are short of food, perpetually on the brink of starvation, and going about in fear for their lives.

The novel’s setting is London, where Trafalgar Square has been renamed Victory Square and the statue of Horatio Nelson atop Nelson’s Column has been replaced by one of Big Brother. Through such touches, Orwell defamiliarises the London of the 1940s which the original readers would have recognised, showing how the London they know might be transformed under a totalitarian regime.

The novel’s protagonist is Winston Smith, who works at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting historical records so they are consistent with the state’s latest version of history. However, even though his day job involves doing the work of the Party, Winston longs to escape the oppressive control of the Party, hoping for a rebellion.

Winston meets the owner of an antique shop named Mr Charrington, from whom he buys a diary in which he can record his true feelings towards the Party. Believing the working-class ‘proles’ are the key to a revolution, Winston visits them, but is disappointed to find them wholly lacking in any political understanding.

Meanwhile, hearing of the existence of an underground resistance movement known as the Brotherhood – which has been formed by the rival of Big Brother, a man named Emmanuel Goldstein – Winston suspects that O’Brien, who also works with him, is involved with this resistance.

At lunch with another colleague, named Syme, Winston learns that the English language is being rewritten as Newspeak so as to control and influence people’s thought, the idea being that if the word for an idea doesn’t exist in the language, people will be unable to think about it.

Winston meets a woman named Julia who works for the Ministry of Truth, maintaining novel-writing machines, but believes she is a Party spy sent to watch him. But then Julia passes a clandestine love message to him and the two begin an affair – which is itself illicit since the Party decrees that sex is for reproduction alone, rather than pleasure.

We gradually learn more about Winston’s past, including his marriage to Katherine, from whom he is now separated. Syme, who had been working on Newspeak, disappears in mysterious circumstances: something Winston had predicted.

O’Brien invites Winston to his flat, declaring himself – as Winston had also predicted – a member of the Brotherhood, the resistance against the Party. He gives Winston a copy of the book written by Goldstein, the leader of the Brotherhood.

When Oceania’s enemy changes during the ritual Hate Week, Winston is tasked with making further historical revisions to old newspapers and documents to reflect this change.

Meanwhile, Winston and Julia secretly read Goldstein’s book, which explains how the Party maintains its totalitarian power. As Winston had suspected, the secret to overthrowing the Party lies in the vast mass of the population known as the ‘proles’ (derived from ‘proletarian’, Marx’s term for the working classes). It argues that the Party can be overthrown if proles rise up against it.

But shortly after this, Winston and Julia are arrested, having been shopped to the authorities by Mr Charrington (whose flat above his shop they had been using for their illicit meetings). It turns out that both he and O’Brien work for the Thought Police, on behalf of the Party.

At the Ministry of Love, O’Brien tells Winston that Goldstein’s book was actually written by him and other Party members, and that the Brotherhood may not even exist. Winston endures torture and starvation in an attempt to grind him down so he will accept Big Brother.

In Room 101, a room in which a prisoner is exposed to their greatest fear, Winston is placed in front of a wire cage containing rats, which he fears above all else. Winston betrays Julia, wishing she could take his place and endure this suffering instead.

His reprogramming complete, Winston is allowed to go free, but he is essentially living under a death sentence: he knows that one day he will be summoned by the authorities and shot for his former treachery.

He meets Julia one day, and learns that she was subjected to torture at the Ministry of Love as well. They have both betrayed each other, and part ways. The novel ends with Winston accepting, after all, that the Party has won and that ‘he loved Big Brother.’

Nineteen Eighty-Four : analysis

Nineteen Eighty-Four is probably the most famous novel about totalitarianism, and about the dangers of allowing a one-party state where democracy, freedom of movement, freedom of speech, and even freedom of thought are all outlawed. The novel is often analysed as a warning about the dangers of allowing a creeping totalitarianism into Britain, after the horrors of such regimes in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and elsewhere had been witnessed.

Because of this quality of the book, it is often called ‘prophetic’ and a ‘nightmare vision of the future’, among other things.

However, books set in the future are rarely simply about the future. They are not mere speculation, but are grounded in the circumstances in which they were written.

Indeed, we might go so far as to say that most dystopian novels, whilst nominally set in an imagined future, are really using their future setting to reflect on what are already firmly established social or political ideas. In the case of Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four , this means the novel reflects the London of the 1940s.

By the time he came to write the novel, Orwell already had a long-standing interest in using his writing to highlight the horrors of totalitarianism around the world, especially following his experience fighting in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. As Orwell put it in his essay ‘ Why I Write ’, all of his serious work written since 1936 was written ‘ against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism’.

In his analysis of Nineteen Eighty-Four in his study of Orwell, George Orwell (Reader’s Guides) , Jeffrey Meyers argues convincingly that, rather than being a nightmare vision of the future, a prophetic or speculative work, Orwell’s novel is actually a ‘realistic synthesis and rearrangement of familiar materials’ – indeed, as much of Orwell’s best work is.

His talent lay not in original imaginative thinking but in clear-headed critical analysis of things as they are: his essays are a prime example of this. Nineteen Eighty-Four is, in Meyer’s words, ‘realistic rather than fantastic’.

Indeed, Orwell himself stated that although the novel was ‘in a sense a fantasy’, it is written in the form of the naturalistic novel, with its themes and ideas having been already ‘partly realised in Communism and fascism’. Orwell’s intention, as stated by Orwell himself, was to take the totalitarian ideas that had ‘taken root’ in the minds of intellectuals all over Europe, and draw them out ‘to their logical consequences’.

Like much classic speculative fiction – the novels and stories of J. G. Ballard offer another example – the futuristic vision of the author is more a reflection of contemporary anxieties and concerns. Meyers goes so far as to argue that Nineteen Eighty-Four is actually the political regimes of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia ‘transposed’ into London of the early 1940s, during the Second World War.

Certainly, many of the most famous features of Nineteen Eighty-Four were suggested to Orwell by his time working at the BBC in London in the first half of the 1940s: it is well-known that the Ministry of Truth was based on the bureaucratic BBC with its propaganda department, while the infamous Room 101 was supposedly named after a room of that number in the BBC building, in which Orwell had to endure tedious meetings.

The technology of the novel, too, was familiar by the 1940s, involving little innovation or leaps of imagination from Orwell (‘telescreens’ being a natural extension of the television set: BBC TV had been established in 1936, although the Second World War pushed back its development somewhat).

Orwell learned much about the workings of Stalinism from reading Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed (1937), written by one of the leading figures in the Russian Revolution of 1917 who saw Stalinist Russia as the antithesis of what Trotsky, Lenin, and those early revolutionaries had been striving to achieve. (This would also be important for Orwell’s Animal Farm , of course.)

And indeed, many of the details surrounding censorship – the rewriting of history, the suppression of dissident literature, the control of the language people use to express themselves and even to think in – were also derived from Orwell’s reading of life in Soviet Russia. Surveillance was also a key element of the Stalinist regime, as in other Communist countries in Europe.

The moustachioed figure of Big Brother in Nineteen Eighty-Four recalls nobody so much as Josef Stalin himself. Not only the ideas of ‘thought crime’ and ‘thought police’, but even the terms themselves, predate Orwell’s use of them: they were first recorded in a 1934 book about Japan.

One of the key questions Winston asks himself in Nineteen Eighty-Four is what the Party is trying to achieve. O’Brien’s answer is simple: the maintaining of power for its own sake. Many human beings want to control other human beings, and they can persuade a worrying number of people to go along with their plans and even actively support them.

Despite the fact that they are starving and living a miserable life, many of the people in Airstrip One love Big Brother, viewing him not as a tyrannical dictator but as their ‘Saviour’ (as one woman calls him). Again, this detail was taken from accounts of Stalin, who was revered by many Russians even though they were often living a wretched life under his rule.

