George Orwell’s book, 1984, is a classic and well-defined post-apocalyptic dystopian story of the dangers that technology will provide to the government like surveillance. Orwell does an excellent job of building the world in the first part of the book and the imagery of a bleak, boring life through the main character’s experiences, Winston Smith. The day-to-day monotoned life that Winston lives helps readers picture the grey world. From his waking up and doing the same exercise that Big Brother, the governmental body that is in charge, makes him do to the long work hours in the office, sets the stage for how this dystopian society is a community of blind obedience that must be followed. Winston becomes bored and wary of the life he’s been living under Big Brother. The constant monitoring of his life through the telescreen makes Winston paranoid about what the government can see. He knows that if he makes one wrong move against the government it would lead to prison or, even worse, execution, but he still writes in a diary. Winston actually writes in the diary throughout the whole book. He writes down what he dislikes about Big Brother’s government policies.
Looking more closely at Chapter V, one can see an ironic policy that Big Brother makes. The policy is the newspeak which is a new way to communicate. The idea is to destroy words that don’t seem fit for the society they are living. On page 51 Orwell beautifully explains the irony of destroying words. Orwell writes, ” It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course, the great wasteage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t just the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. Afterall, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other words.” The irony of this excerpt is that through the character’s speech, there was no use of newspeak even though it was there to make the novel easier to read. Orwell still uses newspeak to show how Winston’s world operates. Orwell knew he needed to give examples and use them to an extent to give evidence of the irony that became of newspeak. Today, we are also making new words and phrases all the time, but with already existing words. What we are doing is the opposite of Orwell, we are taking words and giving them new meaning. For example, the word lit doesn’t necessarily have to mean past particles of light; the new definition is more lax as it means to get drunk or excited. It is not totally different from the ironic and controversial idea that Orwell writes about in this chapter, as well as, in the two chapters after this one.
In Chapter VII, Winston is having a hard time grappling and thinking about what life was before the revolution. He knows that there some parts of life wasn’t pleasant but he is not sure if the life he is living now is better than life before the Revolution. He is aware that the history he has learned and what the governemnt is teaching and propagandizing is incorrect. Winston’s knowledge with the governement’s lies comes from the work he does as an editor who puts what would seeem to be correct in a slot that lead to an incenerartor. As he looks at the truth that he is destroying, he has to craft lies that the government creates.
Orwell makes the readers aware that what Winston writes are lies. If you were sucked into the world without this prior knowledge you would believe what the papers were saying, but there would still be a lingering feeling of mistrust. The feeling would be described as follows: ” It might be true that the average human being was better off now than he had been before the Revolution. The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in your bones, the instinctive feeling that the condition you lived in were intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different” (Orwell 73). The passage shows that even the society that Winston is living in now is as bad as it was before the Revolution or even worse. The passage solidifies the ironic life under Big Brother. A society without a capitalistic presence is freeing to humans especially the proles who were said to be the most oppressed under capitalism, but in reality everyone is now more oppressed.
We readers see the people being oppressed and the newspeak being ridiculous because of Big Brother skewing the history and the literature that would have helped prove that their ways were better. Orwell describes these ironic elements throughout part one to set the stage for the world in which Wisnton lives. Both chapters show the redundancy that Big Brother had created and the fallacies that were made. Overall, both chapters show the counterintuitiveness that Newspeak and the edited history books brought into Winston’s world. We see that some like Winston are skeptical about Big Brother and their way of governing as well as those who blindly follow them.