For years my dad has been pestering me to read Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

Especially in college, when in History we were covering the Soviet regime, it did not go without mention whenever the topic of reading was brought up with my dad. Now, I have finally decided to read it as part of my university course, and it has made me conclude that we (me and my dad) may be more similar than I thought. Because when I finished this book, it made me so miserable and reflective that I now consider it a must-read classic.

The reader is thrown into the dystopian world, introducing Oceania’s official language ‘Newspeak.’ This language has the aim of limiting freedom of expression by lessening the one and only dictionary as much as possible, and so at first it was confusing to read, but I was immediately intrigued. Once you’ve wrapped your head around its dystopian setting, the extent of government surveillance and the order of Oceania’s citizens… then everything you thought you already had a grasp of, gets inflated to another level. To directly quote the novel: ‘[t]he best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.’

Anyone who is familiar with Nineteen Eighty-Four knows that it is about a fictional totalitarian state that represses and controls its citizens – a concept which is not alien to the real world, and is exactly why it had such a huge impact on the literary world. Orwell was making a cautionary political statement, responding to the operations and ideas of the Stalinist era in the Soviet Union. Although the genre is science-fiction, the psyche of the protagonist Winston is proportionate to the mental states of those who have undergone indoctrination and the undergoing of torture as political prisoners. Nineteen Eighty-Four parallels events in the past – and the present.

The most fascinating aspect of the novel for me was the idea of ‘Doublethink,’ often applied to the erasure of historical facts. If the state erases any proof of a certain figurehead, statistic, or fact, and it is only preserved in memory, then did it really happen? How can one prove it? You think you know what is right, but if everyone surrounding you claims what is false is true, then what can you say? Wars and alliances are constantly fabricated, party victories are overblown, and everyone is fuelled with hatred towards immortalised political opponents. However, the way the novel ends suggests that perhaps love and acceptance are more terrifying than hatred. To feel anger is to feel something. But matters are not black and white; it would be reductive to say that one emotion holds more value than others. Winston often contemplates the essence of humanity and feels anger towards the indifference of many minor characters: ‘[u]ntil they have become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.’

The paradoxical nature of ‘Doublethink’ and the language Orwell uses is enough to send the reader into a spiral about the overarching meaning. I suppose there isn’t one sole meaning in Nineteen Eighty-Four – its drive is to warn the reader about the potential danger of political ideologies. There is never one solution. So many paradoxes, so few answers. I will always think about this book.

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