Another key theme of Orwell’s novel is the relationship between language and thought. In our era of fake news and corrupt media, this has only become even more pronounced: if you lie to a population and confuse them enough, you can control them. O’Brien introduces Winston to the work of the traitor to the Party, Emmanuel Goldstein, only to tell him later that Goldstein may not exist and his book was actually written by the Party.

Is this the lie, or was the book the lie? One of the most famous lines from the novel is Winston’s note to himself in his diary: ‘Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.’

But later, O’Brien will force Winston to ‘admit’ that two plus two can make five. Orwell tells us, ‘The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.’

Or as Voltaire once wrote, ‘Truly, whoever is able to make you absurd is able to make you unjust.’ Forcing somebody to utter blatant falsehoods is a powerful psychological tool for totalitarian regimes because through doing so, they have chipped away at your moral and intellectual integrity.

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4 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four”

1984 is a novel which is great in spite of itself and has been lionised for the wrong reasons. The title of the novel is a simple anagram of 1948, the date when the novel was written, and was driven by Orwell’s paranoia about the 1945 Labour government in UK. Orwell, a public school man, had built a reputation for hiself in the nineteen thirties as a socialist writer, and had fought for socialism in the Spanish civil war. The Road To Wigan Pier is an excellent polemic attacking the way the UK government was handling the mass unemployment of the time, reducing workers to a state of near starvation. In Homage To Catalonia, Orwell describes his experiences fighting with a small Marxist militia against Franco’s fascists. It was in Spain that Orwell developed his lifelong hatred of Stalinism, observing that the Communist contingents were more interested in suppressing other left-wing factions than in defeating Franco. The 1945 Labour government ws Britain’s first democratically elected socialist governement. It successfully established the welfare state and the National Health Service in a country almost bankrupted by the war, and despite the fact that Truman in USA was demanding the punctual repayment of wartime loans. Instead of rejoicing, Orwell, by now terminally ill from tuberculosis, saw the necessary continuation of wartime austerity and rationing as a deliberate and unnecessary imposition. Consequently, the book is often used as propaganda against socialism. The virtues of the book are the warnings about the dangers of giving the state too much power, in the form of electronic surveillance, ehanced police powers, intrusive laws, and the insidious use of political propaganda to warp peoples’ thinking. All of this has come to pass in the West as well as the East, but because of the overtly anticommunist spin to Orwell’s novel, most people fail to get its important message..

As with other work here, another good review. I’m also fascinated that Orwell located the government as prime problem, whereas Huxley located the people as prime problem, two sides of the same coin.

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Essays on 1984

Hook examples for "1984" essays, the dystopian warning hook.

Open your essay by discussing George Orwell's "1984" as a prophetic warning against totalitarianism and government surveillance. Explore how the novel's themes are eerily relevant in today's world.

The Orwellian Language Hook

Delve into the concept of Newspeak in "1984" and its parallels to modern language manipulation. Discuss how the novel's portrayal of controlled language reflects real-world instances of propaganda and censorship.

Big Brother is Watching Hook

Begin with a focus on surveillance and privacy concerns. Analyze the omnipresent surveillance in the novel and draw connections to contemporary debates over surveillance technologies, data privacy, and civil liberties.

The Power of Doublethink Hook

Explore the psychological manipulation in "1984" through the concept of doublethink. Discuss how individuals in the novel are coerced into accepting contradictory beliefs, and examine instances of cognitive dissonance in society today.

The Character of Winston Smith Hook

Introduce your readers to the protagonist, Winston Smith, and his journey of rebellion against the Party. Analyze his character development and the universal theme of resistance against oppressive regimes.

Technology and Control Hook

Discuss the role of technology in "1984" and its implications for control. Explore how advancements in surveillance technology, social media, and artificial intelligence resonate with the novel's themes of control and manipulation.

The Ministry of Truth Hook

Examine the Ministry of Truth in the novel, responsible for rewriting history. Compare this to the manipulation of information and historical revisionism in contemporary politics and media.

Media Manipulation and Fake News Hook

Draw parallels between the Party's manipulation of information in "1984" and the spread of misinformation and fake news in today's media landscape. Discuss the consequences of a distorted reality.

Relevance of Thoughtcrime Hook

Explore the concept of thoughtcrime and its impact on individual freedom in the novel. Discuss how society today grapples with issues related to freedom of thought, expression, and censorship.

1984 Movie Vs Book Analysis

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Examples of Paradoxes in 1984

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8 June 1949, George Orwell

Novel; Dystopia, Political Fiction, Social Science Fiction Novel

Winston Smith, Julia, O'Brien, Aaronson, Jones, and Rutherford, Ampleforth, Charrington, Tom Parsons, Syme, Mrs. Parsons, Katharine Smith

Since Orwell has been a democratic socialist, he has modelled his book and motives after the Stalinist Russia

Power, Repressive Behaviors, Totalitarianism, Mass Surveillance, Human Behaviors

The novel has brought up the "Orwellian" term, which stands for "Big Brother" "Thoughtcrime" and many other terms that we know well. It has been the reflection of totalitarianism

1984 represents a dystopian writing that has followed the life of Winston Smith who belongs to the "Party",which stands for the total control, which is also known as the Big Brother. It controls every aspect of people's lives. Is it ever possible to go against the system or will it take even more control. It constantly follows the fear and oppression with the surveillance being the main part of 1984. There is Party’s official O’Brien who is following the resistance movement, which represents an alternative, which is the symbol of hope.

Before George Orwell wrote his famous book, he worked for the BBC as the propagandist during World War II. The novel has been named 1980, then 1982 before finally settling on its name. Orwell fought tuberculosis while writing the novel. He died seven months after 1984 was published. Orwell almost died during the boating trip while he was writing the novel. Orwell himself has been under government surveillance. It was because of his socialist opinions. The slogan that the book uses "2 + 2 = 5" originally came from Communist Russia and stood for the five-year plan that had to be achieved during only four years. Orwell also used various Japanese propaganda when writing his novel, precisely his "Thought Police" idea.

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” “Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.” “Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.” “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” "But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred."

The most important aspect of 1984 is Thought Police, which controls every thought. It has been featured in numerous books, plays, music pieces, poetry, and anything that has been created when one had to deal with Social Science and Politics. Another factor that represents culmination is thinking about overthrowing the system or trying to organize a resistance movement. It has numerous reflections of the post WW2 world. Although the novella is graphic and quite intense, it portrays dictatorship and is driven by fear through the lens of its characters.

This essay topic is often used when writing about “The Big Brother” or totalitarian regimes, which makes 1984 a flexible topic that can be taken as the foundation. Even if you have to write about the use of fear by the political regimes, knowing the facts about this novel will help you to provide an example.

1. Enteen, G. M. (1984). George Orwell And the Theory of Totalitarianism: A 1984 Retrospective. The Journal of General Education, 36(3), 206-215. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/27797000) 2. Hughes, I. (2021). 1984. Literary Cultures, 4(2). (https://journals.ntu.ac.uk/index.php/litc/article/view/340) 3. Patai, D. (1982). Gamesmanship and Androcentrism in Orwell's 1984. PMLA, 97(5), 856-870. (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/pmla/article/abs/gamesmanship-and-androcentrism-in-orwells-1984/F1B026BE9D97EE0114E248AA733B189D) 4. Paden, R. (1984). Surveillance and Torture: Foucault and Orwell on the Methods of Discipline. Social Theory and Practice, 10(3), 261-271. (https://www.pdcnet.org/soctheorpract/content/soctheorpract_1984_0010_0003_0261_0272) 5. Tyner, J. A. (2004). Self and space, resistance and discipline: a Foucauldian reading of George Orwell's 1984. Social & Cultural Geography, 5(1), 129-149. (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1464936032000137966) 6. Kellner, D. (1990). From 1984 to one-dimensional man: Critical reflections on Orwell and Marcuse. Current Perspectives in Social Theory, 10, 223-52. (https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/from1984toonedimensional.pdf) 7. Samuelson, P. (1984). Good legal writing: of Orwell and window panes. U. Pitt. L. Rev., 46, 149. (https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/upitt46&div=13&id=&page=) 8. Fadaee, E. (2011). Translation techniques of figures of speech: A case study of George Orwell's" 1984 and Animal Farm. Journal of English and Literature, 2(8), 174-181. (https://academicjournals.org/article/article1379427897_Fadaee.pdf) 9. Patai, D. (1984, January). Orwell's despair, Burdekin's hope: Gender and power in dystopia. In Women's Studies International Forum (Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 85-95). Pergamon. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0277539584900621) 10. Cole, M. B. (2022). The Desperate Radicalism of Orwell’s 1984: Power, Socialism, and Utopia in Dystopian Times. Political Research Quarterly, 10659129221083286. (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/10659129221083286)

