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Rewriting History, Marxist Elements in Orwell's "1984" and Their Outcome on Love

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Rewriting History. Marxist Elements and their Outcome on Love in Orwell’s 1984 George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is a dystopian novel which presents an exagerated version of a totalitarian regime which not only controlled everything but which also could not be removed by any means. Orwell’s novel drew attention, back in 1949 when the novel was published, upon how this world would look like if a totalitarian regime would truly take over. My aim for this essay is to analyze Orwell’s novel with respect to the marxist elements present in the novel and also to illustrate their impact upon the protagonist’s feelings. Marxism and especially Stalinism are present in Orwell’s novel through certain elements: countinuous surveillance, control …show more content…

The cult of personality has a huge influence on Orwell’s dystopia, as on any other totalitarian society. Big Brother has been associated by the critics with Stalin, while his political enemy, another alleged founder of the Party, Emmanuel Goldstein, was seen as the correspondent of Trotsky, Stalin’s enemy in the power struggle from the 1920s. Like Trotsky, Goldstein was deported and excluded from the Party. According to Isaac Asimov, Orwell’s “enemy was Stalin, and at the time that 1984 was published, Stalin had ruled the Soviet Union in a ribbreaking bear hug for twenty-five years, had survived a terrible war in which his nation suffered enormous losses and yet was now stronger than ever. To Orwell, it must have seemed that neither time nor fortune could budge Stalin, but that he would live on forever with ever increasing strength. - And that was how Orwell pictured Big Brother”. Big Brother is regarded as immortal, the is no evidence of his actual existence, and even O’Brien hints to the fact that Big Brother is nothing more than the embodiment of the Party. In the fictional book written by Goldstein he states that “Nobody has ever seen Big Brother. He is a face on the hoardings, a voice on the telescreen. We may be reasonably sure that he will never die, and there is already considerable uncertainty as to when he was born. Big Brother is the guise in which the Party chooses to exhibit itself to the world” (Orwell,

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