Written by a guest (in this case, a person under the pseudonym Luna Agarsha), this rave of George Orwell’s 1984 is displayed below.
Raving about 1984
In my humble opinion, 1984 is the best book in the entire history of the universe and galaxy. The author, George Orwell, combines the government, politics, manipulation of minds and information, and the corruption of power, in order to forge an epic foreboding novel about the struggle to have privacy where, in the year 1984 (when Orwell had expected this would happen), the world is a totalitarian dystopia that has eyes and ears everywhere, and where even whispering something remotely against the government will land you dead. The book is so well written, the plot so astounding, that the story builds up to the final paragraph of the novel with confounding momentum. Orwell is known for closing his books with a flourish, and the last paragraph of 1984 is — in my opinion — the best final words of a book in the entire history of literature, and even a couple years after reading it I remember it word for word. 1984 is also known for the phrase, “Big Brother is Watching You”, even though it’s only mentioned once or twice, the first time being on the first page of the book. Famous quotes from 1984 include 1) the last paragraph, the last sentence being the most well-known, 2) “We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness” (said O’Brien — a character — to the main character), and 3) the motto of the Party (the government): “War is peace. Ignorance is strength. Freedom is slavery.” A lesser-known quote that I believe still deserves a mention is “if there is any hope, it lies in the proles” (says Winston Smith about the limitations of the government’s grasp).
The book brings up a question which I’ve been dying to debate on since forever: “Was WS delusional and imagined all of this in his head, or was he really sane, but just got caught?”
Final thing to add: The book provides a new view on the past — Orwell argues through the book that the past is recorded through written documents, architecture, and works of art (mainly), which are all things that can be altered, so if you were to change the documents (perhaps say that the Greeks made a Trojan Chicken instead of a Trojan Horse), fake the artwork, and destroy the architecture, couldn’t you technically change what happened in the past? There would be no proof of anything happening otherwise, and to the general public’s eyes, the falsified documents are real. The only reason we believe the Trojan Horse story is because of Homer, the ruins of Troy, and countless artworks depicting the event. If you were to change those things to fit your vision, there’d be no reason to say that it wasn’t actually a Horse but a Chicken that the Trojans fell for. The past exists through artifacts and writing. If you destroyed the artifacts and burned the books, would you have erased the past from existence?