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George Orwells 1984 - Free Essay Examples And Topic Ideas

1984 is a dystopian novel by George Orwell that explores the dangers of totalitarianism and surveillance. Essays on this topic could delve into the themes of surveillance, truth, and totalitarianism in the novel, discuss its relevance to contemporary societal issues, or compare Orwell’s dystopian vision to other dystopian or utopian literary works. A substantial compilation of free essay instances related to George Orwell’s 1984 you can find at PapersOwl Website. You can use our samples for inspiration to write your own essay, research paper, or just to explore a new topic for yourself.

Dissecting Dystopia: George Orwells 1984 and the World of Oceania

George Orwell's "1984", a terrifying portrayal of dictatorship seen through the prism of a made-up superstate called Oceania, is still regarded as a classic piece of literature. Examining how Orwell's dystopian picture of the world mirrors larger concerns of power, surveillance, and the human spirit under authoritarian control, this article explores the complex world-building of Oceania. In the film "1984," Oceania is shown as an authoritarian society marked by ongoing conflict, constant government monitoring, and widespread public manipulation. Orwell painstakingly […]

1984 and Brave New World Comparison

As years pass by, human society has advanced in very unpredictable ways due to the evolution of ideas and technologies. It is somewhat cloudy to forseek what new advancements that may arrive in the future. In the 20th century, two dystopian writers had predicted the fate of the world that we live in today. The novels Nineteen Eighty-Four written by George Orwell and Brave New World written by Aldous Huxley both envisioned how society would end up as a dystopia. […]

1984 Compared to Today

In the world today, the internet is at the center of our actions. The internet and technology enable the recording of everything we do, which can be accessed by millions of people within a short time. This leads to the question of privacy in this age. In the novel "1984" by George Orwell, the main character, Winston Smith, and the rest of the population in Oceania are being surveyed. All their moves are followed with the help of telescreens purposed […]

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Winston against the Party in the Novel 1984

In 1984, the main character, Winston Smith goes through moments where he is in need; His needs consist of physiological needs, safety, and security needs, love and belonging needs, esteem needs, and self-actualization needs. Winston is the main character in his novel it follows his around during this time. In 1984 Winston has his physiological met. These physiological needs include; water, pleasure, and food. Winston had taken up his spoon and was dabbling in pale-colored gravy that dribbled across the […]

1984 the Soviet Union the Parallels

George Orwell is an author who wrote the book 1984 and Animal Farm, two famous Dystopian novels. But what is a dystopian novel? A dystopian novel is where the author writes about a society being oppressed or terrorized from a group of people or person(Jennifer Kendall). Typically in dystopian novels, we are shown a character who don’t agree with the government structure and tend to rebel against them. Although dystopian novels are fictional, it doesn’t mean that it can’t happen […]

1984 Surveillance Essay

George Orwell's 1984 writes of a dystopian society that has become severally oppressed by the methods ‘The Party' uses to control its society. The people do not think for themselves, and there is no independence from the government’s rules. One form that the party has control over everyone is with mind manipulation and constant surveillance, watching people actions and reactions to their messages that ‘The Party’ shares via the ‘telescreen’. A ‘telescreen’ is a two-way connection screen that people watch […]

Lack of Privacy in 1984 Essay

Privacy is a loose term in our world today because no one abides by it and the privacy of many people is invaded every day. People don’t even think about being watched when they’re posting personal experiences in their life on social media. Invasion of privacy is a serious issue concerning the Internet, as e-mails can be read and/or encrypted, and cookies can track a user and store personal information. Lack of privacy policies and employee monitoring threatens security also. […]

Main Themes in 1984

There are many Themes in 1984 however there are two that show themselves as the most important throughout the story: The disastrous effects of both the control of information and complete and total domination of the people, or Authoritarianism. These two themes show themselves many times throughout the entire story. The main Villain of the novel, Big Brother, exists to show the reader what will happen when one single organization or entity controls all information, and every other facet of […]

Nature and Animals 1984 Essay

In George Orwell's 1984, the reader follows a middle-aged man named Winston Smith. In Winston's society, people can be under surveillance at any time, in any place. The reader follows Winston through his affair with a woman named Julia, and the consequences that they face after. Throughout 1984, many motifs are represented, one of them being nature and animals. The motif of nature/animals demonstrates how Orwell connects characters in his book to animals. In 1984, the first time the reader […]

Parallels between a Novel 1984 and Soviet Union

George Orwell is a politically charged author who writes novels as warning issued against the dangers of totalitarian societies. The novel is dystopian literature. A dystopian society is the not so good version of an utopian society which is pretty much a perfect world. While an utopian society IS a perfect world, a dystopian society is the exact opposite as it is dehumanizing and unpleasant in regards to trying to make everything ideal. The novel 1984 by George Orwell is […]

1984 Literary Essay

In the novel 1984 war ment peace, freedom ment slavery, and ignorance ment strength. This novel very intriguing yet dark and twisted, the novel all began with an average man with an average job and an average life named Winston Smith, but what you don't know is how unruly the government is. The government believes everyone they have in their grasp they completely and utterly control, they have dehumanized humans to the point where they can't hardly think for themselves […]

Current Events Shaped Themes in 1984

Throughout history there have been dozens of examples of how the book 1984 relates to current events. A Prime example of this is Fidel Castro and 1960's Cuba, Throughout his rule he was responsible for housing many soviet missiles, and limiting the freedoms of his people. The only news allowed in cuba was the news that was verified by either castro himself or his higher up officers. This is an example of censoring/controlling the media. Throughout the book there are […]

George Orwell’s Fiction Novel 1984

With new technology and advanced programs, the government is gaining more power than one may realize. George Orwell’s fiction novel 1984, depicts Oceania’s control upon it’s party members thoughts and freedom showcasing the harsh effects that it had on its population. Too much control can often lead to social repression, Winston being a product of this repressed society. The cruelty Winston is faced with serves as both a motivation for him throughout the novel and reveals many hidden traits about […]

The Party and Power 1984

William Gaddis once said, “power doesn’t corrupt people, people corrupt power”; a truth that perfectly articulates the relationship between man and power. George Orwell’s prose novel, 1984, and James McTeigue’s theatrical film, V for Vendetta, are such quintessences of power abused by those in pursuit of reaching authoritative domination. They differ in textual form and perspectives however at their core, both texts are works of dystopian fiction and juvenalian satire against authoritarian style leaderships, depicting their respective protagonists as victims […]

A Political Novel 1984

1984 is a political novel composed for the humans below a totalitarian authorities and to give consciousness for the feasible dangers of it. George Orwell, the author, purposefully created the e book give emphasis to the rising of communism in Western countries who are nonetheless uncertain about how to approach it. He additionally wrote it due to having an insight of the horrendous lengths to which authoritarian governments that ought to possibly go beyond their power such as Spain and […]

The Power of Words and Rhetoric in 1984

In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently against the ring of his chair (Orwell 14). Winston Smith is an average man in the world of 1984, at least that is what readers believe at first glance. However, there is a hidden life under the surface of his skin, this being the brewing hatred he feels for the, otherwise, worshiped Big Brother. Smith meets an unlikely companion in a young […]

