libro di Orwell 1984, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica libro di Orwell 1984 e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! 1984 George Orwell The author: Orwell • Born Eric Blair in India in 1903, George Orwell was educated as a scholarship student at prestigious schools in England. After graduating from Eton, Orwell decided to work as a British Imperial Policeman in Burma. He hated his duties in Burma, where he was required to enforce the laws of a political regime he despised. He returned to England and he dedicated himself to becoming a writer. • Orwell went to live among the very poor in London. Later, he lived among destitute coal miners in northern England, an experience that caused him to give up on capitalism in favor of democratic socialism. In 1936, he traveled to Spain to report on the Spanish Civil War. The rise to power of dictators such as Hitler and Stalin inspired Orwell's hatred of totalitarianism. He devoted his energy to writing novels that were politically charged. 1984 • 1984 is one of Orwell's best-crafted novels and it is one of the most powerful warnings against the dangers of a totalitarian society. In Spain, Germany, and the Soviet Union, Orwell had witnessed the danger of absolute political authority in an age of advanced technology. 1984 is a negative utopia, which shows the worst human society imaginable to convince readers to avoid any path that might lead toward such societal degradation. In 1949, at the dawn of the nuclear age, Orwell's vision of a post-atomic dictatorship in which every individual would be monitored by means of the telescreen seemed terrifyingly possible. • 1984 remains an important novel, in part for the alarm it sounds against the abusive nature of authoritarian governments, but even more so for its analysis of the psychology of power and the ways that manipulations of language and history can be used as mechanisms of control. Key Facts • Full title · 1984 • Author · George Orwell • Type of work · Novel • Genre · Negative utopian • Language · English • Time and place written · England, 1949 • Narrator · Third-person • Climax · Winston's torture with the cage of rats in Room 101 • Protagonist · Winston Smith • Antagonist · The Party; Big Brother • Setting time · 1984 • Setting place · London, England (known as “Airstrip One” in the novel's alternate reality) • Falling action · Winston's time in the café following his release from prison, including the memory of his meeting with Julia at the end of Book Three. • Tense · Past Plot • In 1984, Winston Smith lives in London which is part of the country Oceania. The world is divided into three countries: Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. Oceania is a totalitarian society led by Big Brother, which censors everyone’s behavior, even their thoughts. Winston is disgusted with his oppressed life and secretly longs to join the fabled Brotherhood, a supposed group of rebels intent on overthrowing the government. Winston meets Julia and they secretly fall in love, something which is considered a crime. One day, Winston encounters O’Brian, an inner party member, who gives Winston his address. Winston had exchanged glances with O’Brian before and had dreams about him giving him the impression that O’Brian was a member of the Brotherhood. Since Julia hated the party as much as Winston did, they went to O’Brian’s house together where they were introduced into the Brotherhood. O’Brian is actually a member of the Inner-Party and this is a trap for Winston, a trap that O’Brian has been setting for 7 years. Winston and Julia are sent to the Ministry of Love which is a rehabilitation center for criminals accused of thoughtcrime. There, Winston was tortured until his beliefs coincided with those of the Party. Winston denounces everything he believed him, even his love for Julia, and was released back into the public where he wastes his day drinking gin. Social classes Winston Smith A minor member of the ruling Party, Winston is intellectual and thirty-nine-year-old. He hates the totalitarian control and repression that are characteristic of his government. Winston is extremely pensive and curious, desperate to understand how and why the Party exercises such absolute power in Oceania. Winston's long reflections give Orwell a chance to explore the novel's important themes, including language as mind control, psychological and physical intimidation and manipulation, and the importance of knowledge of the past.Winston's main attributes are his rebelliousness and fatalism. He commits innumerable crimes, ranging from writing “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER” in his diary, to having an illegal love affair with Julia, to getting himself indoctrinated into the anti-Party Brotherhood. By the