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George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four 1984

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This passage, taken from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, describes the work that typically befalls the protagonist, Winston Smith, in his profession of tampering with documents and news bulletins in order to convince the masses that everything is well within this society and that Big Brother, the ruling dictator, is always seen as inerrant and infallible. Much of the passage reflecting the worries of the time such as the rising influence of the Soviet Union and the memory of Nazi Germany as well as featuring many tropes of dystopian fiction (some originating from the novel itself). An element of the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four that is built upon in this passage is the language of Newspeak. Language and created languages are a common theme amongst dystopian novels because they represent the abolition of the old world and the complete control of society by the dictatorial government. Winston receives his orders for the day in ‘abbreviated jargon’ which consists ‘largely of Newspeak words’. This shows that although Newspeak hasn’t been adopted fully by the population yet, the government …show more content…
He is said to have predicted that ‘the South Indian front would remain quiet but that a Eurasian offensive would shortly be launched in North Africa’ when in fact the complete opposite happened. This is a reflection on Soviet Russia in which Stalin completely overestimated what they could achieve and then covered up his mistakes with the same process. The analogy is furthered with the mention of ‘the sixth quarter of the Ninth Three Year Plan’ which is a reference to Stalin’s ‘Five Year Plans’ (many of which failed) and Hitler’s Four Year Plan. This infallibility of Big Brother is covered by having workers like Winston ‘rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother’s speech, in such a way to predict the thing that had actually happened’ – altering the past to control the

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