The document provides information about George Orwell's dystopian novel "1984". It was published in 1949 and is set in Oceania, a totalitarian state ruled by the Party and its dictator Big Brother. The protagonist Winston Smith works for the Ministry of Truth rewriting historical records to match the Party's versions. Orwell intended it as a warning about totalitarianism. It presents a totalitarian society with perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance, and public manipulation of historical records and the media.

1. 1984
G.Orwell
Classe 5°C R.I.M

2. Key facts
Author: George Orwell
Country: United Kingdom
Language: English
Genre: Dystopian, political fiction, social science fiction
Published: 8 June 1949 (Secker and Warburg,
London)

3. Plot Summary
Winston Smith is a 39-year-old employee at the Ministry of Truth, London, located in Oceania. His world
is shaped by the Party and its dictator/leader is Big Brother, whose face is everywhere on posters
captioned “Big Brother Is Watching You.” Big Brother controls life in Oceania through the four ministries
of Peace, Love, Plenty, and Truth. Winston’s job at the Ministry of Truth involves revisions of historical
documents and rewrites of news stories to reflect the Party’s infallibility.

4. Dystopian Novel
Dystopian novel was a
new kind of novel in
1930s; Dystopian Novels
are usually set in the
future they warn man to
change his attitude to
society.
A Dystopia is the opposite of
a Utopia: while a Utopia is a
dream of a better future,
Dystopia is the dream of a
future society which turns
into the nightmare of a worse
world than the present one.

5. G. Orwell’s rules to write well
1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figures of speech which
you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if
you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright
barbarous.

6. “War is peace, freedom is slavery,
ignorance is strength”
It’s a George Orwell’s slogan from one of the most famous novel “Nineteen Eighty-
Four”.
All the sentences in this slogan have a double-thinking which means the act of
simultaneously accepting two mutually contradictory believes as correct.
“War is peace”
is inherently wrong because peace is by
definition the absence of war and, like we
cannot both find health and illness at the
same time and place, we cannot find war
and peace both together qualifying the
same state.

7. “Freedom is slavery”
means that life and society enslaved you
and put a chain at your throat so you were
forced to choose until your chain is cut off...
but only death has cutters. “Ignorance is strenght”
is wrong "indirectly." It simply means
that it is not so obvious, that you need to
think a bit to see where it doesn't make
sense.
"War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery;
Ignorance is Strength;" is also one of the
three slogans of the English Socialist Party
("INGSOC" for short) of Oceania.

8. The similiraties between the novel “1984” and the TV programme Big Brother
are:
- Nothing could be kept secret and you are
watched 24 hours a day through telescreens;
- In 1984, Winston falls in love with Julia and also
in the TV programme there are love stories;

9. - The members of the Big Brother house have
to follow some rules like in the novel, if they
don’t do this they are punished.
So freedom is limited in both of them;
- George Orwell's futuristic novel was set
in a totalitarian state, where every aspect
of every person's life was governed by a
body of powerful people who watched every
move a citizen made through countless cameras.