1984 book report

By George Orwell

'1984' by George Orwell follows Winston Smith as he seeks to fight back, through knowledge and free thought, against the totalitarian Party that rules Oceania and his entire life.

About the Book

Article written by Emma Baldwin

B.A. in English, B.F.A. in Fine Art, and B.A. in Art Histories from East Carolina University.

The novel takes place in the year 1984 in which England has been transformed under a totalitarian superstate known as Oceania. 1984 follows Winston Smith , a mid-level member of the Party. The Party demands the allegiance and adoration of its citizens. But, Winston Smith has escaped the brainwashing that seems to have taken over everyone else’s mind. At the center of the Party is a mysterious figurehead who goes by the name of Big Brother . Winston’s burgeoning interest in the past and his hatred of the Party and its cruel, murderous, and destructive policies lead him to seek out the revolution.

Key Facts about 1984

Title: Nineteen-Eighty-Four: A Novel, later republished as 1984.
When/where written : Orwell wrote the book in Jura, Scotland from 1945-1949 .
Published: June 1949
Literary Period: Late Modernism
Genre: Novel / Dystopian / Science Fiction
Point-of-View: Third-person omniscient
Setting: London/Oceania in 1984
Climax: Torture scene in Room 101 .
Antagonist: The Party/ O’Brien /Big Brother

George Orwell and 1984

It is for 1984 that George Orwell is best-known. The events of his life led him down a path that allowed him to see the world through a very clear lens. His belief system was well fostered and served to inspire him to write 1984 and Animal Farm , as well as other works of fiction and non-fiction that seek to promote democratic socialism over any form of totalitarianism. As a young man, Orwell lived in poverty in London and Paris in order to learn about the darkest parts of society. Unlike most men and women with strongly held beliefs, he stood up for them. When he traveled to Spain to write about the Spanish Civil War he ended up joining a militia in order to fight against fascism and Franco. He was shot in the neck and charged with treason for his efforts. Orwell was well aware of the dangers of totalitarianism and Soviet Communism and knew that the conditions he depicted in both novels could occur anywhere at any time. Today, the books are considered to be a reminder that democracy is not bulletproof. It is possible for our better-governing systems and better selves, to fail.

Books Related to 1984

When George Orwell wrote 1984 dystopian fiction was not the genre that it is today. At the time that he was writing 1984, there were several wonderful examples of this genre from which he could draw inspiration. Some of these include his mentor Aldous Huxley’s A Brave New World published in 1932, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We published in 1924, and Jack London’s The Iron Heel . The latter is considered to be the earliest example of the genre, published in 1908.

Over the decades the genre would grow, becoming one of the most popular amongst readers and writers. Today, there are numerous contemporary examples of novels and short stories that have their origins in George Orwell’s masterpiece. These include books like The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, The Stand by Stephen King, The Power by Naomi Alderman, The Giver by Lois Lowry, and The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

The Lasting Impact of 1984

Today, as anti-democratic, pro-isolationist, and even fascist governments are taking power all over the world, many have turned to Orwell for his knowledge of these systems and the importance of fighting back against them. Totalitarianism is not a thing of the past and luckily we have 1984 as well as Orwell’s other novels and essays to remind us how possible it is to lose our democratic systems of governance.

1984 Quotes

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1984 Summary and Analysis

Home » Literature Explained – Literary Synopses and Book Summaries » 1984 Book » 1984 Summary and Analysis

Book Introduction

The novel 1984 by George Orwell is a dystopian classic following the main character, Winston Smith, who is a socially low-ranking individual as he navigates his frustrations with the ever-watching Big Brother which forbids any sort of individuality. Crimes of individual expression and/or rebellion are punishable to the highest extent, but Winston illegally journals his hatred of the ruling party and begins a forbidden love affair in secret. His downfall comes as the oppressive ruling party breaks him down utterly and completely.

This novel was written in a direct response to George Orwell’s mistrust of governmental parties and authoritative regimes due to his observations about the Spanish Civil War. The novel is Orwell’s statement that overly authoritarian rule is closer to happening than most people might want to admit.

Literary Elements of 1984

Type of Work: Fiction/novel

Genres : Dystopian, Science Fiction

Published Date: 1949

Setting: London, 1984 (assumed because of the title but not confirmed in the text.)

