I am going to be honest, I did not love the first twenty pages of 1984...I found it to be slightly dry and found myself speculating about how great it would be to read The Hunger Games! However, after reading past the first twenty pages, I realize just how impressive this book really is. I am a firm believer that it is important to shape your perspective with the knowledge that Orwell wrote this nearly prophetic novel three years after World War II. Televisions were hardly a concept, computers and the idea of "memory" were in their infantile stages, and the idea of digital music and government surveillance was decades away. Thus, how does such an author muster such an ability to foreshadow and create a creative, authentic dystopian society? Ask Orwell because I have not the slightest notion. Clearly some form of distinctive and unique ingenuity is at play here because predicting the future of a nation four decades later so accurately after a technological revolution is a daunting and near-impossible test. I think it would be interesting to see an author try to write a novel entitled 2053 to see if such a performance can be replicated?
Additionally, I see many subtle similarities between 1984 and Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood, but feel that 1984 is a more impressive piece of literature because of its prophetic nature. That being said, both 1984 and Handmaid's Tale have an equivalent of the "Thought Police", a government-implemented form of an oppressive police force which seeks out any form of dissent and swiftly crushed freedom of expression. If I was to guess, I would wager that the "Thought Police" which Orwell invents in 1984 were inspired by the oppressive and brutal police forces in Russia and Germany: The SS and Gestapo respectively. I am excited to see the progression of this novel and see just how much fight Winston has in him!
God Bless America and its Inhabitants,
Kevin Michael Wholihan
Sorry u didnt get any comments yet. I am sure you will soon :)
ReplyDeleteYour points are well taken, Kevin. I am particularly interested in your sense that the novel should be considered in the context of its own present time, and I wonder how a reader in the 1950s would have responded to Orwell's imagination. Would he or she have rejected the futuristic concepts as unbelievable and unrealistic? Because we see the parallels to our own world, we find his story unsettling, but if we did not have that future knowledge, would we still respond that way?
ReplyDeleteInteresting points, Kevin! I'm actually reading The Hunger Games like you had mentioned and I see quite a few connections between what you have written about your novel, The Hunger Games, and The Handmaids Tale. First, I liked your point about considering the work in the time period that it was written. Because The Hunger Games is a recent novel, it is not as easy for us to reflect upon the time it was written because we are still a part of the time period. However, I think that considering The Hunger Games within the broader context of current popular culture can be just as valuable. The Hunger Games emerged around the same time as other alternate reality teen novels became very popular, such as Twilight, and many other vampire books and tv shows. In much of this media, there is a focus on teenagers in particular and their impact on the society in which they live. The Hunger Games comments on this theme running through media today just as 1984 comments on the political themes running through the time period in which Orwell was writing.
ReplyDeleteYou mentioned the connections to the fear in the Handmaids Tale. The oppressive society in The Hunger Games also plays very much into this fear in order to keep people oppressed. It is because of this fear that teenagers must participate in The Hunger Games in the first place, to remind people the control the society can exert at any time, just like the control the "thought police" have in 1984 and the Republic of Gilead has in The Handmaids Tale.