The Very Real Connection Between 1984 and Otto Dix’s Flanders:
George Orwell was a revolutionary author during he’s era and he’s still considered one of the greatest authors of all time. Even to this day authors use Orwell’s “six rules of writing” which are used to make these better overly writers (famousauthor). During George Orwell’s 1984 he writes about a time in the future of a world that is run by a totalitarian government. The world about which Orwell writes about is a very dark, deceiving, and cruel place. He writes this way in 1984 to reflect on the politics of the time in which he lived (famousauthors). Since he was born in 1903 he lived and extraordinary life living through two World Wars and encountering many major events which he
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This desperation is portrayed in 1984 from Winston’s inability to be himself and tell people how he really feels about the government and be himself. It can also be depicted as Winston’s inability to find change and the rebellion, which, throughout the book was an ongoing topic whether Winston would find people that feel the same way he does. This desperation could also be transferred to George Orwell’s personal thoughts of the time he wrote this book. When Orwell wrote this book he was living in a time when fascist viewpoints were spreading across Europe and Totalitarian governments were rising to power. When looking at the painting Flanders from the first couple of seconds one can feel the theme of desperation. There are dead people amongst the living, there are miserable conditions, they show distraught faces of men, and depict what looks to be smoke rising in the background. The men who are more visual seem to me like they are in a very terrible position and place. The land around them is structured with what looks to be like houses that have all been destroyed. These houses are a put into the painting by Otto to reflect a person experience during his time at war, “He described a recurring nightmare in which he crawled through bombed out houses.” (Fulmer Biography). The terrain looks muddy and everything has a dirty color to it. These men in which Dix drew show in their …show more content…
In 1984 it is a book that takes place after a nuclear warfare and the totalitarian government has taken over. Since the book came out in 1949 it can be strongly related to the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan during World War Two, “Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices, always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage, have been developed, and the ravages of the atomic war of the nineteen-fifties have never been fully repaired.”(1984 189). This interpretation of what the world could be like if a nuclear warfare were to happen, connects strongly with the nuclear arms race the world broke out into after World War Two. This arms race which in away was just two political ideologies of countries trying to compete with one another to see who had more power of the world itself. These viewpoints were spreading all across the world and tension between Communist countries like the USSR and Democratic countries like the United States began to rise increasingly. As Political ideas begun to rise all across the world Orwell reflected 1984 as “a novel wrote as a warning after years of brooding on the twin menaces of Nazism and Stalinism.” (famousauthor). Another notable reason on why Orwell could have written this the way he did would be the war he witnessed during the World War Two era “he uses the nostalgic recollections of a middle-aged man to