1984book review 1984英文书评

周冬暖翻译一班0111119074 book report of 1984

Author:

George Orwell, born in India, was an English writer , journalist, and social critics. Before this great work comes out, Orwell was a writer suffering from poverty and hunger, and had hardly any repute at all. Not until in 1950, did this great work be published, yet by no means can he bath in the sun the book would bring him, for before long, his life was taken by the hand of tuberculosis. Orwell is known to the world not only as a novelist in his own peculiar voice, but also as a political prophet with phenomenal vision. The new words he had created in his novels as ‘newspeak’ ,’doublethink’ and ‘big brother ’are all sucked in by many prestigious English dictionaries.

Summary of the book:

The world in 1984 is divided by three countries: the Oceania, the Eurasian and the East Asian countries. Under the innocent outlook of a party member, Winston entertains great doubt towards the society in which he has been trained as a child, and towards the Big Brother, the invincible leader of the country, which is equivalent to a thought crime. After disarmed to the inner party, he was

reshaped to be pure in mind in accords with the standard of the party, and put to death afterwards.

Comment:

No doubt 1984 is a political satirical fiction ,but it is more than that, for an element of humanism, represented by the depiction of the character, Winston ,is blended with the political aspect. Written in the 1940s, the book is to some degree a prediction of the future, and, one point noteworthy to point out is that a lot of plots Orwell had designed in the book did allegedly show up in reality in the later 40 years after it came up. Through a delicate depiction of an ordinary person’s whole life, Orwell reveals to us a power-oriented society of stifling hierarchy and the cant façade of harmonious socialism, unfurling the deep-down essence of totalitarian.

Personally, it is not those essences of totalitarian that touch upon me the most, for totalitarian is such a thing that I almost take for granted as something that would entail danger, horror, confusing, and terrorism, hence such a scene of life under a omnipresent oppressive party of totalitarian should comes to no surprise, and furthermore, whatever goes to extreme never give birth to

goodness, which fix perfectly the philosophy of ancient China, namely, ”the ration of being in the middle ground ”. What stir my heart virtually are those details and incidents, which precisely constitute the texture of the book. Just a few examples:

“ Curiously, the chiming of the hour seemed to have put new heart into him. He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear, but so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage. He went back to the table, dipped his pen and wrote: to the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone—to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone, from the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of big brother, from the age of doublethink—greetings!”

This is one of my favorite paragraphs of the book, the monologue Winston set down in his diary in particular. Curiously, somehow I am convinced that it is not merely the voice of Winston, but in Orwell himself as well, for freedom is always an enterprise to be pursued, especially in his time Orwell was probably been closely watched by