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What Is The Moral Of 1984 By George Orwell

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Texts act as universal mediums to explore the complexities of the human experience, providing insight into how an abuse of power prompts inconsistent and anomalous individual human behaviours. George Orwell’s dystopian satire Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) draws parallels from WWII totalitarian regimes ubiquitous within his context, conveying how abuses of power leads to a degradation of the human experience. Orwell explores the Party’s manipulation of memory and history to shape individual’s psyche in accordance with their political ideologies. Furthermore, he scrutinises how inconsistent human behaviours are provoked when the freedom to love is undermined by political hegemonies. Amidst the Party’s methods of oppression, Winston’s anomalously …show more content…

As such, readers gain insight into how an abuse of power affects the individual human psyche. Orwell’s depiction of the Party is inspired by Joseph Stalin’s dictatorship and his ‘great purges’ in Soviet Russia during his context, whereby collective perspectives were shaped by political propaganda. 1984 draws parallels to this through the leitmotif of paradoxical government institutions dictating the human psyche, evident in “who controls the past controls the future, who controls the present controls the past”. This use of an anaphora evokes the mutability of history, conveying the Party’s manipulation of memory within the human psyche, leading to a degradation of the human experience. Accentuating this, the metaphor “it was as if a piece of his brain had been taken out” represents an impairment of Winston’s memory, insinuating a part of history he is unable to remember. This conveys the Party’s intervention of his intrinsic desire to create connections with the past, ensuring alignment with their ideologies, inviting responders to reconsider the importance of the natural human psyche. Moreover, the pathos used to describe Winston’s experience of his mother’s death as “tragic and sorrowful in a way no longer possible”, conveys his incapacity to form his own emotions, evoking his unacceptance of history. Thus, the Party’s manipulation of memory and history prompts inconsistent human behaviours, leading to a degradation of the human

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In 1984, written by George Orwell, the past is seen or portrayed to be a very crucial part of the understanding of the novel. A few examples that illustrate this theme of the past are Winston's job as a records editor at the Ministry of Truth, O'Brien destroying the photograph of three one-time party members, and the use of Telescreens. Winston's occupation entails the destruction of past records, which solidifies the theme of purging the past in the novel. One example of this is demonstrated when Winston is describing the Records Department. He says, “the records department, after all, was itself only a single branch of the Ministry of Truth, whose primary job was not to reconstruct the past but to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, Telescreen programs, plays, novels- with every conceivable kind of information.”

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