About the Hazard of Controlling Governments in 1984

Dystopian literature has been around for quite some time, shaping the minds of young readers. However, in the course of recent decades, it has turned out to be increasingly popular, especially after the turn of the century. In a time of fear and anxiety, the dystopian genre has become more popular in pop culture, in that they provide audiences with a different aspect of entertainment, while offering a sense of comfort and control. The world that young adults of today […]

The Tools and Actions of Totalitarianism in Cuba and “1984” by George Orwell

George Orwell’s book 1984 displayed an example of a real-life dystopia. Totalitarianism is shown in this communist-based society so ghastly that it coined its own term “Orwellian” in the dictionary. However, a country living in full surveillance with extremely nationalistic views in cookie-cutter world is not entirely fictional. Historical dictatorships are similar to Orwell’s telling of Big Brother, the man in control of Oceania’s economy and strictly enforced values. An example of such was the Cuban regime under control of […]

Wake up its 1984 again

War is peace; freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength In the book 1984 by George Orwell, Big brother is an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent dictator of Oceania. Big Brother symbolizes the face of the Party and its public manifestation, which controlled people's thoughts, actions, knowledge and way of living. By using secret police, surveillance, torture, propaganda, misinformation, and corrupted languages to control all aspects of one's life. Even though the book was meant to be fictional, there is some elements […]

The Parallels of 1984 and the Soviet Union

George Orwell, a pen name for the author’s real name Eric Arthur Blair, is a man that had multiple professions, such as an essayist, imperial police officer, and a critic. However, he is best known as a novelist, writing such stories like Animal Farm, Burmese Days, and the main focus novel that will be talked about today, 1984. 1984 is the story about a man named Winston Smith, a man that lives in a totalitarian society where no one is […]

What did 1984 Steal from 1922

There have been many dictators in the history of the world. They have been mostly bad for the people of the society, reducing their ability to stand up for them self. Most dictators used fear and intimidation to scare their opponents into complying with them, but in 1984 they limited their vocabulary (newspeak) and twisted what they were saying to make it sound nicer (doublespeak) to get the people to comply with the rules. The Party in 1984 is influenced […]

The Party Control in 1984

1984 is a story of tragedy and warns of a dystopian future, which day by day looks like it is becoming closer to a reality. The story starts out with Winston Smith, a member of the Party, living inside the conglomerate super-nation Oceania. Everywhere Winston goes, he is being watched by the Party's leader, Big Brother, who is constantly monitoring to stop any and all rebellion. The Party controls everything and are trying to indoctrinate people, inventing a brand new […]

My 1984 Story

INTRODUCTION The Party did the people wrong and treated them poorly because the Party wanted them to do what they asked for and manipulating their minds. Orwell wanted to tell people how the Party treated other people and what they had to sacrifice in order to do what was told. For it to be one of the most powerful warnings that ever happened in the totalitarian society. George Orwell’s 1984 is a interesting and constructive book that is filled with […]

Dystopian Literature – 1984

The destruction of history causes people to obey the party more and become mindless objects to the party. The party imposed if all records told the same tale then the lie passed into history and became truth. Who controls the past ran the party slogan controls the future who controls the present controls the past And the through of its nature alterable never has been altered{ Orwell p.31}. It represent imagery and talks about how the party controls them and […]

1984 and Brave New Word: Literary Criticisms

Although they seem to portray two completely opposite dystopias, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 are two sides of the same coin, as they both warn of the dangers of an all-powerful government. Both their personal lives and the social climate in which they lived in contributed in the shaping of their novels into the disturbingly brilliant pieces of literature that are praised today. Huxley’s childhood provides great insight into some of the many influences of his […]

The Shadow of 1984

When people read dystopian text they often include topics with darker views of our political structures. George Orwell's novel 1984 is about a place named Oceania in which the main character Winston, a member of the outer party,journeys into his end. He finds himself with these viewpoints no one else seems to have of how Oceania is runned and only continues to question and dig further until he is put to stop by the party. Although Orwell’s work is fiction […]

George Orwell’s 1984 Oppression

After reading and discussing the outcomes of high tech policing, I strongly take a stand with the critics of it. This is not only opinion, the data received by high tech policing technologies distort the true meaning of privacy and is a form of biased policing against poor and minority communities. Police are using high tech policing to target poor and minority communities. The main facts that support my claim are how high tech policing results in biases against minorities […]

What does the Paperweight Symbolize in 1984: Metaphor for Loss of Individuality

Introduction “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows” (Orwell 81). George Orwell wrote a book called 1984 about Winston and how he lives in an oppressive government. The government manipulates them so much that they have no freedom and no way to express themselves. They cannot even say 2+2=4. Imagery, symbolism, and figurative language are used to convey the theme of the loss of individuality by totalitarianism. Metaphor […]

Decoding Dystopia: George Orwell’s 1984 Explored

Picture a world where your every move is watched, where your thoughts aren’t even your own. Welcome to George Orwell’s "1984," a novel that isn’t just a story but a warning bell that still echoes loudly today. Written in 1949 and set in a future that's now our past, Orwell spins a tale of a world caught in the grip of total government control, a place where the very idea of truth is as malleable as clay. At the heart […]

George Orwells 1984 Theme: Rejecting Political Apathy through Orwellian Insights

In George Orwell's iconic dystopian novel, "1984," the theme of rejection to political apathy emerges as a powerful undercurrent. Set in a totalitarian regime where Big Brother's watchful eye permeates every aspect of citizens' lives, the novel serves as a stark warning against the dangers of political passivity. As an environmental studies student, I find intriguing parallels between the oppressive political climate depicted in the book and the urgent need for active environmental engagement in today's world. Orwell's masterpiece provides […]

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How To Write an Essay About George Orwell's 1984

Understanding the context and themes of 1984.

When setting out to write an essay about George Orwell's "1984," it's crucial to first grasp the novel's historical and literary context. Published in 1949, "1984" is a dystopian novel that paints a chilling picture of a totalitarian regime. In your introduction, outline the key themes of the novel: the dangers of totalitarianism, the manipulation of truth, and the erosion of individuality. It's important to contextualize these themes within the post-World War II era during which Orwell was writing, as well as considering their continued relevance in today's society. This foundational understanding will inform your exploration of the novel's complex narrative and thematic structure.

Analyzing Orwell's Characters and Narrative Techniques

The body of your essay should delve into a detailed analysis of the novel's characters and narrative techniques. Focus on the protagonist, Winston Smith, and his journey of rebellion and subsequent downfall. Examine Orwell's portrayal of the Party, particularly the character of Big Brother, and the ways in which it exercises control over individuals. Discuss the novel's key symbols, such as telescreens, Newspeak, and the concept of doublethink, and how they contribute to its overall message. Analyze Orwell's use of language and narrative style, considering how these elements enhance the novel's themes and its impact on readers. Use specific examples and quotes from the text to support your analysis, ensuring each paragraph contributes to a comprehensive understanding of Orwell's vision.

Contextualizing 1984 in the Broader Literary Landscape

In this section, place "1984" within the broader context of dystopian literature and its historical background. Discuss how the novel reflects the anxieties of its time, including fears of fascism and communism, and how these concerns are woven into the fabric of the narrative. Consider the influences on Orwell's writing, such as his experiences during the Spanish Civil War and his observations of Stalinist Russia. Additionally, reflect on the novel's impact on later literature and culture, including its influence on the genre of dystopian fiction and its relevance in contemporary discussions about surveillance, privacy, and political power.

Concluding Reflections on 1984

Conclude your essay by summarizing the key points of your analysis, emphasizing the enduring significance of "1984" in both literary and socio-political contexts. Reflect on the novel's warning about the dangers of totalitarianism and the importance of preserving individual freedoms. Consider the novel's relevance in today's world, particularly in light of current technological and political developments. A strong conclusion will not only provide closure to your essay but also underscore the novel's ongoing relevance, encouraging readers to continue contemplating Orwell's warnings and insights in relation to contemporary society.

