Author: lena

Discuss the extent to which you agree with your chosen statement. Respond critically to the statement by making a close analysis of the text(s). 

The most satisfying text is one that is uplifting and optimistic. 

Everyone likes a happy ending; therefore they are popular in many types of texts. This is not true, however, for dystopian literature. Dystopian texts explain oppressive society issues and often provide readers with warnings for the future. Dystopian literature does not need to be optimistic to encourage readers, because the connection between fiction and reality is enough, which is the reason why I disagree with the statement. The novel Nineteen Eighty Four, written by George Orwell opens doors to a new way of looking at the world and the society we are currently living in. In his novel, George Orwell introduces the idea of a totalitarian government that possesses all the power over its citizens. The government uses many tools to gain control and while stripping citizens off all privacy through telescreens, the party also seems to manage manipulating the citizens thoughts. An omnipresent companion of Winston which is the main character in Nineteen Eighty Four, is BIG BROTHER. The slogan ” Big Brother is watching you” is with the citizens on every step they take and makes the thought of escape almost impossible. The feature of constant control indicating a less happy and optimistic environment, which supports the idea that texts can be satisfying without being uplifting. Another sophisticated idea of the party is its slogan: “ War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” The juxtaposition of this slogan is not detected by the citizens of Oceania, though it is always in their minds. While the reader realised how wrong theses ideas are, it seems impossible at the same time that a whole population believes it. This, however, is another feature of the book that makes it even more interesting and compelling. Nineteen Eighty Four introduced another character called O’Brien, who is a member of the party and later triggers Winston into believing he was like-minded. O’Brien confronts Winston with the idea that “Who controls the past; controls the future. Who controls the present; controls the past.” In this very moment Winston realised how much power the party possesses over its citizens. The idea of a manipulation from such a big capacity is scary but also compellin. It draws attention to the text and transforms Nineteen Eighty Four into a thrilling novel. This moreover proves the  point that a text does not need to be optimistic to be successful. 

Handmaids Tale :

• We learned to lip-read, our heads flat on the beds, turned sideways, watching each other’s mouths. In this way we exchanged names from bed to bed: Alma. Janine. Dolores. Moira. June. (1.5-6)
• When I’m naked I lie down on the examining table, on the sheet of chilly crackling disposable paper. I pull the second sheet, the cloth one, up over my body. At neck level there’s another sheet, suspended from the ceiling. It intersects me so the doctor will never see my face. He deals with a torso only. (11.6)
• My name isn’t Offred, I have another name, which nobody uses now because it’s forbidden. I tell myself it doesn’t matter, your name is like your telephone number, useful only to others; but what I tell myself is wrong, it does matter. (14.37)
• Falling in love. […] It was the central thing; it was the way you understood yourself; if it never happened to you, not ever, you would be like a mutant, a creature from outer space. Everyone knew that. (35.13)

Divergent:

• I think of the motto I read in my Faction History textbook: Faction before blood. More than family, our factions are where we belong. Can that possibly be right? 
• I didn’t jump off the roof because I wanted to be like the Dauntless. I jumped off because I already was like them, and I wanted to show myself to them. I wanted to acknowledge a part of myself that Abnegation demanded that I hide. 

Anthem:

•   . But I still wonder how it was possible, in those graceless years of transition, long ago, that men did not see whither they were going, and went on, in blindness and cowardice, to their fate.
• There was no pain in their eyes and no knowledge of the agony of their body. There was only joy in them, and pride, a pride holier than it is fit for human pride to be.

1984: 

• war is peace 
  freedom is slavery 
  ignorance is strength 
• Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.” (1.5.23, Syme)
• Attention! Your attention, please! A newsflash has this moment arrived from the Malabar front. Our forces in South India have won a glorious victory. I am authorized to say that the action we are now reporting may well bring the war within measurable distance of its end. Here is the newsflash –”Bad news coming, thought Winston. And sure enough, following on a gory description of the annihilation of a Eurasian army, with stupendous figures of killed and prisoners […] (1.2.30-31)
• Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war, but it was evident that there had been a fairly long interval of peace during his childhood, because one of his early memories was of an air raid, which appeared to take everyone by surprise. Perhaps it was the time when the atomic bomb had fallen on Colchester. He did not remember the raid itself […]. (1.3.12)
• Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no color in anything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The black mustachioed face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston’s own. Down at street level another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. (1.1.4)

Good literature enlightens, great literature inspires action

• Showing the truth, holding a mirror in front of us
• Seeing what goes wrong and where we need to take action
• Inform about things that you didn’t know before so u have to change it ( take action)
• Cause u to think twice about what you read and how it may affects you
• 1984 showed what could happen – surveillance
• → it concerns me now and caused that i am more aware and take action for instance being more careful with my devices
• Without reading it, we wouldn’t have noticed it in the first place

Reading a book can have the same effect on you as for instance holding a mirror in front of you. A mirror shows you how you really look, without a filter or cover up.

