Notes

Orwell wrote 'Nineteen Eighty-four' to try and show how political systems can suppress individual freedom. 'Nineteen Eighty-four' is a warning for the future that of what society could become should totalitarianism be allowed to achieve dominance. The totalitarian Dystopia in 'Nineteen Eighty-four' is inescapable for those who suffer under it and is constantly changing for the worst. The world of 'Nineteen Eighty-four' is a model of Orwell's idea of a Totalitarian state that has evolved into its ultimate form. However, Orwell is not trying to make a complete and accurate prediction of what the world will be like in the future under a totalitarian government, but instead he presents it as an extreme instance that sheds light on the nature of current societies that already exist. Shortly before his death Orwell spoke of 'Nineteen Eighty-four', saying "I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive, but I believe that something resembling it could arrive".
Orwell once said he writes "because there is some lie that I want to expose". It is this fundamental lie upon which the political structure of 'Nineteen Eighty-four' rests. The very slogans of the party are contradictions : "War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength". In writing 'Nineteen Eighty-four' Orwell wanted to expose the cruelty of political oppression and the kind of lie on which that inhumanity depends.
'Nineteen Eighty-four' can be interpreted as an antipolitical book - the nightmarish world in which Winston lives is one where politics has displaced humanity and the state has stifled society in its quest for total control over its inhabitants. The purpose of the Party was not to rule for the general good, but in order to have control over everyone and everything. Power is everything. The most startling concept that Orwell deals with in 'Nineteen Eighty-four' is the idea that a political party could see power as being the ultimate goal. The Party rules over its people without even the pretence that it is governing for the benefit of the people.
In 'Nineteen Eighty-four' Orwell used the form of Scientific Romance because it allowed him to express his political messages in the form of a novel. Orwell used the Scientific Romance in a realistic way in order to drive home his political point - that a Dystopia such as the one in 'Nineteen Eighty-four' is a human possibility. Essentially Orwell is warning us of what may happen should certain dangerous political trends be allowed to carry on.
'Nineteen Eighty-four' has a narrow plot which focuses solely on the life of Winston Smith. However, Orwell makes a political point from this - Winston Smith is the only person left who is worth writing about; all the rest have been brainwashed already. When considering the title for the novel Orwell mentioned in a letter that he was considering "The Last Man in Europe" - a clear indication that he saw Winston Smith as the last true free thinker in Europe.
The political and human aspects of 'Nineteen Eighty-four' are very closely linked. Every thought that Winston makes against Big Brother is Thoughtcrime, every time he writes another entry in his diary he is risking arrest, even embracing Julia was "a blow struck against the party". His very relationship with her was "a political act".
In 'Nineteen Eighty-four' Orwell examines how the human spirit copes under the worst conditions possible. Winston is, as O'Brien laughingly calls him, "the guardian of human spirit" - a half starved wreck of a man. He is the last person alive capable of free thought against The Party. Orwell shows how political organisations are capable of doing anything in order to reach their goals. In this case The Party's goal is to eradicate individual thought and they are prepared to do anything in order to achieve their goal and think nothing of torture. Winston's heresy is his insistence on the individual's right to make up his own mind rather than having to follow what the Party perceives as truth and so he is tortured constantly until, eventually, he has learned to "love Big Brother"(Section 3, Ch.VI).
In the world of 1984 there has been no improvement in the living standards of the average person since1948. Big Brother had deliberately kept it this way in the belief that should people not have to concentrate on trying to get the bare essentials for life then they might turn their attentions to demanding more from the Party. Orwell makes a political point from the similarity of living conditions in 1948 and 1984. The opening chapter of 'Nineteen Eighty-four' describes how the lift seldom worked even "at the best of times", that "the electricity was cut off during daylight hours", and how he had to use "coarse soap" and "blunt razor blades". Winston has a nagging belief that life used to be better than what he could remember but he couldn't prove it - when he spoke to the old prole in a pub the only fact that he could extract from him was that "the beer tasted better before Big Brother".
The description that Orwell gives of Big Brother as being "a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features" immediately brings the image of Stalin to the reader's mind. 'Big Brother' is the icon of the Party and it is under his name that every Party announcement is given - "every success, every achievement, every victory, every scientific discovery, all knowledge, all wisdom, all happiness, all virtue, are held to issue directly from his leadership and inspiration" (Part II, Ch.IX, Goldstein's book, Chapter I).
The character of Goldstein is designed to resemble Stalin's political arch-enemy Trotsky. Just as in 'Animal Farm' a Trotsky-like scapegoat is incessantly blamed for all problems and is labelled an enemy of the people by a government led by a Stalinesque figure. Goldstein's book "The Theory and Practise of Oligarchical Collectivism" is an obvious replica of Trotsky's "The Revolution Betrayed". The sections of Goldstein's book which are printed in 'Nineteen Eighty-four' serves two purposes - firstly it identifies many of the ways in which the Party manipulates its own people (they are merely "cheap labour"), and secondly it mocks Trotsky's revolutionary rhetoric of polysyllables and ridiculous paradoxes such as "The fields are cultivated with horse plows while books are written by machinery".
In Section 1,Chapter 7 Winston writes in his Diary "If there is hope, it lies in the Proles". However, there is no evidence of any revolutionary desires amongst the Proletariat at all in the novel. O-Brien laughs at Winston in 3.3 for placing his hopes in them and declares "The proletarians will never revolt". The reason for this is that the Proles do not show the intelligence, or the desire to revolt - The Party no longer fears the proles because as a class they have become totally demoralised. Orwell himself confessed in a letter written in 1940 "I have never met a genuine working man who accepted Marxism".
One of the major issues in 'Nineteen Eighty-four' is the nature of freedom and the way that Totalitarianism has the capacity to destroy it. Winston's comment in his diary that "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four" encapsulates Orwell's belief that the individual must have the right to make up his own mind, regardless of official political party lines. Orwell saw his role as a writer to be the objective conscience of a society - he was trying to express the truth as he saw it.