The Novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Essay Example

When George Orwell wrote the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four the Second World War had only recently ended. Orwell had been concerned about political issues for years, and had written about them in different essays and books (including Animal Farm, published in 1945, but Nineteen Eighty-Four was his most significant and important book. Orwell was quite concerned about the power of a totalitarian government system to control every aspect of the lives of citizens. His novel seems to be inspired by the growing power of the Soviet Union in the middle of the 20^th century, but he set the story in England (which in the book is named “Airstrip One”). In the novel, the government controls people by watching everything they do and say, and the world is run like a huge prison.

In recent years the news stories about U.S. spying and the NSA made people realize that the current technology makes it possible for the government to monitor people and gather data on ordinary citizens very easily. If there is one very big difference between the government of Big Brother in Nineteen Eighty-Four and the current U.S. government, it is that the current government does not have to force citizens to submit to being monitored by the telescreens.  Billions of people around the world are using computers, cell phones, and tablets that are all connected through the Internet, and almost anything the government wants to know about anyone can be found.

The proposed presentation will explore several of the prominent themes and specific plot elements in Nineteen-Eighty-Four related to government control, and compare them to current real life circumstances and events. This will demonstrate the ways that Orwell’s message is still relevant to modern audiences even if some of the details are different.

This first proposal was very brief, and I can see looking back on it that I did not really have a strong sense of what was expected. Al I really did was analyze some of the main ideas of the book, like totalitarianism and how governments exert control over people. When I compare this to what my actual RIP project became in the end, I can see that it evolved significantly fro this very general set of ideas to a completely different project. Even if the final project is not perfect, I am still happy that I was able to get some of mmy ideas on paper, and I am also able to see how the process of writing workouts, feedback, and reflections allowed me to move from something that was very vague to a much more focused and specific finished project.