GEORGE ORWELL’S BACKGROUND
9 novembre 2010 by rorueso
Nineteen Eighty-Four occurs in Oceania, one of three intercontinental super-states who divided the world among themselves after a global war. Almost all of the action takes place in London, the “chief city of Airstrip One“,[22] the Oceanic province that “had once been called England or Britain”.[23] Posters of the Party leader, Big Brother, bearing the caption BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU dominate the landscape, while the telescreen (transceiving television) ubiquitously monitors the private and public lives of the populace. The social class system is threefold: (I) the upper-class Inner Party, (II) the middle-class Outer Party, and (III) the lower-class Proles (from Proletariat), who make up 85% of the population and represent the working class. As the government, the Party controls the population via four government ministries: the Ministry of Peace, Ministry of Plenty, Ministry of Love, and the Ministry of Truth, where protagonist Winston Smith (a member of the Outer Party), works as an editor revising historical records to concord the past to the contemporary party line orthodoxy—that changes daily—and deletes the official existence of people identified as unpersons.
Winston Smith’s story begins on 4 April 1984: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen”;[24] yet the date is dubitable, because it is what he perceives, given the continual historical revisionism; he later concludes it is irrelevant. Winston’s memories and his reading of the proscribed book, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, by Emmanuel Goldstein, reveal that after the Second World War, the United Kingdom fell to civil war and then was integrated into Oceania. Simultaneously, the USSR‘s annexation of continental Europe established the second superstate of Eurasia. The third superstate, Eastasia, represents East and Southeast Asian region. The three superstates fight a perpetual war for the remaining unconquered lands of the world; they form and break alliances as convenient.
From his childhood (1949–53), Winston remembers the Atomic Wars fought in Europe, western Russia, and North America. It is unclear to him what occurred first—either the Party’s civil war ascendance, or the US’s British Empire annexation, or the war wherein Colchester was bombed—however, the increasing clarity of his memory and the story of his family’s dissolution suggest that the atomic bombings occurred first (the Smiths took refuge in a tube station) followed by civil war featuring “confused street fighting in London itself”, and the societal postwar reorganisation, which the Party retrospectively call “the Revolution”
BACK TO First paper/ Essay
(URL://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four)