1984 George Orwell, Essay Example

In the book 1984 George Orwell uses a variety of rhetorical techniques to get his point across to his audience. One of the techniques he uses is the make the world of Oceania as detailed and realistic as possible. In dystopian stories the future world is usually very bleak and depressing, like the events of the story are set at a time after some war or other disaster has occurred. There are some stories that are exceptions to this, of course. Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” is set in a future where technology is common, and where the setting is not full of destruction and the aftermath of war. But it is still a dystopian future, because of the way that the people in the future are enslaved by technology and trapped in social roles that keep them from being free. Either of these approaches can work for telling a story of a dystopian future, but Orwell’s worked very well for his audience because 1984 was published just after World War II. The destruction of the war was still seen all over England and Europe, and the Soviet Union was growing in power, which made “Big Brother” seem like a real possibility to Orwell’s audience. In many ways Orwell was wrong about the way the future would look, and how the government would operate to restrict freedom and privacy. But there are also many things that Orwell got right, and comparing things from the book to things that actually exist today can help demonstrate that the details do not matter as much as the results where government power is concerned.

I wrote the RIP project as a short story, and it was definitely influenced by 1984, even though I tried not to steal any of Orwell’s specific ideas. What I did try to reflect was the way that Orwell used elements of the real world of his day and imagined how they might look in a dystopian future. All of the main ideas in the story were taken from things that either exist now in the real world or are exaggerated versions of things that exist now. The most obvious one of these things is the drug “bioxx” that changes the way people look, like botox does now. Bioxx  uses nanoparticles, which I have read about and which are probably going to be used in medicine in the future.

The main character is named “Chay.” This is a nickname that was given to him long ago, and he does not understand that this nickname was based on the name “Che Guevara,” who was a revolutionary in Cuba and South America in the 1960s. The character of “Chay” does not know how to write or spell very well, so he thinks that the name “Che” should be spelled “Chay.”The point of his name in the story is that the word “revolutionary” does not mean anything to the people in Chay’s world. There is nothing to revolt against because everything is automated and there is food and drugs and all kinds of other resources and technologies left over after a great war. The world has been damaged and billions of people have died, but the survivors have everything they need to keep living.

The story takes place sometime in the future. Chay lives in Mex City in the country of New Texas. This used to be the country of Mexico, but somewhere along the way there has been a major war that changed many of the things we know today.In the city where Chay lives there is a lot of technology, like cell phones and computers and tablets and flat screen TVs. No one who lives there knows where these things came from because they are all left over from before the war. Chay calls cell phones “talk boxes,” and he calls tablets “carry screens” because they are screens that are carried around.

In Mex City everything is automatic. There are automatic cars, automatic street lights, and even automatic gardens that grow vegetables. There is a food source called “terrano” that can be turned into meat, a drug called “skona” that makes users feel happy, and a medication called “bioxx” that can be injected into the face to change a person’s facial features (I made up these words).

There is a border between New Texas and the Confederate States, and Chay wants to get to the other side. (The Confederate States of America was the name that was used by the southern states in the American Civil War in the 1800s, when the south tried to break away from the rest of the United States over the issue of slavery and other issues). In the future world where Chay lives, the Confederate States are not explained in great detail, and all Chay knows is that the population of the Confederate States is made up entirely of white people. Chay uses the bioxx injection to give him white facial features, because he thinks that will make it possible for him to cross the border. Chay has heard of a place in the Confederate States called Angel City,” which is the city that used to be Los Angeles.

Chay does not understand that all the technology around him in Mex City is left over from before the war, and that it all keeps operating because it is connected to solar power, wind power, and other renewable power sources. He has heard that life in the Confederate States is very different, and that people there have jobs and drive their own cars and do all sorts of things he cannot understand because he has never seen or experienced any of them. He has everything he needs to survive in Mex City, because there is an endless supply of food and transportation and anything else he needs, but he is bored by al of it, and he wants some sort of adventure. Chay believes that by temporarily making his face white with the bioxx that the robot drones that protect the border will think he is a whiter person and will let him pass.

What Chay does not realize is that the border is not really a border, it is a prison wall, and that he is a prisoner. There is a man on the other side of the border watching Chay on a screen. This man, John Hardy (a name I made up because it sounds like a very “white” name) is obviously a prison guard, John Hardy laughs at the idea that Chay believed making his face white would allow him to escape the prison.

When I wrote this story I tried to use many examples of technology that we already have right now (like cell phones and tablets), and I also included technology that might be common soon (like cars that drive themselves, and renewable energy sources that we will be able to use instead of oil and gas). I also used examples of technology that we might have in the future, like nano-technology that can be in medicine and health care. I set the story in the future after a huge war that killed billions of people but left a ,lot of technology still working. SO hundreds of years from now the survivors of this war would still use the technology they had available, even if they did not know who built it or how it work

The underlying theme of the story is that this technology made life into a prison because people came to depend on it so much that they did not have to work or do anything else, because the technology would do everything for them. What the people did not know is that they lived in a huge prison, and were actually being watched 24 hours a day by the people in the Confederate States. I do not give away too much about the people in the Confederate States. All that is shown in the story is that still live somewhat normal lives, and they have jobs and families and all the other things we think of as being normal parts of life.

I decided to use some themes about race and racism in the story because I was thinking about what is happening on the U.S. border in the real world of 2014. There are many people in the U.S. who would like to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico to keep people from Mexico and South America from entering the country. So in the future world the people in the Confederate States all have the same white skin and the same physical features because they use genetic engineering to make everyone exactly the same. The people in New Texas have dark skin, and they have never seen the white-skinned people. They have only heard stories about them. In Chay’s imagination, the stories he has heard make him think of the white people almost like they are angels, but the truth is that they are just human beings who use technology to make themselves all exactly alike because they believe that white skin is superior to dark skin. And they understand how technology works, so they use it to control the dark skinned people.

My goal with this story was to use some of the same rhetorical techniques that Orwell used in 1984. I took things that exist now in the real world (like cell phones and other technology) and tried to imagine how these things might be used in the future by one group of people to control another group of people. Right now, in the real world, technology can be used to spy on people without them knowing. In the future world I made up for this story, technology is now used to keep people imprisoned. And the technology works so well that the prisoners do not even realize that they are prisoners.

This RIP project has been a really enormous challenge. I hope that the explanation I just provided will make it clear what I was trying to accomplish with this story.