George Orwell: Biography and Summary of "1984", Appunti di Inglese

Scarica George Orwell: Biography and Summary of "1984" e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! GEORGE ORWELL George Orwell (the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair) was born in Bengal (India) in 1903. He was the son of a customs official. At the age of eight he was taken to England and educated first at a preparatory school, then at Eton (a famous boys’ school). He had to study very hard, in order to gain a scholarship to carry on his studies because his parents could not afford to pay them. When he left the school, he refused to go either Oxford or Cambridge: Orwell could not stand anymore the lack of privacy, the humiliating punishments, the pressure to conform the values of the English public school tradition (such as the development of a spirit of competition and a rigid adherence to discipline).. He decided to enrol instead in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma (to follow a family tradition), but: when he realised how much against their will the Burmese were ruled by the British, Orwell resigned his commission (feeling ashamed of being a colonial police officer). He wanted “to escape”, as he said, “not merely from imperialism but from every form of man’s domination over man”. Orwell’s revulsion against imperialism led not only to his personal rejection of the bourgeois lifestyle but also to a political reorientation. Immediately after returning from Burma he began to define himself as an anarchist and continued to do so for several years. During the 1930s he began to consider himself a socialist. Having felt guilty that the barriers of race and caste had prevented his mingling with the Burmese, he thought he could expiate some of his guilt by immersing himself in the life of the poor and outcast people of Europe, choosing to leave his upper-class friend and family. He started a sort of social experiment: wearing second-hand clothes, he went into the East End of London to live in common lodging-houses, among labourers and beggars. In this way he directly experienced poverty and learned how institutions for the poor (such as the hostels, prisons, lodging-houses and hospitals) worked. After a period in Paris, where he worked as a dishwasher in a hotel, he decided to begin publishing his works using a pseudonym (so that his family would not be embarrassed). He chose the name George Orwell to reflect his love of English tradition and landscape: George is the patron saint of England and the River Orwell (a popular sailing spot) was a place he loved to visit. «Down and out in Paris and London» was his first non-fiction narrative in which he described his experience among the poor». It was followed by «Burmese Days» , a book based on his experiences in the colonial service. In 1936 Orwell was commissioned to investigates conditions among the miners, factory workers and unemployed in the industrial North. A year later he published «The Road to Wigan Pier», an account of his life and work with miners. Like many left-wing writers of the 1930s, Orwell felt it a moral duty to fight on the republican side in the Spain Civil War. For this reason, he went to Barcellona and joined the militia of the POUM (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification) and fought in the trenches of the Aragon front. When he moved back to England, Orwell published «Homage to Catalonia»: a reportage of the time he spent in Spain. When World War II broke out, Orwell was rejected for military service (considered unfit on medical grounds). He joined the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) Indian Service. In those years he also became literary editor of the socialist newspaper “Tribune”. In 1945 he published «Animal Farm» (a satire of the Russian Revolution) where the author expressed (in the form of an animal fable) his disillusionment with Stalinism and totalitarianism in general. Orwell died of tuberculosis in 1950, a few weeks after the publication of his masterpiece, «Nineteen Eighty-Four» (1949). NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR «Nineteen eighty-four» is an anti-utopian or “dystopian" novel written with the purpose of warning readers of the dangers of totalitarian governments. In this novel, Orwell portrays the perfect totalitarian society and describes a world in which a tyrannical power, headed by the Big Brother (a distant, mysterious, omnipresent oppressor), controls men’s actions and thoughts through telescreens and microphones (present in every room and street). The society Orwell depicts is dominated by mass-media propaganda and reinforced by an all-powerful police state (the Thought Police). The original title of the book was «The Last Man in Europe». A couple of months before the book was published, Orwell wrote to his editor about his indecision between «The Last Man in Europe» and «Nineteen Eighty-Four». The publisher suggested the author to choose the latter, because he felt it was a more commercial-friendly title. The story clearly takes its name from the year in which it is set and depicts a state where daring to think differently is rewarded with torture, where people are monitored every second of the day and where men’s instincts and intelligence are crushed by the Party. Orwell originally wanted to set his novel in 1980. This is evident in his manuscript, where he originally put 1980, then crossed it out and put instead 1982. Just at the end he decided to set the story in 1984, switching the last two numbers of the year in which it was written: 1984. Though the author sets his novel in the future, the reader can seize an obvious reference to the political scenario of Orwell’s time (the author had the chance to witness firsthand the horrific oppression of totalitarian governments) and, after a careful reading, he can understand that there’s a deeper meaning hidden behind the choice of the title, in fact: it was meant to indicate that the events described in the novel could have had a real chance to occur in the near future if the totalitarianism had not been opposed. «Nineteen eighty-four» has become one of the modern myths, or rather anti-myth, with its prophetic picture of a world where individuality is annihilated. The novel and especially Big Brother has become the symbol of man’s enslavement to mass media. With bitter irony, the name Big Brother has recently become the title of TV programmes that have great success worldwide thanks to the same domination of the individual’s life by mass media that Orwell denounced in his masterpiece. The media in Oceania has a double function: to keep people under constant surveillance and to brainwash population with the paradoxical slogans of “newspeak” (such as «war is peace», «love is hate», «freedom is slavery»). Every room has a two-way telescreen (that records and transmits) and everywhere they go, citizens are constantly reminded (especially through the omnipresent signs reading “Big Brother is watching you”) that the authorities are scrutinising them. Moreover, the Party controls every source of information, managing and rewriting the content of all newspapers and histories for its own ends. People are not allowed to keep records of their past (such as photographs or documents). As a result, memories become fuzzy and unreliable (because they can’t distinguish real memories from imagined ones), and citizens become perfectly willing to believe whatever the Party assumes as true. For example, the basic traits that define the identity of a person are unavailable to Winston (the main character of «1984») and to the other citizens of Oceania: Winston does not know how old he is, he does not know whether he is married or not, he does not know if his mother is alive or death. Instead of being unique individuals with specific, identifying details, every member of the Outer Party is identical.