The chief character in the novel – Winston Smith – is a 39 year old, physically weak person, who uncannily resembles author Orwell himself in terms of physical attributes. Appropriate to a totalitarian political system there is only one Party in Oceania, in complete control of the ruling oligarchy. During the course of the novel the author shows his readers the pathetic new depths to which The Party had taken its atrocities and violations of basic human rights. What more, the concept of privacy, which has come to be expected of any free and fair society today is completely abolished in Oceania. Each individual citizen is always under the surveillance of the tele-screen, thereby making impossible any attempts to undermine the power of The Party through subversive activities. The tele-screen is also an attempt to control the thoughts and actions of the citizens and keep them in complete control. The undisputed leader of this nightmarish political system is the Big Brother, the despotic head of The Party.
Orwell does a stellar job in organizing the novel into three main subdivisions. The first section is dedicated to depicting the atrocities and violations in the totalitarian society. The author does a commendable job of bringing the essence of the oppressed society to the fore. It is here that Winston Smith, the lead character, develops thoughts of a free world, which is anathema to The Party.
The next part of the book narrates the development of Winston’s love for Julia, the latter being the only one with whom he could have an intimate emotional life. But their desperate union does not last for long, as they were exposed to the Party by O’Brien. Interestingly O’Brien was at that time Winston’s one big hope and Winston believed that O’Brien was also someone wanting freedom and having unorthodox thoughts. But all this proves just an illusion, as O’Brien betrays the couple and make them face a party Inquisition.
The final part of the novel is Winston’s reconciliation with the fact that the Party and the Big Brother are invincible and the only mode of survival possible is through complete surrender to the dictates of the Party. After having been brainwashed and tortured, Winston finally comes to love Big Brother.
The author’s descriptive prose is very effective in bringing to fore the essence of the totalitarian society. A clever use of word play and slogans is another asset to the book. For instance, the following are a selection of quotations from the work that serve as evidence to Orwell’s proficient use of language in conveying the oppressive realities of Oceania:
“WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH”
“The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.”
“Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes, no heroes, he thought over and over as he writhed on the floor, clutching uselessly his disabled left arm.”
“You must love Big Brother. It is not enough to obey him; you must love him.”
Evident through out the novel is the author’s descriptive and informative prose style. The horrifying images of the totalitarian society that Winston lives in are presented to the reader in a balanced and a placid tone, which brings a touch of irony to the narrative. Also employed by Orwell are elements of foreshadowing and suspense to add more drama to the story. What come across as the dominant philosophy of the book is the warnings of the despicable dangers that such an absolute power-system can have on its subjects. While the story is supposedly fictional, in the foreword to the book, Orwell alludes that the existing so called democracies of the western world are not all that different from the government of Oceania. And that if necessary changes at the level of democratic institutions are not made humanity would find its condition in the year 1984 akin to the one described in the novel. The following passage captures this lucid and descriptive style of Orwellian prose while also inducing elements of irony into the narrative:
“It was at night that they came for you, always at night. The proper thing was to kill yourself before they got you. Undoubtedly some people did so. But it needed desperate courage to kill yourself in a world where firearms, or any quick and certain poison, were completely unprocurable. He thought with a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery of the human body which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment when a special effort is needed. He might have silenced the dark-haired girl if only he had acted quickly enough: but precisely because of the extremity of his danger he had lost the power to act. It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one’s own body”.
The book also excels in clever and appropriate use of symbolism to denote concepts and situations. Such phrases as “The coral was Julia’s life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity in the heart of the crystal”, “It is a little chunk of history that they have forgotten to alter”, “Golden Country”, “I sold you and you sold me”, expresses the intended sentiment of the author quite clearly.
While the book excels in so many areas, it has some deficiencies too. For instance, apart from Julia, O’Brien, and Winston Smith, there are no other significant characters; there is apparently no attempt on part of the author to show a wider range of social behaviour and other complexities of personality that it entails. But to be fair to the author, that is indeed his very point – one of uniformity of all humans – the zombie-hood of the inhabitants of Oceania. So, in this context, the parameters of judging a conventional novel are not applicable to this work. As a matter of fact, what Orwell is implying is that the struggles for survival of Winston Smith capture the basic nature of the captive human society of Oceania. In other words, the plot was built around this character in order to focus on the response that it stirs in him to combat the inhumane forces of the Party system. The lack of individuality among the citizens of Oceania is best illustrated by the following passage:
“At this moment the entire group of people broke into a deep, slow, rhythmic chant of ‘B-B! …. B-B! …. B-B!’—over and over again, very slowly, with a long pause between the first ‘B’ and the second—a heavy mumurous sound, somehow curiously savage, in the background of one which seemed to hear the stamps of naked feet and the throbbing of tom-toms. For perhaps as much as thirty seconds they kept it up. It was a refrain that was often heard in moments of overwhelming emotion. Partly it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise”.
So, how far has Orwell’s prophetic warning come true? While one cannot see such an absolutely dominant one party state today, what one can see are lesser formed power structures – be it in the form of private corporate ownership or political power based on mass propaganda. So, in this regard, the novel 1984 is as relevant today as it was fifty years ago when it was first published alongside the rise of the totalitarian Stalinist USSR. The book is a useful educative device for both citizens and policy makers in modern democracies, where the absoluteness of the mythical “Party” survives in subtle and sophisticated ways. Also, the manner in which Orwell divides the fictional superpowers of his world according to the balance of power evident during the period of the Cold War between the United States and the USSR, is a further suggestion that 1984 is as much a work of fact as it is of fiction and hence highly relevant to the world of today.