ORWELL (INGLESE)

George Orwell

His real name is Eric Arthur Blair, he was born in India in 1903,and he died in 1950. He had an interesting life, he was a writer and a journalist. He wrote often about politics and about  the main problems of his society.

His most famous books are “Animal Farm”(that speaks about the Russian revolution) and “1984”.

This book describes a totalitarian society where everyone is controlled by a sort of immortal head of state called Big Brother. The world is divided into three parts, Oceania is at north and its most important city is London.

People think, talk, live like Big Brother wants. No one can escape from this even because the totalitarian government uses teleschreens to control even inside the houses.

There is only one man that tries to escape from this reality: his name is Winston Smith (Winston like Winston Churchill, an english politician, and Smith is one of the most common surnames of England). He is the very ordinary man: he’s not a hero or a soldier, he hasn’t got particular characteristics and he works for the Big Brother like everyone else in his country. But he’s different from the others because he can realize that Big Brother is not freedom. And he tries to change things.

When he’s alone, in his flat in Victory Mansions, he thinks giving the back to the teleschreen, because he knows that “even the back can show something”. When the Thought Police catches him, he becomes like everyone else through a brainwash. The final line represents what Winston thinks at the end: “He loved the Big Brother”.

“1984” is a dystopian novel (like “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley): with this scaring book Orwell wanted to warn mankind about that type of society.

The adjective “dystopian” means the idea of a society in a repressive and controlled state(often under the guise of being “utopian”).

London is described in a terrible way. This description opens the book, in the month of April.

This totalitarian society remembers Stalin’s government and even the democratic ones: the repression is made through the main communication instruments, like magazines, books and television.

Big Brother changes the way of communicating. The language is very simple, most of the words are deleted from the vocabularies, so people can speak(and think) only about certain things: they can’t realize that they are in a terrible condition if they haven’t got the words to tell it.