Main Characters: Winston Smith, Julia, O’Brien, Big Brother

Protagonist/Antagonist: Protagonist – Winston Smith/Antagonist – The Thought Police

Major Thematic Elements: Perils of totalitarianism, psychological and physical control/manipulation, censoring of information and history, advanced technology, restrictions on language to control and manipulate, loyalty and resistance to power, revolution and independence, identity

Motifs: Doublethink, urban decay

Exposition: Explanation of Big Brother and how the new government regime has altered Winston’s life in drastic ways

Plot: Three parts, linear narrative structure

Major Symbols: Big Brother, the glass paperweight, St. Clement’s Church, the telescreens, the place where there is no darkness, red-armed prole woman

Climax: Julia hands Winston a note confessing her love and now Winston must go from passively objecting to The Party to actively committing acts of rebellion and defiance.

Literary Significance of 1984

1984 is a powerful message about the dangers of political suppression and totalitarian powers. 1984 details the dangers of the rising technological advances mixing with the wrong kinds of political leaders. Published at the dawn of the nuclear age, there were very real fears across the globe that unchecked technological advances in such times of unrest could lead to further oppression of the individuals living under oppressive regimes.

Although much of Orwell’s fears never materialized and democracy overcame oppressive government structures, the novel remains an important and widely-taught novel that serves as a warning for what could happen under the wrong circumstances. The novel is much more than a sci-fi thriller, it contains very real implications for unchecked governmental power and unbridled control.

1984 Book Summary

Winston found a diary in an antique shop in the district where the very poor (the proles) live and the Party does not monitor as closely, believing them to be insignificant. Winston writes in his diary even though he knows it is a punishable act of rebellion. Winston daydreams and when he looks down, sees he has written “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER” over and over and has committed thoughtcrime, the crime of having rebellious thoughts against the Party. Winston realizes that nothing will be the same.

As time goes on, Winston continues to write in his diary, knowing full well that it will lead to his downfall. He writes that he longs for revolution against the Party and that the proles will be the key to a successful revolution since they make up such a large number of the population. He believes the Party’s oversight and dismissal of the proles is the key to starting a revolution. Winston thinks about the Party official O’Brien and believes that he may be a player in a potential rebellion effort. He dreams about O’Brien and a place where there is no darkness.

In chapter 8, Winston goes to the prole neighborhoods to try and find out what life was like before the Party but cannot get much information. He goes back to the antique store where he bought his journal and purchases a glass paperweight. The shop owner shows Winston a room above the shop with no telescreen and a picture of St. Clement’s church. On the way home, Winston believes he is being followed by Thought Police and resolves to commit suicide before they can even catch him.

Book Two begins with Winston seeing the pretty brown-haired woman at work. She falls and he helps her up. In doing this, she passes him a note that simply reads “I love you.” Winston is conflicted as he has suspected her of being a spy this whole time. This note changes Winston’s desire to find a way to commit suicide. He resolves to live. The two plan a secret meeting and find much pleasure in being alone together.

In chapter 3, Winston rents the room with no telescreen above the antique shop. This is his and Julia’s go-to meeting place. Winston begins to be frustrated with being kept apart from Julia and longs intensely for a leisurely and romantic life with her. The room with the glass paperweight and picture of St. Celement’s church becomes a symbol of the past for Winston and he thinks about it when he is working and stuck doing other things as a type of refuge.

In chapter 6, O’Brien makes contact with Winston. Convinced that he is being invited to join the rebellion, Winston accepts that he is now really going down a road that will lead to his being killed by the Party. He accepts this and agrees to meet with O’Brien anyway. Winston’s emotions are greatly stirred at this point and he remembers memories from his childhood of leaving his family behind during the political struggles. He believes his is responsible for his mother’s death. Julia and Winston begin to realize the great chances that they will be caught and tortured, and they know that they should stop renting the room but they cannot. They vow to still love each other, no matter what happens. Later, in chapter 8, Winston and Julia meet with O’Brien and declare themselves enemies of the Party.

In chapter 10, Julia and Winston are admired the red-armed prole woman who does her laundry outside their window. They believe her and her children are the keys to revolution. Suddenly, a voice speaks to them in the room and they realize that there has been a telescreen behind the picture of St. Clement’s church. Police storm the room and arrest them. It turns out the owner of the antique shop was a member of the Thought Police.

