1984 is about a world, our world, in the future (it was written in 1949). It is a world that has been divided into three superstates: Oceania,
Eastasia, and Eurasia. The main character is a man named Winston Smith who lives in Oceania, which is under the control of the Party. The Party
controls every aspect of daily life, and has four large buildings that keep Oceania in their power, the Minstry of Peace (for war purposes), the
Ministry of Truth (for media purposes), the Ministry of Plenty (for economic affairs), and the Ministry of Love (for criminals to go). The
naming of these buildings is the exercise of "doublethink," which is the process of holding two contradictory thoughts in your head at the same time, and accepting both as the truth. Through using this method, the Party
can control what people consider to be the truth and twist the truth around.
Winston is just a normal human being when compared to us, and on the outside he's also normal in Oceania. George Orwell does a remarkable
job in comparing Winston's actions to our own, such as in the scene in the Ministry of Love where he is interrogated and broken down by O'Brien's reasoning. Any person in the same situation would be forced to the same
Winston can be seen as a representative of man throughout the book. He knows how things work, but he doesn't know why they do, which he
struggles to find out like any other person would. It is this curiousity, which comes with all humans, that leads to his demise in the Ministry of Love.
Everywhere you look in 1984, some kind of injustice is taking place: constant wars, people confessing to crimes they did not commit, people's
memories being rewritten every minute, the Party controls everything and seems to be like the Stalinist Russia. But then, in the scene of the
interrogation, we learn a lot more about how the Party compares with "governments of the past,"...