Revision document created by an A* A-level student who now attends the University of Oxford. This document contains key AO5 interpretations from 1946 to the present day, highlighting how different readers have responded to the key issues, characters and themes of Orwell's brilliant book. These clea...
1984 AO5 Key Critics
Orwell’s Own Words
Why I Write ‘Desire to push the world in a certain direction’
1946 ‘No book is genuinely free from political bias’
‘Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written,
directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism’
‘I write because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I
want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing’
‘Good prose is like a windowpane’
Wigan Pier 1937 ‘It is the miners who are driving your car forward’
‘People bred in slums can imagine nothing but the slums’
Homage to ‘However little you were actually conspiring, the atmosphere forced you to feel
Catalonia 1938 like a conspirator’
Inside the ‘[Communism] began as a movement for the violent overthrow of Capitalism
Whale 1940 and degenerated within a few years into an instrument of Russian foreign
policy’
1941 ‘History is a series of victories won by the scientific man over the romantic
man’
1948 ‘A book is built up as a balanced structure and one cannot simply remove large
chunks here and there unless one is ready to recast the whole thing’
1948 ‘To discuss the implications of dividing the world up into Zones of Influence’
1948 ‘Nearly the whole of the English Left has been driven to accept the Russian
regime as 'Socialist’. Hence, there has arisen a sort of schizophrenic manner of
thinking, in which the word ‘democracy' [has come to mean] concentration
camps and mass deportations’
1949 ‘[1984 was] not intended as an attack on Socialism’
1949 ‘Totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere’
General
Jacob 1984 ‘One of the most disgusting books ever written’
Berkes 2000 ‘Language becomes a method of mind control’
Pynchon 2015 ‘His anger was precious to him- he had invested blood, pain and hard
labour to earn his anger, and was attached to it’
‘Big Brother's face certainly is Stalin's’
‘The despised Party heretic Emmanuel Goldstein's face is Trotsky's’
‘Religious fanaticism is in fact strangely absent from Oceania’
‘[Two Minutes Hate] is a plot device for introducing Julia and O’Brien’
‘The proles as the only hope for deliverance from the dystopian hell of
Oceania’
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