1984

Katerina Mazackova
Dr. Jay Gaspar
Junior Honors Seminar 300H
6 December 2010
Orwell’s 1984 And The Totalitarian Regimes
George Orwell belongs between most read authors because of the genre of his work. The popularity of his novels leads toward the many discussions about his literary production. The novel 1984 evokes many strong feelings through a variety of readers at different times. His novel 1984 is liked, discussed, banned or hated at the same time. According to Frodsham, “to reflect on and discuss 1984 is to do more than pay homage to a literary masterpiece. It is to consider and question ourselves, our society, our world; our past, our present-and-above all-our future” (1). This book and other literary works are closely emotionally related especially to the readers who experienced the fictional reality which is masterly depicted in the novel and pushed to the fatal consequences in their real lives. The author will discuss how the totalitarian regime is depicted in 1984 and what the reactions of the public were during the Cold War on this worldwide famous novel.
A totalitarian regime is a concept which has previously been used in the different countries all around the world before World War II. At the beginning, it was an abstract concept used only between social scientists, but the use of the term gradually spread into other levels of society and became more popular. The concept of totalitarian regimes is connected with the disrespect towards an individual, totalitarian terror, the control of one dominating political party which promotes its totalitarian ideology, the absolute hegemony of a secret police, and monopole of the government over economic, cultural and informational structures. Many theoretical studies were written. In the fiction pieces of literature this topic was not particularly popular, except in Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World (Grieder, 2007).
Communism is a totalitarian system, whose main ideal is the negation of all civil...