end of the novel, Winston's rebellion is revealed as playing into O'Brien's campaign of physical and psychological torture, transforming Winston into a loyal subject of Big Brother. Julia Julia is Winston's lover and the only other person who Winston can be sure hates the Party and wishes to rebel against it as he does. Whereas Winston is restless, fatalistic, and concerned about large-scale social issues, Julia is sensual, pragmatic, and generally content to live in the moment and make the best of her life. Winston longs to join the Brotherhood and read Emmanuel Goldstein's abstract manifesto; Julia is more concerned with enjoying sex and making practical plans to avoid getting caught by the Party. Winston sees their affair as temporary; his fatalistic attitude makes him unable to imagine his relationship with Julia lasting long. Julia, on the other hand, is well adapted to her forms of small- scale rebellion. She claims to have had affairs with various Party members, and has no intention of terminating her pleasure. Julia is a striking contrast with Winston: apart from their mutual sexual desire and hatred of the Party, most of their traits are dissimilar, if not contradictory. O’Brien The sense of mystery is centralized in the character of O'Brien, a member of the Inner Party who tricks Winston into believing that he is a member of the Brotherhood and inducts Winston into it. Later he appears at Winston's cell to abuse and brainwash him in the name of the Party. During the process of this punishment, O'Brien admits that he pretended to be connected to the Brotherhood to trap Winston in an act of disloyalty to the Party. This revelation raises more questions about O'Brien than it answers. Rather than developing as a character, O'Brien seems to un-develop: by the end of the book, the reader knows far less about him than they had thought. When Winston asks O'Brien if he too has been captured by the Party, O'Brien replies, “They got me long ago.” This reply could signify that O'Brien himself was once rebellious, only to be tortured into passive acceptance of the Party. One can also argue that O'Brien pretends to sympathize with Winston merely to gain his trust. Similarly, one cannot be sure whether the Brotherhood actually exists, or if it is simply a Party invention used to trap the disloyal and give the rest of the populace a common enemy. The novel leaves O'Brien as a shadowy, symbolic enigma on the fringes of the even more obscure Inner Party. Other characters • Emmanuel Goldstein - Figure who exerts an influence on the novel without ever appearing in it. According to the Party, Goldstein is the legendary leader of the Brotherhood. He seems to have been a Party leader who fell out of favor with the regime. The Party describes him as the most dangerous man in Oceania. • Big Brother - Though he never appears in the novel, and though he may not actually exist, Big Brother, the ruler of Oceania, is an extremely important figure. Everywhere Winston looks he sees posters of Big Brother's face bearing the message “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.” Big Brother's image is stamped on coins and broadcast on telescreens; it haunts Winston's life and fills him with hatred and fascination. • Mr. Charrington - An old man who runs a secondhand store in the prole district. Kindly and encouraging, Mr. Charrington seems to share Winston's interest in the past. He also seems to support Winston's rebellion against the Party and his relationship with Julia, since he rents Winston a room without a telescreen in which to carry out his affair. But Mr. Charrington is not as he seems. He is a member of the Thought Police. Themes • The Dangers of Totalitarianism 1984 is a political novel written with the purpose of warning readers of the dangers of totalitarian government. Orwell designed 1984 to sound the alarm in Western nations still unsure about how to approach the rise of communism. In the American press, the Soviet Union was portrayed as a great moral experiment. Orwell was disturbed by the cruelties and oppressions he observed in communist countries, and seems to have been particularly concerned by the role of technology in enabling oppressive governments to monitor and control their citizens. In 1984, Orwell portrays the perfect totalitarian society, the extreme realization imaginable of a government with absolute power. If totalitarianism were not opposed, the title suggested, some variation of the world described in the novel could become a reality. Orwell portrays a state in which government monitors and controls every aspect of human life to the extent that even having a disloyal thought is against the law. As the novel progresses, the rebellious Winston sets out to challenge the limits of the Party's power to discover that