Ultimately the party cannot allow variations of their power to exist. To relinquish control over any part of the person is to relinquish all control over the individual. The brutality of the party leads to absolute devotion or absolute rebellion. The object of Oceana is a society of apathetic people who will serve the party without thought. This society destroys humanity. By taking away their subjects emotions, freedom, and identity the citizens are at a loss to do anything. They do not know how to get their humanity back. The citizens are only physically alive. Our humanity is what makes us human, out emotions, freedom, and identity separates us as individuals. When Winston fights for his humanity he loses and is changed into something less than human.
Winston’s life at the Ministry of Truth is very bleak; the canteens represent the canteens during WWII. Through sordid realism creating a depressing atmosphere of life in 1894: the sloppy tables, the bad smelly food, the upswept floors. Something in Winston revolts against this, described as ” a mute protest in your own bones” he attempts to recapture some fragments of ancestral memory. Attempting to live in a way more natural than is possible given the party and the general atmosphere in 1984. Wishing for a more complete fuller life he starts his diary. From the beginning Winston knows he is doomed, he presses on though especially after meeting Julia, like a man eager to test his fate. The fact that Winstons attempts at rebelling fail emphasise the despair and hopelessness created in Nineteen Eighty-Four, whatever happened he promised not to betray Julia and ultimately he gave in, ultimately the party won. That is the message the reader is left with.
The language in Nineteen Eighty-Four is simple direct and concrete. It presents the details of life in England in 1984 with great exactness with a careful attention to detail, so that the imagined world of the novel is given a sensuous reality as in the ways Orwell has Winston notice how one could always tell Parsons had been playing Table Tennis “By the dampness of the bat handle” Orwell is taking great effort to make this fantasy world seen as real as possible therefore enhancing the shock effect of it all.
When Winston meets with Julia Orwell uses a more poetic style of writing especially in the passages connected with the proles. “The mystical reverence that he felt for her was somehow mixed up with the aspect of the pale, cloudless sky, stretching away behind the chimney pots into interminable distance.” In this passage Orwell seems to be a bit too flowery and he is being ironic about Winston’s idealistic tendencies. He also uses dry language of political theory in the book within a book ‘The Theory and Practice of Oligarchial Collectivism’ by Emmanuel Goldstien. Orwell uses abstract, scientific analysis which lacks concreteness, appropriate for a book which is supposed to be an analysis of the party’s power.
One of the books main issues is the construction of Newspeak. Involving the destruction of English. (Oldspeak) It eliminates the words freedom, democracy, honour, justice, religion, under the idea that these ideas themselves will eventually disappear. The eventual aim is to make thoughcrime impossible, as there is nothing to think. To be human is to descrimiate and to judge, discrimination and judgement involve language. Not to use language involves a clear descent into a sub human state like the man in the canteen, whose speech is just a ‘noise uttered in unconsciousness’ duckspeak as it is called in Newspeak. ” His head was thrown back a little, and because of the angle at which he was sitting, the light caught his spectacles and presented to Winston two black discs instead of eyes. What was slightly horrible, was that from the stream of sound that poured out it was almost impossible to distinguish a single word.”
Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four are very similar because they have created a very similar society. Suppressing the past, the works of Shakespeare and everything else they create people who are not humans but members of a party, People who do not think for themselves and have no individuality. The methods of suppression are very different; Brave New World with all the technology and make these people appear to be content due to the endless slepteachings, and seen to have more of a life. In Nineteen Eighty-Four People in the party seem to be afraid to show the truth, how they feel. The only difference between the books is the technology, if there was ample technology available in Nineteen Eighty-Four as there was in Brave New World, the two books would be almost identical. In Nineteen Eighty-Four there were attempts to eliminate procreation all together however the technology was not available.