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Doublethink Is Stronger Than Orwell Imagined

What 1984 means today

No novel of the past century has had more influence than George Orwell’s 1984 . The title, the adjectival form of the author’s last name, the vocabulary of the all-powerful Party that rules the superstate Oceania with the ideology of Ingsoc— doublethink , memory hole , unperson , thoughtcrime , Newspeak , Thought Police , Room 101 , Big Brother —they’ve all entered the English language as instantly recognizable signs of a nightmare future. It’s almost impossible to talk about propaganda, surveillance, authoritarian politics, or perversions of truth without dropping a reference to 1984. Throughout the Cold War, the novel found avid underground readers behind the Iron Curtain who wondered, How did he know?

It was also assigned reading for several generations of American high-school students. I first encountered 1984 in 10th-grade English class. Orwell’s novel was paired with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World , whose hedonistic and pharmaceutical dystopia seemed more relevant to a California teenager in the 1970s than did the bleak sadism of Oceania. I was too young and historically ignorant to understand where 1984 came from and exactly what it was warning against. Neither the book nor its author stuck with me. In my 20s, I discovered Orwell’s essays and nonfiction books and reread them so many times that my copies started to disintegrate, but I didn’t go back to 1984 . Since high school, I’d lived through another decade of the 20th century, including the calendar year of the title, and I assumed I already “knew” the book. It was too familiar to revisit.

Read: Teaching ‘1984’ in 2016

So when I recently read the novel again, I wasn’t prepared for its power. You have to clear away what you think you know, all the terminology and iconography and cultural spin-offs, to grasp the original genius and lasting greatness of 1984 . It is both a profound political essay and a shocking, heartbreaking work of art. And in the Trump era , it’s a best seller .

The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 , by the British music critic Dorian Lynskey, makes a rich and compelling case for the novel as the summation of Orwell’s entire body of work and a master key to understanding the modern world. The book was published in 1949, when Orwell was dying of tuberculosis , but Lynskey dates its biographical sources back more than a decade to Orwell’s months in Spain as a volunteer on the republican side of the country’s civil war. His introduction to totalitarianism came in Barcelona, when agents of the Soviet Union created an elaborate lie to discredit Trotskyists in the Spanish government as fascist spies.

Left-wing journalists readily accepted the fabrication, useful as it was to the cause of communism. Orwell didn’t, exposing the lie with eyewitness testimony in journalism that preceded his classic book Homage to Catalonia —and that made him a heretic on the left. He was stoical about the boredom and discomforts of trench warfare—he was shot in the neck and barely escaped Spain with his life—but he took the erasure of truth hard. It threatened his sense of what makes us sane, and life worth living. “History stopped in 1936,” he later told his friend Arthur Koestler, who knew exactly what Orwell meant. After Spain, just about everything he wrote and read led to the creation of his final masterpiece. “History stopped,” Lynskey writes, “and Nineteen Eighty-Four began.”

The biographical story of 1984 —the dying man’s race against time to finish his novel in a remote cottage on the Isle of Jura , off Scotland—will be familiar to many Orwell readers. One of Lynskey’s contributions is to destroy the notion that its terrifying vision can be attributed to, and in some way disregarded as, the death wish of a tuberculosis patient. In fact, terminal illness roused in Orwell a rage to live—he got remarried on his deathbed—just as the novel’s pessimism is relieved, until its last pages, by Winston Smith’s attachment to nature, antique objects, the smell of coffee, the sound of a proletarian woman singing, and above all his lover, Julia. 1984 is crushingly grim, but its clarity and rigor are stimulants to consciousness and resistance. According to Lynskey, “Nothing in Orwell’s life and work supports a diagnosis of despair.”

Lynskey traces the literary genesis of 1984 to the utopian fictions of the optimistic 19th century—Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888); the sci-fi novels of H. G. Wells, which Orwell read as a boy—and their dystopian successors in the 20th, including the Russian Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924) and Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). The most interesting pages in The Ministry of Truth are Lynskey’s account of the novel’s afterlife. The struggle to claim 1984 began immediately upon publication, with a battle over its political meaning. Conservative American reviewers concluded that Orwell’s main target wasn’t just the Soviet Union but the left generally. Orwell, fading fast, waded in with a statement explaining that the novel was not an attack on any particular government but a satire of the totalitarian tendencies in Western society and intellectuals: “The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: Don’t let it happen. It depends on you .” But every work of art escapes the artist’s control—the more popular and complex, the greater the misunderstandings.

Lynskey’s account of the reach of 1984 is revelatory. The novel has inspired movies, television shows, plays, a ballet, an opera, a David Bowie album , imitations, parodies, sequels, rebuttals, Lee Harvey Oswald, the Black Panther Party, and the John Birch Society. It has acquired something of the smothering ubiquity of Big Brother himself: 1984 is watching you. With the arrival of the year 1984, the cultural appropriations rose to a deafening level. That January an ad for the Apple Macintosh was watched by 96 million people during the Super Bowl and became a marketing legend. The Mac, represented by a female athlete, hurls a sledgehammer at a giant telescreen and explodes the shouting face of a man—oppressive technology—to the astonishment of a crowd of gray zombies. The message: “You’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’ ”

The argument recurs every decade or so: Orwell got it wrong. Things haven’t turned out that bad. The Soviet Union is history. Technology is liberating. But Orwell never intended his novel to be a prediction, only a warning. And it’s as a warning that 1984 keeps finding new relevance. The week of Donald Trump’s inauguration, when the president’s adviser Kellyanne Conway justified his false crowd estimate by using the phrase alternative facts , the novel returned to the best-seller lists. A theatrical adaptation was rushed to Broadway. The vocabulary of Newspeak went viral. An authoritarian president who stood the term fake news on its head, who once said, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,” has given 1984 a whole new life.

What does the novel mean for us? Not Room 101 in the Ministry of Love, where Winston is interrogated and tortured until he loses everything he holds dear. We don’t live under anything like a totalitarian system. “By definition, a country in which you are free to read Nineteen Eighty-Four is not the country described in Nineteen Eighty-Four ,” Lynskey acknowledges. Instead, we pass our days under the nonstop surveillance of a telescreen that we bought at the Apple Store, carry with us everywhere, and tell everything to, without any coercion by the state. The Ministry of Truth is Facebook, Google, and cable news. We have met Big Brother and he is us.

Trump’s election brought a rush of cautionary books with titles like On Tyranny , Fascism: A Warning , and How Fascism Works . My local bookstore set up a totalitarian-themed table and placed the new books alongside 1984 . They pointed back to the 20th century—if it happened in Germany, it could happen here—and warned readers how easily democracies collapse. They were alarm bells against complacency and fatalism—“ the politics of inevitability ,” in the words of the historian Timothy Snyder, “a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done.” The warnings were justified, but their emphasis on the mechanisms of earlier dictatorships drew attention away from the heart of the malignancy—not the state, but the individual. The crucial issue was not that Trump might abolish democracy but that Americans had put him in a position to try. Unfreedom today is voluntary. It comes from the bottom up.

We are living with a new kind of regime that didn’t exist in Orwell’s time. It combines hard nationalism—the diversion of frustration and cynicism into xenophobia and hatred—with soft distraction and confusion: a blend of Orwell and Huxley, cruelty and entertainment. The state of mind that the Party enforces through terror in 1984 , where truth becomes so unstable that it ceases to exist, we now induce in ourselves. Totalitarian propaganda unifies control over all information, until reality is what the Party says it is—the goal of Newspeak is to impoverish language so that politically incorrect thoughts are no longer possible. Today the problem is too much information from too many sources, with a resulting plague of fragmentation and division—not excessive authority but its disappearance, which leaves ordinary people to work out the facts for themselves, at the mercy of their own prejudices and delusions.

During the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, propagandists at a Russian troll farm used social media to disseminate a meme: “ ‘The People Will Believe What the Media Tells Them They Believe.’  — George Orwell.” But Orwell never said this. The moral authority of his name was stolen and turned into a lie toward that most Orwellian end: the destruction of belief in truth. The Russians needed partners in this effort and found them by the millions, especially among America’s non-elites. In 1984 , working-class people are called “proles,” and Winston believes they’re the only hope for the future. As Lynskey points out, Orwell didn’t foresee “that the common man and woman would embrace doublethink as enthusiastically as the intellectuals and, without the need for terror or torture, would choose to believe that two plus two was whatever they wanted it to be.”

We stagger under the daily load of doublethink pouring from Trump, his enablers in the Inner Party, his mouthpieces in the Ministry of Truth, and his fanatical supporters among the proles. Spotting doublethink in ourselves is much harder. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” Orwell wrote . In front of my nose, in the world of enlightened and progressive people where I live and work, a different sort of doublethink has become pervasive. It’s not the claim that true is fake or that two plus two makes five. Progressive doublethink—which has grown worse in reaction to the right-wing kind—creates a more insidious unreality because it operates in the name of all that is good. Its key word is justice —a word no one should want to live without. But today the demand for justice forces you to accept contradictions that are the essence of doublethink.

For example, many on the left now share an unacknowledged but common assumption that a good work of art is made of good politics and that good politics is a matter of identity. The progressive view of a book or play depends on its political stance, and its stance—even its subject matter—is scrutinized in light of the group affiliation of the artist: Personal identity plus political position equals aesthetic value. This confusion of categories guides judgments all across the worlds of media, the arts, and education, from movie reviews to grant committees. Some people who register the assumption as doublethink might be privately troubled, but they don’t say so publicly. Then self-censorship turns into self-deception, until the recognition itself disappears—a lie you accept becomes a lie you forget. In this way, intelligent people do the work of eliminating their own unorthodoxy without the Thought Police.

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Orthodoxy is also enforced by social pressure, nowhere more intensely than on Twitter, where the specter of being shamed or “canceled” produces conformity as much as the prospect of adding to your tribe of followers does. This pressure can be more powerful than a party or state, because it speaks in the name of the people and in the language of moral outrage, against which there is, in a way, no defense. Certain commissars with large followings patrol the precincts of social media and punish thought criminals, but most progressives assent without difficulty to the stifling consensus of the moment and the intolerance it breeds—not out of fear, but because they want to be counted on the side of justice.

This willing constriction of intellectual freedom will do lasting damage. It corrupts the ability to think clearly, and it undermines both culture and progress. Good art doesn’t come from wokeness, and social problems starved of debate can’t find real solutions. “Nothing is gained by teaching a parrot a new word,” Orwell wrote in 1946. “What is needed is the right to print what one believes to be true, without having to fear bullying or blackmail from any side.” Not much has changed since the 1940s. The will to power still passes through hatred on the right and virtue on the left.

1984 will always be an essential book, regardless of changes in ideologies, for its portrayal of one person struggling to hold on to what is real and valuable. “Sanity is not statistical,” Winston thinks one night as he slips off to sleep. Truth, it turns out, is the most fragile thing in the world. The central drama of politics is the one inside your skull.

This article appears in the July 2019 print edition with the headline “George Orwell’s Unheeded Warning.”

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

1984 Essay Topics

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One of the most iconic books of the 21st century, George Orwell’s 1984 has long been a staple of English Language classrooms for many years. The novel was a dystopian story by writer George Orwell and was published in June 1949. Most of the themes in the novel are about the risk of government, totalitarianism and repressive regimes of all people, colours and creeds within society. The novel is set out in a dystopian future world in 1984 where much of it has fallen victim to oppressive government surveillance, perpetual war, propaganda and an extreme form of communism.

Throughout the novel, the reader is taken on a journey throughout airstrip one (Great Britain) which has become the head of state in the province called Oceania. Everything is ruled by ‘the Party’ who carry out their oppressive rule along with the thought police, a sub-branch of government that persecute any independent or individual thoughts that citizens may have. The leader of the party is something or someone called Big Brother , therefore the novel is about a cult of personality. Nobody even knows who or what Big Brother is or if it exists. The main protagonists, Winston Smith, is a party member who is diligent, intelligent and a skilful worker, however, he secretly despises the party and everything that it stands for. Smith tries to rebel against Big Brother and enters an exciting and forbidden relationship with his friend Julia. The novel takes us on a journey of hiding, running away and defying the government, with some pretty dire consequences for the characters involved.

There are numerous 1984 essay themes that one can write about and used to think of a topic. Let’s take a look at some of the major themes in the novel.

Totalitarian rule – this is a major theme and presents the kind of government that is unknown to the public. It is a warning to people to believe in all of the lies presented by the government. There is no actual proof of Big Brother throughout the novel, gets the party still manages to exercise control over their citizens.

Subverted reality – most people live in poverty within the novel and many people work against each other. There are spies everywhere and people are actually even told not to enjoy a life of love, only pledge their allegiance to the party. Reality is certainly subverted.

Propaganda – the novel shows how propaganda is used throughout to control its citizens. All well presents this vein through the vehicle of the Ministry of truth, an organisation part of Oceania. All throughout the novel, we are shown how the government uses propaganda time and time again to spread their message. We see slogans such as ‘Big Brother is watching’ everywhere.

Subversion of love the novel paints a dismal picture of how people are not to love each other according to the party. Everything should be a duty to the party and this really plays on people’s minds.

Identity – the loss of identity is a striking theme in the novel. Orwell shows that totalitarianism is able to rip people off their individualism and identity.

Loyalty – political loyalty is all so evident throughout 1984. Winston Smith is an employee that questions politics, however, he does still remain loyal to his job. Everyone in society has to remain loyal to Big Brother otherwise there will be major repercussions.

Class systems – a very prominent theme in the novel is that of class. One can see how Oceania is subdivided into separate classes. The inner party are the elites who have luxury lifestyles and servants around them. Ordinary class members such as Smith live in small apartments and have no permission to enjoy any familial or conjugal life. The poor class live in no-go areas where they are constantly bombarded with propaganda in order to subvert their minds to believe anything as truth. The party has complete control over the class.

The control of information – throughout Oceania, there is only one party and one leader called Big Brother. Everything is completely controlled, from the broadcast to rewriting history. Everything is done with Big Brother and the totalitarian regime in mind. You can see how Winston Smith has a very hard time and why he is struggling in his work.

Technology – the writer shows how technology is used to govern people and subvert their minds. Throughout the novel, the audience is presented with tales that involve terror screens and strange apparatuses as primary tools for controlling the public. There is even torture technology, especially in room 101.

Language – the abuse and the use of language is an important theme throughout 1984. The audience is shown how language is constantly used to exert physical and mental control over citizens. The party employs language and even has its own language called Newspeak which is designed to further harm people and control them.

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Now that we have touched on the themes, let’s have a look at various 1984 essay topics that you may find useful. With all of these topics, have a look and see what you would be interested in writing. You may want to take one of the topics without rephrasing or you can use them to formulate your own ideas. Let’s take a look at all the great topics and 1984 essay ideas that you can use!

Compare and contrast topics

Compare 1984 and Kite Runner – what are the different themes?

Compare and contrast 1984 with Huckleberry Finn. How does reading 1984 help understand all of the fields in Huckleberry Finn?

Make comparisons and contrast between George Orwell’s piece and Communist party in China. Are there some differences and similarities?

Compare 1984 with the movie, the lives of others. What kind of similarities are there?

What differences in technology are there between 1984 and V for Vendetta?

How does Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and 1984 share point about Marxism?

Compare and contrast 1984 with other dystopian novels.

How are the male characters portrayed in 1984 and in JG Ballard’s high-rise?

Compare and contrast 1984 with a work of JG Ballard.

