1984

6 Pages 1593 Words

N "America must be the police force for freedom in the world,"; "The Gulf War was to help the people of Kuwait,"; "Mexico started the Mexican-American war!" All three of these statements are false, yet we see these things in textbooks and our own politicians that run our country often say them. Is this a form of mind control or doublethink? Although it hasn’t reached the heights it did in the novel 1984, it is one of the things Eric Blair (George Orwell) warns us about. George Orwell lived in the 1940’s, so it is easy to ignore his warnings, but he has every right to warn us and foresaw things that have happened and maybe are still to come.

Eric Blair was born in India, which happens to be the place that changed his career in the future. He was a very pessimistic child; at the age of 18 months he was recorded for the first time and his only word was "beastly". As a little kid he remembered thinking about writing as a career although none of it was serious (I omitted the last bit of the sentence, it’s not necessary). But he did in fact keep a sort of deeply descriptive journal in his mind of everything he ever did. He went to Eton College in England where he learned of many writing techniques; of which he mostly disliked.

He, though often put into a genre of writers, created his own unique style that is immensely descriptive and underlining. When did this style come about then? It happened during two major events in his life; first he joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. He felt it was an "unsuitable profession," to put it nicely. He felt it was the collapse of his character and he fell into poverty. In this impoverished state he traveled to London and Paris and looked at the working class and the poor. He wrote his first book Down and Out In London And Paris(1933) from his experiences. This book basically showed how the lower classes lived and suffered in an almost comical way. Then he wrote Burmese Days at the age o...