Nineteen Eighty-Four
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Nineteen Eighty-Four is a novel written by George Orwell in 1948. The main character is Winston Smith, who lives in Oceania, under the rule of The Party and Big Brother. He becomes friends with the character O'Brien. He also falls in love with Julia, who hates Big Brother and The Party.
Winston's job is to write revisions (changes) to articles and news stories all the time. But in the book, no one in Oceania is ever allowed to look at the old changes, or even think about them again, or else they will be in big trouble. Another thing they are trying to do is cut all the hard words out of the English language and change it to make it more simple so that people will not be too smart or think too hard. For example, the word dog means dog only because the Party says so. They are not allowed to have families, but other people who live on the outside of the system have more freedoms, and are called proles. Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, large wars are being fought to keep the people busy. The sides in the wars sometimes change, but whenever they do, they pretend there was no change and that the sides were always the same. This means that all the articles will have to be changed by people like Winston who aren't supposed to think about what they are doing. It is a terrible vision of what life could be.
[edit] Political satire
Orwell got the idea for the book when he was noticing in the newspapers of London that they were listing how much the country's supplies improved during World War II when they were actually very low on supplies and getting worse everyday. With his knowledge of Communism (after living in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics for five years) he started writing a political satire (making fun of a thing) of where he thought Britain may be in 50 years. It is still a debate today whether he wrote it in 1934 or 1948, but the believed date today is 1948. The book mainly satires Communism with a dystopian or false utopian society. While Orwell was a socialist he hated Communism.
[edit] Ending
In the end of Nineteen-Eighty Four, Winston gives up after telling O'Brien (who betrays him, since he is actually a member of The Party) to put Julia's head with the rats in Room 101. They lose their love for each other, and just continue life under The Party, and Big Brother.
[edit] Newspeak
"Newspeak" is a language that George Orwell invented just for the use in Ninteen eighty-four. It is the official language of Oceania. At the end of his book, George Orwell added a short description of Newspeak. It started out as the English language, but the number of words gets smaller each year. The "Party" is trying to stop people from rebelling, so it destroys words like "freedom" and "love", saying that people can not think of it if there is no word for it. For example, a person couldn't say "I want to be free", because there was no word for "free" any more, so the person could not describe what he or she was feeling. "Newspeak" is also used for military reasons, such as Oceania's Ministry of Peace (in Newspeak: "Minipax"), really the war department. Another "Newspeak" word, joycamp, means "forced labor camp". Other "Newspeak" words were used for political reasons. Words like "crimethink" were defined by the "Party", and became laws of the land.