How does crash by JG Ballard and George Orwell’s 1984 share common themes?

How does society become depicted in 1984 and how is it different from the society depicted in Panopticism by forecourt?

What kind of comparisons and contrasts can one make about 1984 and North Korea?

How are female characters betrayed in 1984 and in Brave New World?

What are some of the ways that the themes can be compared and contrasted between 1984 and The Giver by Lois Lowry?

What are some of the differences between the Shawshank redemption in 1984?

Compare and contrast the movie hunger games and the dystopian novel 1984. Think about all of the characters, ideas, themes and style that the story has been told in. How do you both novels differ in the way that they portray dystopia?

Are there any similarities between Children of Men and 1984?

What are the main ideas and connections between the Shawshank redemption and Orwell’s 1984?

Compare and contrast 1984 with the popular movie, the Truman show. What are the main differences between the plot, motifs, characters and themes?

How does the movie, the propaganda game, differ from 1984?

Is dictatorship amongst us at the moment? Compare current society to the society in 1984. Are there any parallels?

Are there any similarities between Lord of the flies and Orwell’s 1984? Can you see any connections between either of these books?

How does the book into the wild compare with 1984? Are there any similar themes?

Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and almost 1984 compare and contrast.

Compare the ways that police brutality today is similar to how it is in 1984.

Analytical topics

How can one compare the book, 1984, to society today? What countries have features that Oceania has in Orwell’s dystopian novel?

How have any of Orwell’s political views had an influence on his work?

The theme of subversion of love in 1984.

Analyse the setting, theme, and all the ways that the author is able to depict characters within the context of political predictions in 1984.

Make an analysis of propaganda use in 1984. How does the government achieve its goals through the use of sponsorship, technology and media?

What role does the Ministry of truth play in the novel? What is the government able to achieve by controlling the truth?

Are the Ministry of truth able to rewrite history successfully?

The theme of totalitarianism in 1984.

What kind of influence does Big Brother have on society?

What does Big Brother say about today’s surveillance and privacy?

What role does Newspeak have in 1984? How can we see language change throughout the story?

In the room above Charrington’s shop, what significance does this have on the story and Winston’s character?

What parallels can we draw between 1984 and racial profiling today

Why have the upper class in 1984 only allowed intellectual freedom to a certain number of people?

The theme of class in 1984.

What kind of dystopia and symbolism is used in 1984 to convey the message?

How has oppression and fear continue to thrive in today’s society? What parallels can you see between today and 1984?

What parallels are there between Carl Jung’s philosophy and the ideas in 1984?

Our Winston and Julia complimentary carriages?

The theme of the subversion of society throughout the novel.

Discuss the theme of technology in 1984.

What are the different views between Winston and Julia on morality, politics, ethics and history?

Make an analysis of chapter 11 in 1984. What kind of serious repercussions will there be for Winston and Julia?

What colour parallels can we draw between consumers and to and 1984 society?

How has 1984 betrayed the theme of alienation?

Argumentative topics

Can a society survive if it follows the rules of society in 1984?

1984 paint a picture of totalitarianism today. Discuss.

Many of today’s world leaders such as Trump and Marie Le Pen are much like the higher-ups in 1984.

Dehumanisation which is a theme in 1984 is often used today to subvert citizens.

Does 1984 help us to understand more about the popularity of nationalism in the 21st century?

What powers do common people have in 1984? How does Winston think about the higher-ups?

Winston is definitely against Big Brother throughout the whole novel. Discuss.

1984 can teach us many lessons about today’s society. Discuss.

The significance of memory in 1984.

Which parts of 1984 have come true in today’s reality? Were there any things that were exaggerated? Could any things in 1984 not become true in the future?

The social hierarchy of Oceania how does this strange hierarchy come to support the party and all of their goals?

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The Bedrock of Good Journalism

2024 Alum of the Year Bill Whitaker brings integrity to his storytelling.

B ill Whitaker says he’s tired, but you wouldn’t know it to look at him.

It’s midweek and the 60 Minutes correspondent has been burning the midnight oil on a story about Russian hackers and ransomware, set to air that Sunday.

“You have to bear with me,” he says over Zoom. “I was here last night until 2 o’clock this morning, so if I’m talking as though I’m a zombie here… ”

Crisply attired in a plaid sports coat and light blue dress shirt, Whitaker looks anything but zombie-like. He sits tall in his office chair on the 14th floor of the CBS Building in Midtown Manhattan and peers alertly through emerald-framed glasses. Of course, deadline pressure is nothing new to the 72-year-old, who studied journalism at Cal in the late 1970s. He has been a news broadcaster for 45 years and honored with myriad awards including three Emmys, two Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards, and a 2018 Peabody Award for a 60 Minutes and Washington Post investigation into the opioid crisis.

Now he can add 2024 Berkeley Alum of the Year to the list, a distinction he shares with such past recipients as writer Joan Didion ’56, Nobel-winning physicist Steven Chu, Ph.D. ’76, and Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak ’86.

W illiam Whitaker Jr. was born in the Philadelphia area in 1951. His mother, Marie, married William Whitaker Sr. and the couple settled in Media, Pennsylvania, where their children—son, Bill, and two daughters, Gail and Anita—grew up.

Whitaker says he likely got the news bug from his dad, sitting by his side watching TV broadcasts. “The half-hour of evening news was almost like church in our household.”

Bill’s father didn’t just consume the news. He wrote it, too. For a brief period, William Whitaker Sr. authored a column for the Harlem Bulletin , and also wrote for the Boilermakers Union newsletter, “Our Yard.”

My father wanted to be a journalist, but it just wasn’t in the cards. A Black man in the ’30s and ’40s [with a] family? Being a journalist just wasn’t something he found he was able to do and support them.

Whitaker Jr. graduated from Hobart College in 1973 with a bachelor’s degree in American history, then moved to Massachusetts to attend Boston University, where he pursued a master’s degree in African American studies.

Before graduating from BU in 1974, he spent a semester abroad in Liberia, his first experience outside the states other than visits to his mother’s family in Barbados. It was eye-opening. Even before Liberia’s first civil war, tensions were high in Africa’s oldest republic. Sharp declines in world prices for the West African country’s chief exports, iron ore and natural rubber, caused profound economic hardship. As part of his studies, Whitaker interviewed the minister of labor, the minister of health, and union members in the rubber plantations.

It was fascinating. I got to see a broad swath of life there. It was like being a reporter. I didn’t make the connection with journalism at the time, but once I started feeling the journalist bug, I went ‘ Ooh , that’s kind of where I got it.’ … To be able to step into a place that’s so different, yet find the humanity and the connections; I think that’s where I got the spark to do this.

If Liberia sparked his passion for journalism, then a subsequent job with a small film company that made promotional content for the nation’s bicentennial added kindling and focus.

“The process of doing the research, going out and shooting it, and then helping to write it and watching them edit, and then getting the final product was very satisfying to me…. It just hit me that what I was doing was broadcast journalism. And I really liked it.” Having found his path, Whitaker researched the best journalism schools in the U.S. “UC Berkeley was one of them. And I had always wanted to live in California. I applied. I was hoping against hope that I would get in. And I did. So, I packed up and moved out to California.” The year was 1978. At the time, only about 4 percent of journalists in newsrooms nationwide were people of color, and, to Whitaker’s recollection, Berkeley’s J-school was even less diverse. “I think I was it, as far as Black students were concerned. There was a Latino student in our class. That was it. I don’t even know what made me think that I could have a career in broadcast journalism, because there weren’t very many people on TV who looked like me at the time…. There were no guideposts, no people to look at as role models.” At the J-school, his professors demanded clear, concise storytelling. Whitaker learned to write like a reporter. He remembers red lines and notes bleeding through his drafts. Non sequiturs were circled. Grandiose statements were crossed out. Superfluous details, cut. To Whitaker, the takeaways were clear: “Hit the nail on the head, make it make sense, make me understand, make me care.”

