1984 sample essay questions hsc

Common Module State-Rank Essay Showcase: Nineteen Eighty-Four

The following essay was written by Project Academy English Tutor, Marko Beocanin

Marko Beocanin

99.95 ATAR & 3 x State Ranker

The following essay was written by Project Academy English Teacher, Marko Beocanin.

Marko’s Achievements:

• 8th in NSW for English Advanced (98/100)
• Rank 1 in English Advanced, Extension 1 and Extension 2
• School Captain of Normanhurst Boys High School

Marko kindly agreed to share his essay and thorough annotations to help demystify for HSC students what comprises an upper Band 6 response!

Common Module: Nineteen Eighty-Four Essay Question

Marko’s following essay was written in response to the question:

“The representation of human experiences makes us more aware of the intricate nature of humanity.” In your response, discuss this statement with detailed reference to George Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’.

State-Ranking Common Module Essay Response

George Orwell’s 1949 Swiftian satire Nineteen Eighty-Four invites us to appreciate the intricate nature of humanity by representing how the abuse of power by totalitarian governments degrades our individual and collective experiences. (Link to rubric through individual/collective experiences, and a clear cause and effect argument: totalitarian governance -> degraded human experience. Also, comments on the genre of Swiftian satire. Value!) Orwell explores how oppressive authorities suppress the intricate societal pillars of culture, expression and freedom to maintain power. He then reveals how this suppression brutalises individual human behaviour and motivations because it undermines emotion and intricate thought. (Link to rubric through ‘human behaviour and motivations’, and extended cause and effect in which the first paragraph explores the collective ‘cause’ and the second paragraph explores the individual ‘effect’. This is an easy way to structure your arguments whilst continuously engaging with the rubric!) Ultimately, he argues that we must resist the political apathy that enables oppressive governments to maintain power and crush human intricacy. Therefore, his representation of human experiences not only challenges us to consider the intricate nature of humanity, but exhorts us to greater political vigilance so we can preserve it. (Concluding sentence that broadens the scope of the question and reaffirms the purpose of the text).

Orwell makes us aware of the intricate nature of humanity by representing how totalitarian authorities suppress intricate collective experiences of culture, expression and freedom in order to assert control. (This is the ‘collective’ paragraph – a cause and effect argument that relates the question to the loss of human intricacy in the collective as a result of totalitarian rule). His bleak vision was informed by Stalin’s USSR: a regime built upon the fabrication of history in Stalin’s ‘cult of personality’, and ruthlessly enforced by the NKVD. (Specific context – an actual specific regime is named and some details about its enforcement are given). The symbolic colourlessness and propaganda-poster motif he uses to describe London reflects the loss of human intricacy and culture under such leadership: “there seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere.” (First example sets up the world of the text, and the degraded collective experience). Orwell uses the telescreens, dramatically capitalised “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU” posters and allusions to Stalin in Big Brother’s “black-moustachio’d face” as metonyms for how governmental surveillance dominates both physical and cultural collective experiences. Winston’s metatextual construction of the fictitious “Comrade Ogilvy” serves as a symbol for the vast, worthless masses of information produced by totalitarian governments to undermine the intricacy of real human history: “Comrade Ogilvy, who had never existed…would exist just as authentically, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.” Similarly, Orwell’s satirical representation of Newspeak ignites the idea that political slovenliness causes self-expression to degrade, which in turn destroys our capacity for intricate thought and resistance: “we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.” (The examples above prove that the government’s leadership style truly is totalitarian, and that it results in a loss of intricacy and ‘humanity’ in the collective. It’s good to cover a variety of examples that explore different facets of the collective – for example, the first example establishes the extreme surveillance, the second example establishes the loss of ‘truth’/history, and the third example establishes the loss of language). The political bitterness that marks Nineteen Eighty-Four as a Swiftian satire (This is a link to the ‘Swiftian’ term used in the thesis statement. It’s important to refer back to any descriptive terms you use in your thesis) ultimately culminates in O’Brien’s monologue, where Orwell juxtaposes the politicised verb “abolish” to symbols of human intricacy, “we shall abolish the orgasm…there will be no art, no literature, no science…when we are omnipotent”, to express how totalitarian rulers suppress collective experiences to gain metaphoric omnipotence. Thus, Orwell makes us aware of the intricate nature of humanity by representing a future in which totalitarian governments suppress it. (A linking sentence that ties it all back to the question and rephrases the point)

Orwell then argues that the effect of this suppression is a loss of human intricacy that brutalises society and devalues individual experiences. (Cause and effect argument that links collective suppression to a loss of human intricacy on an individual scale – continuous engagement with the question and the rubric!) Orwell’s exposure to the widespread hysteria of Hitler’s Nazi regime, caused by the Nuremberg Rallies and Joseph Goebbels’ virulent anti-semitic propaganda, informs his representation of Oceania’s dehumanised masses. (More specific context around the Nazis, and a specific link to how it informed his work) The burlesque Two Minute Hate reveals human inconsistency by representing how even introspective, intelligent characters can be stripped of their intricacy and compassion by the experience of collective hysteria: even Winston wishes to “flog [Julia] to death with a rubber truncheon…ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax”, and is only restored by compliance to the Christ-like totalitarian authority, “My-Saviour!”, Big Brother. (A link to the rubric with the ‘human inconsistency’ point) Orwell frequently juxtaposes dehumanising representations of the proles, “the proles are not human beings”, to political sloganism: “As the Party slogan put it: ‘Proles and animals are free’”, to argue that in such a collectively suppressed society, the upper class grow insensitive towards the intricate nature of those less privileged. (It’s important to link the proles into your argument – they’re often forgotten, but they’re a big part of the text!) He asserts that this loss of empathy degrades the authenticity and intricacy of human relationships, characterised by Winson’s paradoxically hyperbolic repulsion towards his wife: “[Katharine] had without exception the most stupid, vulgar, empty mind that he had every encountered”. (Continuous engagement with the question and rubric: make sure to recycle rubric terms – here, done with ‘paradoxically’ – and question terms – here, with ‘intricacy’)  Winston’s “betrayal” of Julia symbolises how totalitarianism ultimately brutalises individuals by replacing their compassion for intricate ideals such as love with selfish pragmatism: “Do it to Julia…Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me!” Therefore, