Example research essay topic: Nineteen Eighty Four World Of 1984 - 1,098 words

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... g (only thirty-five years from its publication, whereas Huxley's and Zamyatin's imagined futures are set hundreds of years away), and second, the disturbing familiarity and plausibility of the world that Orwell constructs. Because the social world of 1984 is not that far removed from the reader's own experience, he becomes involved in a more profound, intimate way than he does in Huxley's remote chrome-and-glass society. Orwell wanted his readers to understand not only the intellectual-theoretical foundations of this future society, but to experience the dull, shabby horror of living in such a world. The first two-thirds of Nineteen Eighty-Four portrays the future as a schizoid, psychotic world, but Orwell counterpoints this disturbing portrait by showing that an awareness of the past (which the Party is determined to extirpate from human consciousness) provides a means of understanding the present and becomes the single resource by which the novel's protagonist, Winston Smith, can preserve his sanity and establish his individuality.

While the world of 1984 has virtually erased the private, subjective life, Winston surreptitiously begins his diary (itself a political crime) in order to give form to his "ancestral memory, " a vague term which is used to express the recesses of his cultural consciousness, his shadowy sense of the past, and his last vestiges of a communal human spirit. The motivation for Winston's revolt is not so much political as it is cultural and historical he seeks to validate his "ancestral memory" by seeking out ordinary, bourgeois experience (a quest not entirely dissimilar to Flory's, Comstock's, or Bowling's). Toward this end he gathers a number of relics of the past: a diary, a paperweight, and Charrington's upstairs room, where he and Julia make love. There is a timeliness and peace about this bourgeois room, and it becomes a place where he and Julia can establish (albeit temporarily) a normative and private life. This "pocket of the past" is both an escape from the nightmarish world of Oceania and a place where they can recover the sources of ordinary human experience, which the party recognizes as an embryonic threat to their control and therefore seeks to extinguish.

It is important to remember that this work, like previous works of Orwell's, does not simply assert a nostalgia for the past but asserts the value and significance of the past to human consciousness, and therefore to the preservation of human liberty and the human heritage. The only hope outside of himself that Winston feels lies in his quasi-faith in the proles, who comprise eighty-five percent of the population (a large figure which suggests that it comprises the majority of common, ordinary Englishmen, what Orwell elsewhere referred to as the "big public"). Winston believes that they have unconsciously preserved the ordinary values and habit of life through an "ancestral transmission of the human spirit, " and yet he finds in them no potential for acting upon their instincts or even of becoming conscious of their instinctual heritage. The proles are strikingly evocative of a pre- 1914 working-class world, a class that Orwell periodically idealized, but whose "semi-anaesthesia" he feared would abet their own oppression.

The image of the working-class woman who sings as she hangs up her clothes defines for Winston the abiding human spirit that the Party has not extinguished, but, finally, the proles are no more conscious of their past or of their heritage than are the animals in Animal Farm and are vulnerable to the same kind of oppression. The last third of Nineteen Eighty-Four -- dominated by the interpolated chapters from Emmanuel Goldstein's "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, " and Winston's systematic "re-education" in the Ministry of Love as O'Brien expounds on the theoretical foundations of Ingsocdoes not effectively develop or resolve the thematic or plot elements established in the first two-thirds. It is in this section that Orwell's focus appears to shift away from the dramatic framework and toward the direct, unfiltered expression of his political purpose. By the close of the novel, Winston's final obliteration and the mute survival of the proles suggest Orwell's pessimistic outlook in 1948 for the survival of England's liberal heritage, a pessimism which he was repeatedly expressing elsewhere (as in statements such as, "When you are on a sinking ship, your thoughts will be about sinking ships").

There is no doubt that this grim, powerful, affecting work has continued to express the latent insecurities and anxieties of our age. For Orwell the problem of making people conscious of what was happening around them, as well as awakening a critical habit of mind that would resist the political rationalizations of power policy, had been his most significant literary challenge since 1936. In Nineteen Eighty-Four he found a form capable of meeting that challenge by fusing realism and fantasy: realism enabled him to establish a recognizable world and to express some of his most deeply felt social and cultural attitudes; fantasy enabled him to construct a mythic framework that would dramatize the nightmarish quality of the political society of 1984 and to affect the deepest resources of the reader's imagination. Although the work was immediately successful, it coincided with the emergence of the Cold War consciousness, and because it was often used to support political points of view that Orwell never intended, he was provoked to directly respond to such "misreadings": It has been suggested by some of the reviewers of Nineteen Eighty-Fourth it is the author's view that this, or something like this, is what will happen inside the next forty years in the Western world.

This is not correct. I think that, allowing for the book being after all a parody, something like Nineteen Eighty-Four could happen. This is the direction in which the world is going at the present time, and the trend lies deep in the political, social and economic foundations of the contemporary world situation. Specifically the danger lies in the structure imposed on Socialist and on Liberal capitalist communities by the necessity to prepare for total war with the U. S.

S. R. and the new weapons, of which of course the atomic bomb is the most powerful and most publicized. But danger lies also in the acceptance of a totalitarian outlook by intellectuals of all colours.

The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: Don't let it happen. It depends on you... Bibliography: David Morgan Zero, "George Orwell, " in British Novelists: 1930 - 1959, Part 2, edited by Bernard Older, Gale Research Company, 1983, pp. 407 - 22. Reprinted in DISCovering Authors 3. 0, Gale Group, 1999.

Research essay sample on Nineteen Eighty Four World Of 1984