Stephen Groening does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The novel tells the story of Winston Smith, a hapless middle-aged bureaucrat who lives in Oceania, where he is governed by constant surveillance. Smith works at the Ministry of Truth, and his job is to rewrite the reports in newspapers of the past to conform with the present reality.
Smith lives in a constant state of uncertainty; he is not sure the year is in fact Although the official account is that Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia, Smith is quite sure he remembers that just a few years ago they had been at war with Eastasia, who has now been proclaimed their constant and loyal ally.
The telescreen displays a single channel of news, propaganda and wellness programming. It differs from our own television in two crucial respects: It is impossible to turn off and the screen also watches its viewers.
The telescreen is television and surveillance camera in one. In the novel, the character Smith is never sure if he is being actively monitored through the telescreen. In the s Germany had a working videophone system in place , and television programs were already being broadcast in parts of the United States, Great Britain and France.
The reader learns that Winston now leads a life of easy, meaningless work, and that when he once spoke to Julia again, she admitted that she had also turned on Winston, and the two now feel nothing for each other. In the final moment of the novel, Winston encounters an image of Big Brother and experiences a sense of victory because he now loves Big Brother. The Party had to go to extreme measures to break Winston, employing an entire cast of characters and spending countless hours following Winston and later interrogating him.
The amount of effort the Party puts into breaking down just one individual would not be possible on a massive scale: there are simply too few Party members and too many people for them to monitor. If the Party needs to expend the same amount of resources on every dissenter as it spent on Winston, it will never be able to completely stamp out dissent among the people.
For every dissenter like Winston who gets caught and broken by the Party, another may go undetected. Were the Party able to invent an efficient way to squash dissent on a large scale, rather than picking off dissenters one by one, then the ending of the book would be truly hopeless. But the fact that Winston was able to resist as long as he did, and that it took the Party such extraordinary efforts to bring him down, keeps the novel from being completely hopeless.
It's message still holds true today. When you're banned from Twitter. A good book written by George Orwell in It is about someone who tries to rebel against an extremely fascist government, and is captured, tortured, and brainwashed until he himself becomes a follower of the government. It shows what the people of thought the future might be like if the Axis powers had defeated the Allies in World War 2.
By the way, it actually does take place in , and it says that quite a few times in the book. It's not just because it's the last two digits of backwards, although that might have been why he chose that year.
0コメント