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"1984" in Comparison to "The Giver"

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War, torture, and constant fear, all of these are key elements in the distopia George Orwell creates in the novel, 1984. In this book, Orwell creates a society which is based solely on hate and controlled by those who seek only power. Orwell, however, is not the only author to ponder the possibility of an extreme, futuristic society. In particular, The Giver, by Louis Lowry relates a great deal to the themes found in 1984. Unlike 1984, Lowry's novel focuses on the idea of a utopia as opposed to Orwell's distopia. What is the most interesting is how though the fundamental idea of the novels are opposites, the methods by which each society is maintained are surprisingly similar. When one analyses The Giver versus 1984, it becomes clear that …show more content…

The party also controls love between men and women. For example, the party must give approval for marriages and never lets a compatible couple wed. Similarly, the Party highly discourages sex through the Junior Anti-Sex League and permitting sex for procreation only, never pleasure. This is well described when Winston recalls his relationship with Katherine, "As soon as he touched her she seemed to wince and stiffen... She would lie there with shut eyes, neither resisting nor cooperating, but submitting."(58). This shows how the party successfully morphed the act of sex into dirty and painful, there by taking control of yet another aspect of love. The other key way in which the Party maintains the society is through control of the past. The Party holds the slogan "Who control the past control the future; who controls the present controls the past."(204), which means that if the citizens of the Party have no previous events to base feelings on, they will never oppose the Party because they have never known anything else. The Party even keeps members in the dark about recent events by teaching people to hold two contradictory ideas simultaneously as truth. Such an idea is named doublethink. An example of the concept put into action, is the Party vaporizing enemies and convincing citizens that the person who they had just had recent contact with never really existed. This is exactly what happened to Withers as

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