Reading "Nineteen Eighty-Four" (audio)

George Orwell, Blackstone Audio, NMTV; Fandango 1984 movie; Wisdom Quarterly Wiki edit

Nineteen Eighty-Four, often republished as 1984, is a dystopian novel by English novelist in police state Burma George Orwell.

It was published on June 8, 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell's ninth and final book completed in his lifetime. The story was mostly written at Barnhill, a farmhouse on the Scottish island of Jura, at times while Orwell suffered from severe tuberculosis.

Thematically, Nineteen Eighty-Four centers on the consequences of government over-reach, totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and repressive regimentation of all persons and behaviors within society [2, 3].

THE STORY

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The story takes place in an imagined future, and it is not known what year because the government has manipulated things so much.

But the protagonist imagines it might be 1984 (chosen because the author was writing in 1948), when much of the world has fallen victim to perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance, historical negation, and propaganda.

Great Britain, known as Airstrip One, has become a province of a superstate named Oceania that is ruled by the Party who employ the Thought Police to persecute individuality and independent thinking [4].

Big Brother, the leader of the Party, enjoys an intense cult of personality despite the fact that he may not exist.

The protagonist, Winston Smith, is a diligent and skillful rank-and-file worker and Party member who secretly hates the Party and dreams of rebellion. He enters a forbidden relationship with a co-worker, Julia.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is a classic literary example of dystopian fiction. Many terms used in the novel have entered common usage, including

• Big Brother
• doublethink
• thoughtcrime
• Newspeak
• Room 101
• telescreen [phone, computer, TV screens]
• 2 + 2 = 5
• prole
• memory hole.

Nineteen Eighty-Four also popularized the adjective "Orwellian," connoting things such as official deception, secret surveillance, brazenly misleading terminology, and manipulation of recorded history by a totalitarian or authoritarian state.

Time included it on its 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005 [5].

It was placed on the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels, reaching No. 13 on the editors' list and No. 6 on the readers' list [6]. In 2003, the novel was listed at No. 8 on The Big Read survey by the BBC [7].

Parallels have been drawn between the novel's subject matter and real life instances of totalitarianism, communism, mass surveillance, and violations of freedom of expression among other themes. More