Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
It is most certainly a novel written to make a political point - about the dangers of totalitarianism (both the Stalinist form of communism, and fascism). You got absolutely the right idea about it.
Bleak though it is (and is most certainly is!) it's been hugely influential and has given many words to the English language (such as adding "-think" or "-speak" suffixes to words like "doublethink").
It is one of the classic "dystopian" novels. Bleak though it is, it's still worth a read. Just don't expect it to be a barrel of laughs.
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Yeah, I understand all that, I just think it failed on both the novel level
and the political treatise level.
As a novel, it breaks the cardinal rule of good writing: show, don't tell. 1984 is all about telling, with only a tiny bit of showing (and showing things that had already been told -- that's why the bleakness especially at the end seemed so unnecessary. We didn't need to find out how horrible things were any more; we already knew it all.)
On the political level. Totalitarianism is of course a danger, but 1984's version doesn't do any justice all to what makes it so insidious, or how it relates to human nature. The message is just Big Brother can do what he wants, human nature is irrelevant. No discussion of how big brother came to power, or what about the people of Oceania or the Earth allowed to happen, etc. And again, there's nothing in there at all about even a possibility of an alternative, or even prevention of such things. I'm not complaining just about the unhappy ending, which was fine, but just the seeming lack of a point to the whole thing.
Anyway, I've read other dystopian novels I've thought were much better thought out; so I guess I'm not clear on why it's been so influential comparatively. Zamyatin's
We, an inspiration to Orwell, for example, seems to me to be better in almost every way, though it's been awhile since I read it.