1984 – GEORGE ORWELL

MY COMMENTS :

George Orwell's classic work is about the events that take place when the main character, Winston, begins to rebel against his country when he is confronted with the realities of the dystopian country he lives in. Although I last read the work during my university years, I finally had the chance to review it thanks to its quotes and memorable subject.

Winston, who works in a unit called the Ministry of Truth, where the truth is changed according to the specific conditions of the day, realizes that the truth of the country he lives in is completely distorted and that all people are deliberately misinformed by this administration. Despite this, he wants to join a resistance movement. He meets people named Julia and O'Brien during this process. Although he and Julia become lovers and support each other during this process, they find themselves in prison when they realize that O'Brien, whom they think is one of the rebels, and the owner of the antique shop they are staying in are thought police and undercover police.

After being subjected to many tortures and confessing to the crime they did not commit, they were released again with everything confiscated. Winston, who now takes on the identity of people who truly love Big Brother, has become a true citizen of INGSOS at the end of the story.

The work is considered the most well-known cult work in the dystopian novel category of all time. When the topics it covers and the messages it conveys are taken into consideration, it is clearly understood that it is one of the books that truly deserves this title. Although it has been stated that it contains dystopian novel elements, it is known that some states today use some of the management tactics in the book.

Today, we are living in a period where people's desire for happiness and security is more appealing than the idea of freedom due to the comfort zone brought by technological developments, just like in the novel. Therefore, although the work appeared to be a dystopian novel at the time it was written, when the current world order is seen, it is seen that the novel is getting closer to reality.

Since the idea of freedom is a very simple and abstract concept for people, the number of people who are willing to embrace this ideal is much less than we think. The freedom movement that gained popularity after the French Revolution later felt more prone to being swept away by the emotional flood of nationalism. As I have stated before, the concept of freedom is not one of the first or second sensitivities of most people, as it brings with it a responsibility that many people cannot handle. However, elements such as nutrition, shelter, and survival have always been a priority for humanity.

The basic logic of states is to provide their people with certain necessary and useful needs. If they provide these, it will not be very important whether the concept of freedom is fully experienced or not. Moreover, it should be noted that there is no country where the concept of freedom can be truly experienced today. Although every country has provided freedom to its citizens up to the limits it has determined, it is obvious that the requirements of the concept of freedom are not fully met if this is done. Therefore, fancy words such as freedom and revolution have always been instrumental concepts used to drag the masses and have never been made the main goal.

Meanwhile, it is also possible to interpret the concept of freedom not necessarily in its enlightenment sense, but as the entrusting of the administration and management to certain people. The fact that society and the people make such a decision and leave politics, administration and the state regime to certain groups can be interpreted as another element of freedom.

As a result, the work is a novel that has left its mark on the minds of every reader as one of the world classics that must be read with its deep plot and impressive detailing.

MY QUOTATIONS(*) :

1. Because Orwell’s novel was called 1984, the year 1984 had become a myth years before. However, Orwell had initially chosen 1980 as the year in which the story takes place, and as the completion of the book took longer, partly because of his illness, he first changed 1980 to 1982, and then settled on 1984. Later, when he explained to his close friend, the writer Julian Symons, why he chose 1984 as the date for his novel, he said, “ Since I finished writing the book in 1948, I decided to change the places of the last two digits of 1948. ”

2. In the world described by Orwell, the creation of a society devoid of memory and past is of great importance in order to keep reality under control.

3. In the new discourse, they developed a process called “doublethink”: “… To know and not to know at the same time, to tell artfully invented lies while being aware of the whole truth at the same time, to defend two views that refute each other while knowing that they contradict each other and believing in both, to use logic against logic, to deny morality while claiming to defend morality, to believe both in the impossibility of democracy and that the Party is its protector; to forget what must be forgotten, to remember it again as soon as it is necessary, and then to forget it again suddenly; and most importantly, to apply the same process to the process itself… ” ( Excerpts from the Translator’s Notes )

4. Big Brother's face faded away again and the Party's three slogans appeared in black capital letters: " WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH ."

5. “ He who controls the past controls the future; he who controls the present controls the past .” Moreover, the past, although by its very nature changeable, had never been changed. What was real now was real forever. It was very simple. All that was required was endless victories over your own memory. They called it “ reality control ”: in the new discourse, “ doublethink .”

6. War is a way of destroying, sending into the stratosphere, or sending to the bottom of the sea, the tools and equipment that would make the masses too comfortable and therefore too much work for their minds for a long time. Even if the weapons used in war are not destroyed, the manufacture of weapons is a convenient way of using labor without producing anything that can be consumed.

7. The Party's two aims are to conquer the whole world and to destroy all possibility of independent thought. The Party therefore has two great problems to solve. One of these is how to read what a person is thinking without his knowledge; the other is how to kill hundreds of millions of people in a few seconds without prior warning. This is the subject of scientific research today. The scientist of today is either a mixture of a psychologist and an interrogator, who meticulously examines the meaning of people's facial expressions, gestures, and tones of voice, and who tests the effects of drugs, shock therapy, hypnosis, and physical torture on making them tell the truth, or he is a chemist, physicist, or biologist, who deals only with those branches of his field which concern the taking of human life.

