Nineteen Eighty-Four

Written from secondary sources (reference descriptions of the novel), not from the text.

Orwell’s last novel, published in June 1949. Winston Smith is a minor member of the Party in Airstrip One, a province of the superstate Oceania, and his job at the Ministry of Truth is rewriting old records so that they agree with whatever the Party says now. He begins a forbidden affair with Julia, trusts the wrong man, and is arrested, tortured and broken. The book ends with him accepting the Party.

Its ideas have outlived its plot. Whoever controls the record controls the past, and Winston’s job is the machinery of that: history edited until no evidence remains that it was ever different. Newspeak shrinks the language so that dissent has no words to be thought in. Doublethink is holding two contradictory beliefs and accepting both. The telescreens watch and broadcast at once, and they are aimed at the Party’s own members; the proles, the working majority, are mostly left alone. Abroad, three superstates are locked in a permanent war.

Orwell named Stalinism and Nazi Germany as his models. The appendix on Newspeak is written in the past tense, and critics disagree about whether that means the Party eventually fell or is simply how a technical note is written.