Book Three begins with Winston being contained in a bright cell that always has the lights on. Winston is tortured for some time and wishes for an opportunity to kill himself. O’Brien meets with Winston and reveals that he was actually acting as a spy and set Winston and Julia up to reveal themselves. O’Brien says that the torture will fix Winston.

After some time, Winston’s torture begins to work, and he agrees to things that he knows are not true. He is being brainwashed and even agrees that “two and two make five.” In a fit of misery after many weeks of confinement and torture, he can’t help but yell Julia’s name over and over. Winston backtracks and tells the guards that he hates Big Brother. In chapter 5, Winston’s greatest fear, rats, are used against him. As the guards prepare to strap a cage of rats to Winston’s head so that they can eat his face off, Winston gives up and tells them to take the rats to eat Julia’s face instead. O’Brien is satisfied and Winston is released back into the real world. Winston is fully in support of the Party, he has been fully broken during his time imprisoned. When Winston sees Julia again, he finds her repulsive. When he sees posters about Big Brother, he feels safe and happy.

A Summary and Analysis of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four , completed in 1948 and published a year later, is a classic example of dystopian fiction. Indeed, it’s surely the most famous dystopian novel in the world, even if its ideas are known by far more people than have actually read it. (According to at least one survey , Nineteen Eighty-Four is the book people most often claim to have read when they haven’t.)

Like many novels that are more known about than are carefully read and analysed, Nineteen Eighty-Four is actually a more complex work than the label ‘nightmare dystopian vision’ can convey. Before we offer an analysis of the novel’s themes and origins, let’s briefly recap the plot.

Nineteen Eighty-Four : plot summary

In the year 1984, Britain has been renamed Airstrip One and is a province of Oceania, a vast totalitarian superstate ruled by ‘the Party’, whose politics are described as Ingsoc (‘English Socialism’). Big Brother is the leader of the Party, which keeps its citizens in a perpetual state of fear and submission through a variety of means.

Surveillance is a key part of the novel’s world, with hidden microphones (which are found in the countryside as well as urban areas, and can identify not only what is said but also who says it) and two-way telescreen monitors being used to root out any dissidents, who disappear from society with all trace of their existence wiped out.

They become, in the language of Newspeak (the language used by people in the novel), ‘unpersons’. People are short of food, perpetually on the brink of starvation, and going about in fear for their lives.

The novel’s setting is London, where Trafalgar Square has been renamed Victory Square and the statue of Horatio Nelson atop Nelson’s Column has been replaced by one of Big Brother. Through such touches, Orwell defamiliarises the London of the 1940s which the original readers would have recognised, showing how the London they know might be transformed under a totalitarian regime.

The novel’s protagonist is Winston Smith, who works at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting historical records so they are consistent with the state’s latest version of history. However, even though his day job involves doing the work of the Party, Winston longs to escape the oppressive control of the Party, hoping for a rebellion.

Winston meets the owner of an antique shop named Mr Charrington, from whom he buys a diary in which he can record his true feelings towards the Party. Believing the working-class ‘proles’ are the key to a revolution, Winston visits them, but is disappointed to find them wholly lacking in any political understanding.

Meanwhile, hearing of the existence of an underground resistance movement known as the Brotherhood – which has been formed by the rival of Big Brother, a man named Emmanuel Goldstein – Winston suspects that O’Brien, who also works with him, is involved with this resistance.

At lunch with another colleague, named Syme, Winston learns that the English language is being rewritten as Newspeak so as to control and influence people’s thought, the idea being that if the word for an idea doesn’t exist in the language, people will be unable to think about it.

Winston meets a woman named Julia who works for the Ministry of Truth, maintaining novel-writing machines, but believes she is a Party spy sent to watch him. But then Julia passes a clandestine love message to him and the two begin an affair – which is itself illicit since the Party decrees that sex is for reproduction alone, rather than pleasure.

We gradually learn more about Winston’s past, including his marriage to Katherine, from whom he is now separated. Syme, who had been working on Newspeak, disappears in mysterious circumstances: something Winston had predicted.

O’Brien invites Winston to his flat, declaring himself – as Winston had also predicted – a member of the Brotherhood, the resistance against the Party. He gives Winston a copy of the book written by Goldstein, the leader of the Brotherhood.