Books do a similar thing. Books reveal the truth and with this idea we open our eyes and see how our society really works and what is really behind the big face of a leader.

Those things are shown to us in the 1984 novel from George Orwell. We get confronted with the Big Brother as a leader saying “Big Brother is watching you”  but throughout the book we question if he is real or just a role that the government made up to manipulate its citizen.

Those concerns make us think about our own society and where we get manipulated.

We begin to open our eyes to what is obvious and even though we just read about a dystopian world, we ask ourselves if it is really so different from the one we are living in. 

The uncomfortable moments in a text teach us the most

• Dystopian texts are so successful because of that
• We remember it through emotions
• We start paying attention
• Maybe you question yourself why you feel that way
• Maybe it relates to the real world and that is what scares you

The movie “Minority Report” directed by Steven Spielberg carries us into a society that seems so far from the one we are currently living in. The movie shows a dystopian future version of the world and how our society could develop.

Those features are brought to us in a disturbing way which makes us feel uncomfortable, even almost scared. We might find ourselves questioning why we are feeling that way in a particular scene. Maybe it is disgust or anxiety. Associating our emotions to specific moments in the film leads to a better memory of those scenes.

While asking why we might have those emotions we refer back to the film scene and try to analyse these by understanding the cause of our reaction.

With most things in life we have to experience them before we are able to learn or understand the depthful meaning of those. Having a bad experience or associating painful emotions with it, help us to learn from these because we do not want to feel that way again. 

Good decisions come from experience and experience comes from bad experiences. 

As this quote underlines the statement before, bad experiences help us to learn what we have to be careful about and where we need to take action. 

“The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over material world. ” 1984, Chapter VII

Winston judges his own behaviour as a child since he blames himself for killing his mum and younger sister. He is not very emotional and could never understand why his mum gave him all their food even though everybody else was starving. 

As he groves older he thinks of his mum as being special because her thoughts and feelings belonged to her while she made decisions out of intuition. She decided on a morally base because she loved him even though it was not efficient and most likely her own death. Winston sees this ability as a useful and important skill because just you can say whats wrong or right and nobody can take this decision from you. 

The party took that away with persuading the people that they don’t have to think because they would do the thinking for them. It causes that the people can’t make a decision just out of intuition because those are not always the most smartest ones. 

To think and to make our own decisions makes us human and taking it away from us, takes a part of being a human away. 

If we dont have own feelings and our own thoughts, how do we know what we truly like or desire. 

Maybe it saves you from loosing time thinking bout stuff that is not important or protects you from making a wrong decision but it also takes your identity away.

“If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can´t have any result whatever, you´ve beaten them.” 1984, Chapter VII

“And when memory failed and written records were falsified—when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested.” Chapter VIII

 

“All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot. And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small. Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain.”

The main character Winston from george orwells book 1948 themes in Chapter 4 in a quote how the population gets manipulated by the leaders.

Winston clarifies not just the significant fraud, he also states his opinion about the system he is living in.

Choosing the example of boots is a sign for how obvious the population gets manipulated because it just takes a little bit of intellect to notice the wrong numbers of produced boots if most of the people dont have shoes at all.

The last sentence of his quote makes clear that the system manipulates the people in multiple things and they dont even stop before changing the date of the year.

After looking closer on the language used by George Orwell in the quote it appears to me, he used the symbolic of a shadow to led up to the dark side of the human nature, emphasising the dystopia of the future.

A shadow world can be also an sign for a future without happiness and sun. It would be cold and odd. The reason he used a shadow world to express his feelings shows how much he fears it.

He used a strong impression which everybody can emphasise with. Shadows are normally linked to bad happenings without sunlight and related to bleakness.