George Orwell Satire

What is your idea of an ideal, secure, successful society? Who do you trust to be in charge of your society? In 1984, George Orwell explores the idea of what an ideal society is through a critical lens focused on the almost absurd character of Winston. Through Winston’s awakening to a sense of self and a government determined to bury this new-found sense of self, Orwell provides aggressive social commentary upon the world he lives in.

Through absurd dramatic irony in Winston’s daily life, Orwell makes a significant criticism on the power and moral corruption that the government was gaining in his time. There is incredible violence and gore placed in the book to criticize that the government was becoming too morally lax. The primary example

His political views were very unique and formed through his experiences and also his observations of the world around him. Consequently, he did not blindly follow the views of one simple theory; he accepted the flaws within the theory he chose, socialism, and attempted to form a solution. This is supported in The 'Dark Power of Destiny' in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four with the quote, “Why I Write: Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it” (Quoted in Carpentier 179). The first and most apparent criticism is the stratification and inequality in society. In brief, this is something which socialism attempts to mitigate in its base theory of wages and economics. Orwell comments upon this most brutally throughout the book by displaying it as a negative, but somewhat necessary part of society. He portrays it as a fact when he writes, “POWER remained in the hands of a small privileged caste” (Orwell 190). This quote is from The Book which explained the state of the world in a large scope. The Book, in the end, was a creation of the thought police to soothe the runners who refused the orthodoxy before they were captured by the thought police. As one of these runners, Winston speaks about the inner Party not in a directly negative manner, but instead Orwell infers it to the reader by providing vivid imagery of the differences between the classes presented in the book. This commentary was driven by the societal stratification around Orwell. A second commentary that is closely related to that of social stratification is the inequality of a patriarchal society. Of course, Orwell wanted to pose as something that could be fixed through the political solution of socialism. This criticism is shown through the characterization of women as unlikable