When Oceania’s enemy changes during the ritual Hate Week, Winston is tasked with making further historical revisions to old newspapers and documents to reflect this change.

Meanwhile, Winston and Julia secretly read Goldstein’s book, which explains how the Party maintains its totalitarian power. As Winston had suspected, the secret to overthrowing the Party lies in the vast mass of the population known as the ‘proles’ (derived from ‘proletarian’, Marx’s term for the working classes). It argues that the Party can be overthrown if proles rise up against it.

But shortly after this, Winston and Julia are arrested, having been shopped to the authorities by Mr Charrington (whose flat above his shop they had been using for their illicit meetings). It turns out that both he and O’Brien work for the Thought Police, on behalf of the Party.

At the Ministry of Love, O’Brien tells Winston that Goldstein’s book was actually written by him and other Party members, and that the Brotherhood may not even exist. Winston endures torture and starvation in an attempt to grind him down so he will accept Big Brother.

In Room 101, a room in which a prisoner is exposed to their greatest fear, Winston is placed in front of a wire cage containing rats, which he fears above all else. Winston betrays Julia, wishing she could take his place and endure this suffering instead.

His reprogramming complete, Winston is allowed to go free, but he is essentially living under a death sentence: he knows that one day he will be summoned by the authorities and shot for his former treachery.

He meets Julia one day, and learns that she was subjected to torture at the Ministry of Love as well. They have both betrayed each other, and part ways. The novel ends with Winston accepting, after all, that the Party has won and that ‘he loved Big Brother.’

Nineteen Eighty-Four : analysis

Nineteen Eighty-Four is probably the most famous novel about totalitarianism, and about the dangers of allowing a one-party state where democracy, freedom of movement, freedom of speech, and even freedom of thought are all outlawed. The novel is often analysed as a warning about the dangers of allowing a creeping totalitarianism into Britain, after the horrors of such regimes in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and elsewhere had been witnessed.

Because of this quality of the book, it is often called ‘prophetic’ and a ‘nightmare vision of the future’, among other things.

However, books set in the future are rarely simply about the future. They are not mere speculation, but are grounded in the circumstances in which they were written.

Indeed, we might go so far as to say that most dystopian novels, whilst nominally set in an imagined future, are really using their future setting to reflect on what are already firmly established social or political ideas. In the case of Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four , this means the novel reflects the London of the 1940s.

By the time he came to write the novel, Orwell already had a long-standing interest in using his writing to highlight the horrors of totalitarianism around the world, especially following his experience fighting in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. As Orwell put it in his essay ‘ Why I Write ’, all of his serious work written since 1936 was written ‘ against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism’.

In his analysis of Nineteen Eighty-Four in his study of Orwell, George Orwell (Reader’s Guides) , Jeffrey Meyers argues convincingly that, rather than being a nightmare vision of the future, a prophetic or speculative work, Orwell’s novel is actually a ‘realistic synthesis and rearrangement of familiar materials’ – indeed, as much of Orwell’s best work is.

His talent lay not in original imaginative thinking but in clear-headed critical analysis of things as they are: his essays are a prime example of this. Nineteen Eighty-Four is, in Meyer’s words, ‘realistic rather than fantastic’.

Indeed, Orwell himself stated that although the novel was ‘in a sense a fantasy’, it is written in the form of the naturalistic novel, with its themes and ideas having been already ‘partly realised in Communism and fascism’. Orwell’s intention, as stated by Orwell himself, was to take the totalitarian ideas that had ‘taken root’ in the minds of intellectuals all over Europe, and draw them out ‘to their logical consequences’.

Like much classic speculative fiction – the novels and stories of J. G. Ballard offer another example – the futuristic vision of the author is more a reflection of contemporary anxieties and concerns. Meyers goes so far as to argue that Nineteen Eighty-Four is actually the political regimes of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia ‘transposed’ into London of the early 1940s, during the Second World War.

Certainly, many of the most famous features of Nineteen Eighty-Four were suggested to Orwell by his time working at the BBC in London in the first half of the 1940s: it is well-known that the Ministry of Truth was based on the bureaucratic BBC with its propaganda department, while the infamous Room 101 was supposedly named after a room of that number in the BBC building, in which Orwell had to endure tedious meetings.