Berkeley got the history writer out of me and the journalist into me. And then, working with Andy Stern in his class, we put on a weekly news broadcast. And if I remember my first one, I was just horrible.

No one at Berkeley had a bigger influence on Whitaker than Andy Stern, one of the original faculty members of the Graduate School of Journalism, who passed away in 2023 at age 92.

Hired in 1969 after a career at PBS and ABC News, Stern spent 25 years building the school’s highly respected program in visual journalism and mentored dozens of high-profile students including television reporter Linda Schacht ’66, M.J. ’81, 60 Minutes writer and investigative reporter Helen Malmgren ’85, M.A. ’90, and renowned documentarian Marlon Riggs, M.J. ’81. “One of the things about my dad was that he always had really diverse classes of students, including supporting a lot of women and people of color and people with disabilities,” recalls his daughter, Alexandra Minna Stern, now a professor of English and dean of humanities at UCLA. She added that he had a special regard for Bill. “My dad always thought Whitaker was immensely talented and really liked [him] as a person. They had a lot to talk about when it came to news, media, and how stories were being covered. And they remained in touch even when Bill went off to his great successes.” Indeed, whenever Whitaker was in the Bay Area, for work or travel, he would visit with the Sterns, and the Sterns would do the same when they were in New York. “He was more than a professor,” Whitaker says of his old mentor. “We became friends. He helped me then, and he helped me towards the end. He was sort of a guiding hand through much of my career, to tell you the truth.” It was Stern who helped Whitaker land his first real journalism job, at KQED television. The station hired him straight out of J-school, which helps explain why it took him so long to actually claim his Cal degree. It seems Whitaker had completed all of his coursework and planned to finish his thesis in his free time. It just didn’t work out that way. “Over the next few months, it ended up being less of the writing of the thesis and more of the working at KQED. And then it just never got completed. So I would have on my résumé for years and years, ‘Attended UC Berkeley School of Journalism.’ I just wanted to always say, ‘Graduated from UC Berkeley.’ And my mother, who has now passed away, would always say, ‘Are you ever going to finish up that thesis at Berkeley?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah sure, Mom, sure. I will. I will.’” It wasn’t until sometime in the mid-2010s, when he was arguably at the pinnacle of his profession, that Whitaker called the J-school to see if it was at all possible to get his diploma.

He wasn’t the only student who had left without finishing their thesis. There were many, according to former J-school Dean Tom Goldstein, who said he always made time for those students and tried to help them get their degrees. Goldstein said Whitaker put together a thesis of his 60 Minutes work and “a narrative on why he was deserving of a [graduate degree]. We accepted his work, and I believe I was one of the signatures on his degree.” Nearly four decades after leaving the school, Whitaker had fulfilled his promise to his mother. He could finally put on his résumé: UC Berkeley, Master of Journalism, 2016.

In the interim, the world became his classroom. After his time at KQED, Whitaker was chosen as one of the minority trainees at CBS affiliate WBTV in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1984. “Big difference, San Francisco to Charlotte. It was a huge difference. But a lot of my sense of that difference was baggage that I was carrying. I’d never lived in the South before. I didn’t know what to expect. And Charlotte was a surprise. It was a progressive little city at the time, a little city that had a handful of tall buildings.” Charlotte grew a lot during Whitaker’s tenure at WBTV. He recalls a significant amount of the housing around downtown was low-income and primarily Black. The project required residents to make way for the new development. But developers planned it in a way so that residents could return to the new housing and get low interest loans to keep the locale both racially and socioeconomically diverse.

I wasn’t expecting that in the South. It was a lesson to me; I can’t go into someplace with preconceived ideas. I have to go in with my eyes and my heart and my ears open and see the place for what it is.

After Charlotte, he went to Atlanta from 1985 to 1989 and covered politics, including the 1988 presidential campaign of Michael Dukakis. There, he won his first Emmy Award, for his reports on the collapse of Jim and Tammy Bakker’s television ministry. From Atlanta he went to Tokyo for CBS News, from 1989 to 1992, covering stories across Asia. He went to the Philippines to cover coup attempts and to Beijing for the Tiananmen Square protests. He was in Baghdad for the build-up to Desert Storm. After Tokyo, he went to Los Angeles as a regular reporter for CBS Evening News, and covered the trial of the century. As he told the Los Angeles Times , nothing had quite prepared him for the O.J. Simpson murder trial. “The sheer spectacle of the proceedings was mind-blowing…. It was murder trial as circus. I’ve never witnessed a trial with so many ‘gasp’ moments: the bloody glove, the N-word, the verdict. Still, the trial was about so much more. It was about race in America, about wealth and celebrity and policing, wrapped around two brutal murders. The verdict put a spotlight on our deep-rooted racial divide, a schism that plagues us still.”

Since joining 60 Minutes in 2014, Whitaker has continued to cover the globe, reporting from places few ever see. In 2018, he went more than two miles underground in a South African gold mine. In 2021, he witnessed an active Icelandic volcano up close, as glowing chunks of molten rock hurtled skyward and lava oozed from fissures in the ground at his feet. “That was the most spectacular thing I’ve ever seen in my life.” He went to Uganda in 2022 and reported on virus hunters searching for novel pathogens in the hopes of preventing future pandemics. “I got to climb to the top of a mountain … sit in a grove with the mountain gorillas. I have to pinch myself sometimes.” It’s one thing to have the experience, but it’s another to bring back the story and make it compelling. “I don’t know how he does it as well as he does,” said Rome Hartman, Whitaker’s longtime producer at 60 Minutes. Hartman remembers their first adventure for the program, a story called “The Wolves of Yellowstone” that first aired on December 23, 2018. “We went in the dead of winter. We basically went to see how this very controversial animal was faring decades after its reintroduction. It was a beautiful feature story; I mean, we nearly froze doing it. Bill and I have since done a number of adventures, and he has taken me places that I wouldn’t otherwise go and introduced me to people I wouldn’t otherwise meet.” It’s not only his adventurousness that makes Whitaker stand out from other journalists, Hartman said. It’s also his innate curiosity. “He’s a really good listener, and that makes him a really good interviewer…. He makes people feel comfortable. He draws people out. He draws people to him.” 60 Minutes is television’s longest continually running prime-time series, having now aired for 56 years. Asked how it has maintained its relevance in the age of streaming, Hartman said, “We’ve adjusted technologically to make sure that as many people can see our work. But I think the bedrock of great storytelling, great journalism [is integrity]. Integrity is why people have kept watching for all these years.”

W hile the way people consume the news has changed, Hartman and Whitaker both believe that, fundamentally, journalism is as essential as ever. And despite the drastic decline of city and local news outlets, they remain optimistic. “The old model is no longer sustainable,” Whitaker admits. “But since we are necessary, I have to believe we will find a way to keep informing the American people.” Thankfully, there are programs and organizations, including UC Berkeley, that are helping to fund local journalism. In September 2022, the Journalism School announced a $25 million, state-funded fellowship program to support and strengthen local reporting in underserved and historically underrepresented areas across the state. In support of the effort, Dean Geeta Anand asked Whitaker to meet with California legislative leaders in the state capital. “He flew out last summer to be the main attraction for a dinner that we hosted in Sacramento,” Anand said. “Bill came out and met with a small group of 10 state senators, which is a huge commitment,” she stressed, given the demands of his 60 Minutes job. “He’s just incredibly accomplished,” Anand added. “And he’s also extraordinarily generous with his time to our school, and also to the faculty members who have mentored him, particularly Andy Stern. To come back every year to see Andy, to come to his 90th birthday, and to come to his funeral and speak at it, these [gestures] are just really meaningful to our community.” After serving 20 years in the U.S. Marine Corps with tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, Francisco Martínezcuello changed careers to be a journalist, graduating from the Berkeley School of Journalism in 2022. His narrative writing focuses on science, the environment, and veterans’ issues.

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