Introduction

《一九八四》（Nineteen Eighty-Four），是英国（也许这也是他假象伦敦原因之一） 作家乔治·奥威尔（George Orwell）创作的一部政治讽刺小说，小说创作于 1948年，出版于1949年。书中讲述了一个令人感到窒息和恐怖的，以追逐权力为最终目标的假想的未来极权主义社会，通过对这个社会中一个普通人温斯顿·史密斯的生活描写，投射出了现实生活中极权主义的本质。它与1932年英国赫胥黎著作的 《美丽新世界》 ，以及1920年俄国尤金·扎米亚金的《我们》 并称反乌托邦的三部代表作，通常也被认为是政治小说文学的代表作。

Misunderstanding

“我最近的小说《一九八四》不是为了攻击社会主义或我支持的工党，而是揭露扭曲……部分已经可以在共产主义和法西斯主义中领会到……这本书的场景放在英国，是为了强调英语民族并非天生比其他民族优秀，并且，如果不与极权主义做斗争，它将无往不胜。”

Background

《一九八四》在大洋国（Oceania）中发生。大洋国是三个洲际国家联盟之一，二次世界大战之后，世界分成了三个国家联盟。故事发生在伦敦，“第一空降场的主要城市”，大洋国的一个省，“曾经被称为英国”。

Political geography:
- Oceania (ideology（意识形态）: Ingsoc, i.e., English Socialism); its core territories（领土） are the Western Hemisphere, the British Isles, Australasia, and Southern Africa.
- Eurasia (ideology: Neo-Bolshevism); its core territories are Continental Europe and Russia, including Siberia.
- Eastasia (ideology: Obliteration of the Self, i.e., “Death worship”); its core territories are China, Japan, Korea, and Indochina.
大洋国的社会阶级系统有三层：
- 核心党员（Inner Party）：the upper-class Inner Party, the elite ruling minority, who make up 2% of the population.
- 外围党员（Outer Party）：the middle-class Outer Party, who make up 13% of the population.
- 无产阶级（Proles）：the lower-class Proles (from proletariat), who make up 85% of the population and represent the uneducated working class.
政府统治部门
- the Ministry of Peace（和平部） deals with war and defense.
- the Ministry of Plenty（富裕部） deals with economic affairs (rationing and starvation).
- the Ministry of Love（友爱部） deals with law and order (torture and brainwashing).
- the Ministry of Truth（真理部） deals with news, entertainment, education and art (propaganda),responsible for propaganda and historical revisionism

Main characters

Winston Smith（protagonist）：a member of the Outer Party, works in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth as an editor, revising historical records, to make the past conform to the ever-changing party line and deleting references to unpersons, people who have been “vaporised,” i.e. not only killed by the state but denied existence even in history or memory.
Julia：Winston’s lover who is a covert “rebel from the waist downwards” who publicly espouses Party doctrine as a member of the fanatical Junior Anti-Sex League.
Big Brother：the dark-eyed, mustachioed embodiment of the Party who rules Oceania.
O’Brien（反派）：a member of the Inner Party who poses as a member of The Brotherhood, the counter-revolutionary resistance, in order to deceive, trap, and capture Winston and Julia. O’Brien has a servant called Martin.
Emmanuel Goldstein：ostensibly a former leader of the Party, counter-revolutionary（反革命） leader of the Brotherhood, and author of The Book, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism（寡头政治集体主义）, Goldstein is the symbolic enemy of the state—the national nemesis who ideologically unites the people of Oceania with the Party, especially during the Two Minutes Hate and other fearmongering. While Winston eventually learns that The Book is the product of an Inner Party committee that includes O'Brien. Whether Goldstein or his Brotherhood are real or fabrications of Party propaganda is something that neither Winston nor the reader is permitted to know.
Charrington：An officer of the Thought Police posing（假扮） as a sympathetic antiques dealer（古董商）, who rent Winston the leisure room.

Terms and Concept

Big Brother, doublethink, thoughtcrime, Newspeak, Room 101, telescreen, 2 + 2 = 5, and memory hole
Telescreens in every building, accompanied by secret microphones and cameras, allow the Thought Police to identify anyone who might compromise the Party’s régime. Children are encouraged to inform the officials about potential thought criminals, including their parents.
The original documents are burned up in a “memory hole”.

Doublethink

The keyword here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink. Doublethink is basically the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.-Part II, Chapter IX – The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism

Vaporised

notes

The man’s eyes seemed to follow Winston as he moved. Below the face were the words BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.
Inside his flat, a voice was reading out a list of figures for last year’s production of iron.
There was now even more iron in Oceania than the Ninth Three-Year Plan had demanded.
The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There were no windows in it. Nobody could get anywhere near it unless they had business there.
It was always at night – the rough hand on your shoulder, the lights in your face. People just disappeared, always during the night. And then your name disappeared, your existence was denied and then forgotten.
Every day newspapers, magazines, photographs, films, posters and books were all changed. The past was changed.
They would make 145 million pairs of boots last year. Sixty-two million pairs were made. Winston changed 145 million to 57 million. So the Party had made five million more boots last year than they expected to.
People disappeared from the newspapers when they were vaporized and they could also appear in the newspapers when they did not exist.
Most workers in the Ministry were busy writing everything that the people of Oceania read or saw: all the newspapers, films, plays, poems, school books, telescreen programmes and songs, the Newspeak dictionaries and children’s spelling books.
He ate his bread hungrily. His thin, dark face had come alive and his eyes were shining like the eyes of a man in love. ‘It’s a beautiful thing to destroy words,’ he said. ‘For example, a word like “good”. If you have “good” in the language, you don’t need “bad”. You can say “ungood”.’
The aim of Newspeak is to narrow thought. In the end we will make thoughtcrime impossible, because people won’t have the words to think the crime. By the year 2050 there will be nobody alive who could even understand this conversation.
Sex, to the Party, was only necessary to make children.
She had sex only because it was her duty to try and have children. When no children came, they agreed to separate.
‘It was something in your face. I thought I’d take a chance. I’m good at finding people who don’t belong. When I first saw you I knew you were against them!
Afterwards they fell asleep and slept for about half an hour. Their love, their sex together, had beaten the Party. It was a political act.
They can’t make you believe it. They can’t get inside you.
The room was a world, a past world, and they were the last two people from it who were still living.
The aims of the three groups are completely different. The High want to stay where they are. The Middle want to change places with the High. Sometimes the Low have no aim at all, because they are too tired from endless boring work to have an aim. If they do have one, they want to live in a new world where all people are equal.
This meant that a few people (the Inner Party) owned almost everything and the Middle and Low groups owned nearly nothing.
The Party had made itself stronger by killing all of its first leaders (people like Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford).
The aim is to use everything that a country produces without making its people richer.
The future belonged to the proles; Party members were the dead.
‘The worst thing in the world,’ said O’Brien, ‘is different for each person. It may be death by fire, or by water, or fifty other deaths. Sometimes it is something quite small, that does not even kill you.’

1984 George Orwell