The technology of the novel, too, was familiar by the 1940s, involving little innovation or leaps of imagination from Orwell (‘telescreens’ being a natural extension of the television set: BBC TV had been established in 1936, although the Second World War pushed back its development somewhat).

Orwell learned much about the workings of Stalinism from reading Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed (1937), written by one of the leading figures in the Russian Revolution of 1917 who saw Stalinist Russia as the antithesis of what Trotsky, Lenin, and those early revolutionaries had been striving to achieve. (This would also be important for Orwell’s Animal Farm , of course.)

And indeed, many of the details surrounding censorship – the rewriting of history, the suppression of dissident literature, the control of the language people use to express themselves and even to think in – were also derived from Orwell’s reading of life in Soviet Russia. Surveillance was also a key element of the Stalinist regime, as in other Communist countries in Europe.

The moustachioed figure of Big Brother in Nineteen Eighty-Four recalls nobody so much as Josef Stalin himself. Not only the ideas of ‘thought crime’ and ‘thought police’, but even the terms themselves, predate Orwell’s use of them: they were first recorded in a 1934 book about Japan.

One of the key questions Winston asks himself in Nineteen Eighty-Four is what the Party is trying to achieve. O’Brien’s answer is simple: the maintaining of power for its own sake. Many human beings want to control other human beings, and they can persuade a worrying number of people to go along with their plans and even actively support them.

Despite the fact that they are starving and living a miserable life, many of the people in Airstrip One love Big Brother, viewing him not as a tyrannical dictator but as their ‘Saviour’ (as one woman calls him). Again, this detail was taken from accounts of Stalin, who was revered by many Russians even though they were often living a wretched life under his rule.

Another key theme of Orwell’s novel is the relationship between language and thought. In our era of fake news and corrupt media, this has only become even more pronounced: if you lie to a population and confuse them enough, you can control them. O’Brien introduces Winston to the work of the traitor to the Party, Emmanuel Goldstein, only to tell him later that Goldstein may not exist and his book was actually written by the Party.

Is this the lie, or was the book the lie? One of the most famous lines from the novel is Winston’s note to himself in his diary: ‘Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.’

But later, O’Brien will force Winston to ‘admit’ that two plus two can make five. Orwell tells us, ‘The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.’

Or as Voltaire once wrote, ‘Truly, whoever is able to make you absurd is able to make you unjust.’ Forcing somebody to utter blatant falsehoods is a powerful psychological tool for totalitarian regimes because through doing so, they have chipped away at your moral and intellectual integrity.

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5 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four”

1984 is a novel which is great in spite of itself and has been lionised for the wrong reasons. The title of the novel is a simple anagram of 1948, the date when the novel was written, and was driven by Orwell’s paranoia about the 1945 Labour government in UK. Orwell, a public school man, had built a reputation for hiself in the nineteen thirties as a socialist writer, and had fought for socialism in the Spanish civil war. The Road To Wigan Pier is an excellent polemic attacking the way the UK government was handling the mass unemployment of the time, reducing workers to a state of near starvation. In Homage To Catalonia, Orwell describes his experiences fighting with a small Marxist militia against Franco’s fascists. It was in Spain that Orwell developed his lifelong hatred of Stalinism, observing that the Communist contingents were more interested in suppressing other left-wing factions than in defeating Franco. The 1945 Labour government ws Britain’s first democratically elected socialist governement. It successfully established the welfare state and the National Health Service in a country almost bankrupted by the war, and despite the fact that Truman in USA was demanding the punctual repayment of wartime loans. Instead of rejoicing, Orwell, by now terminally ill from tuberculosis, saw the necessary continuation of wartime austerity and rationing as a deliberate and unnecessary imposition. Consequently, the book is often used as propaganda against socialism. The virtues of the book are the warnings about the dangers of giving the state too much power, in the form of electronic surveillance, ehanced police powers, intrusive laws, and the insidious use of political propaganda to warp peoples’ thinking. All of this has come to pass in the West as well as the East, but because of the overtly anticommunist spin to Orwell’s novel, most people fail to get its important message..

As with other work here, another good review. I’m also fascinated that Orwell located the government as prime problem, whereas Huxley located the people as prime problem, two sides of the same coin.

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