Totalitarianism In George Orwell's 1984

1984 by George Orwell, is a dystopian novel written in 1949 about a totalitarian government headed by a governing entity known as “Big Brother”, that exercises complete control over its people. The people have no individuality and are under constant surveillance by the inner party, who have cameras, tv screens, and microphones everywhere to detect and prevent any acts of rebellion. Any acts of rebellion, which can be as small as words or actions of individuality, result in being sent to labor camps, being tortured, or even killed. In order to further control the people, their daily lives, their actions, and their thoughts about the party, history is rewritten, knowledge is spread out and restricted, and even the very language that they speak

The story starts off with Winston having increasing frustration with the Party’s strict overwatch on everything he does and their overbearing rules on free thought, and individual expression.The governing laws even go as far as preventing sex, in fact Winston has a wife, but is neither attracted to her, nor lives with her. On Top of the rules and laws, Winston also starts to notice things out of place with the Party’s version of history. For instance, the Party wants the people to believe that Oceania was always in an alliance with Eastasia in a war against Eurasia, but Winston thinks that it wasn't always true. One day Winston Illegally buys a journal, and starts a diary, with his back turned to the monitoring TV, about his ideas against Big Brother. There are two main people that are of interest in Winston's life; an Inner Party member that Winston believes is secretly a member of a resistance named O'brien, and a dark haired beauty that Winston is apprehensive of named Julia. Winston is afraid that the Julia would turn him into the “thought police” for his ideas against Big Brother, and his Journal, but that changes when one day she slips him a note that says “I love you.” After that he decides to trust her, and they start an affair. But Winston isn’t satisfied with rebelling in only small actions of individuality, he wants

About a year later, his mother brought him and his sister back to england and settled in Henley on Thames. From an early age, Orwell had an interest in writing. When he was 11 years old he had a poem posted in a local newspaper, which no doubt added fuel to his love of writing.(Biography.com) Many experiences contributed to Orwell’s views of how the world worked, and where it was headed. Orwell had a hard time socially in school and it is from his experiences throughout his education that he really got an idea of the unfairness in life. During his education, Orwell got a pretty good look into the class system of England at the time. On a partial scholarship, Orwell noticed that the school treated the richer students better than the poorer ones.(Biography.com) A parallel can be drawn between this particular life experience, and a fear that Orwell later wrote about in a letter about Nineteen Eighty-Four. He states, “Everywhere the world movement seems to be in the direction of centralised economies which can be made to ‘work’ in an economic sense but which are not democratically organised and which tend to establish a caste system.” By this, Orwell means to express that it is possible for centralized economies to work, but if not by democratic means it can to lead to the rich staying rich off of the poor, who will stay poor. This is shown in Nineteen