ous of the Left. He turns pro-war after the Hitler-Stalin pact and maintained his anti-Stalinist position with Animal Farm, arguably his greatest work, despite the Great Britain signing a treaty of peace with the Russian dictator. Despite his rapidly deteriorating health, he completes 1984 in 1949 to instantaneous success but dies the next year. His life and influences established his belief that socialism and communism were reprehensible political systems, which was of course displayed in his works; parodied in Animal Farm and taken to their logical extreme in 1984.
             Again, before embarking on a study of the politically-related themes of 1984, it is helpful to give a short summary of the plot. The central character of the novel is Winston Smith, a minor member of the ruling party of Oceania (England as envisaged in the eponymous year) named, simply, The Party whose leader is the all-seeing, all-powerful Big Brother. Winston is at conflict with how the world he lives in works, a world controlled by the telescreen, a two-way communication machine, akin to perpetual video conferencing, whose main use is to scrutinize any anti-Party behaviour such as love, art and independent thought. Despite this, Winston engages in an affair with a fellow Party member named Julia, writes a diary, enjoys many a happy hour in a second-hand bookshop and even affiliates himself to an anti-Party movement led by O'Brien who turns out to be a Party member and betrays him. Brainwashed at the Ministry of Love, his personality is crushed into submission and rehabilitation in the feared Room 101 where faced with his greatest fear, rats, he betrays Julia to become a diligent if simple-minded
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