1984
Related
- George Orwell (1949)
Overview
Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth in Airstrip One, rewriting old newspapers so that the Party's record is always right. He begins a diary, then an affair, then reads the forbidden book that explains how the system works, and is then arrested, broken, and taught to love Big Brother. The novel gave the language Newspeak, doublethink, thoughtcrime, the memory hole, and the claim that two plus two makes five if the Party says so.
Notes
It is on this list for the epistemology, not the politics. The horror of 1984 is not the surveillance but the destruction of the idea that there is a fact of the matter about the past, and that a person can hold on to it. O'Brien's insistence that reality exists only in the mind of the Party is solipsism with a boot in it. The novel is a case study in why a shared external reality, and the freedom to say what you see in it, are not luxuries. See Free Speech.
Also see
- Recomended Books
- Animal Farm
- Free Speech
- George Orwell