8. Some teams of experts are investigating how to produce new and more deadly gases, soluble poisons in quantities that could wipe out the vegetation of entire continents, or disease microbes that have become immune to all antibodies; others are trying to make even more remote possibilities possible, such as focusing the sun's rays on lenses suspended thousands of miles away in space, or generating artificial earthquakes and tidal waves by extracting heat from the earth's core.

9. In the past, the ruling classes of all countries, knowing their common interests, were able to limit the destructive power of war, but they actually fought each other, and the victorious party always lost. Today, they never fight against each other. War is waged by each ruling class against its own subjects, and the aim of war is not to seize territory or to prevent the loss of territory, but to ensure that the structure of society continues unchanged. So even the word war has acquired a misleading meaning. If the three superpowers, instead of fighting each other, had agreed to remain in perpetual peace and leave each other alone within their own borders, the result would have been almost the same. A truly permanent peace would amount to a permanent war. This is the essence of the party slogan, although the vast majority of party members understand it in a narrower sense: War is peace.

10. From the point of view of the Low, no historical change has ever meant anything other than a change in the name of their masters.

11. CRIMESTOP means the faculty of stopping short, as it were, by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought . It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.

12. The key word here is "aklakara." Like many Newspeak words, this word has two contradictory meanings. In the case of an enemy, it means "aklakara", "aklakara", "aklakara", "aklakara", "aklakara", in the face of the obvious. This requires the continual revision of the past, which is made possible by the system of thought that encompasses everything else and is known in Newspeak as "doublethink."

13. Doublethink means that a person can hold two contradictory beliefs in his mind at the same time and accept both of them. The party intellectual knows in what direction his memories must be changed, and he also knows that he is playing with reality; but by applying doublethink he convinces himself that reality has not been violated. This process must be done consciously, or it will not be sufficiently precise; but it must also be done unconsciously, or it will create a feeling of falseness and therefore of guilt in the person.

14. If you want to manage and make your management permanent, you will get rid of the sense of reality. Because the secret of managing is to believe in your own infallibility while at the same time learning from your past mistakes.

15. The very names of the four ministries that govern us reflect the disrespect in which the truth is deliberately distorted. The Ministry of Peace is the ministry of war, the Ministry of Truth is the ministry of lies, the Ministry of Love is the ministry of torture, the Ministry of Wealth is the ministry of want. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they arise from ordinary hypocrisy; they are the conscious exercise of doublethink. For power can only be maintained indefinitely by reconciling contradictions. In no other way can the old cycle be broken. If men are to be prevented from becoming equal—if the High, as we call them, are to always retain their place—the prevailing state of mind must be controlled madness.

16. The party wanted to be in power because the masses of people were weak, cowardly creatures who could not bear freedom or face the truth and therefore had to be led and systematically deceived by someone stronger than themselves. People had to choose between freedom and happiness, and the vast majority chose happiness.

17. Power is not a means, it is an end. No one establishes a dictatorship to protect a revolution; one makes a revolution to establish a dictatorship. The aim of oppression is oppression. The aim of torture is torture. The aim of power is power.

18. “ We dominate matter because we dominate the mind. Reality is in the head .”

19. Even in the first thirty years of the twentieth century, abbreviated words and phrases had become one of the defining characteristics of political language, and such abbreviations were most frequently used in totalitarian countries and totalitarian organizations. Although this practice was initially adopted instinctively, it was used with a conscious purpose in Newspeak. It was realized that by shortening a name in this way, many of its possible associations could be blocked, and its meaning could be narrowed and subtly changed.

20. In the future, these pieces of literature, even if they had not been lost, would have been incomprehensible and untranslatable. It was impossible to translate a passage written in Oldspeak into Newspeak, except for a technical operation or for very ordinary everyday behavior or for something that already showed a commitment to doctrine. This meant that, in practice, no book written before about 1960 could be translated in its entirety. Literature before the Revolution could be transferred into Newspeak only by ideological translation, which meant changing the meaning as well as the language.

MY EVALUATIONS:

Subject : The work is about the events that the main character named Winston goes through when he starts to act with the idea of rebelling against his country when he is confronted with the realities of the dystopian country he lives in.

Style: Thanks to the author's unique style, the novel, which is structured with a detailed and simple narrative from beginning to end, has always managed to keep the reader in the work.

Originality : The work is one of the most original novels written in its field due to its detailed description of the subject and plot. Considering the period in which it was written, it should be noted that it is one of the few works that best meets the originality criterion among the classics.

Character : The character scheme in the work consists of a main character, 2 supporting characters and other side characters. Many side characters were used in the novel in sufficient numbers to convey a clear message regarding the messages to be given; apart from that, there were no character additions that could cause stagnation with excessive character density.

Fluency : Considering the issues mentioned in the style and originality categories, it should be stated that the work is written in a fluent language from beginning to end and has all the elements of a gripping novel.

General : In the evaluation made out of 10 according to the criteria stated above:

Subject: 8.5

Style: 8

Originality: 9

Characters: 8

Fluency: 8.5

The overall average of the work that received the scores is 8.4 points . As one of the books that passed the 8 threshold in every category and received almost the highest score, it should definitely be stated that it is one of the books that readers of all ages should definitely read.

(*) : All parts under the title My Quotations:

1984

Author : George Orwell

Publisher : Can Publications

Edition : 50th Edition – March 2015

The photo used on the cover was used as a quote from the book.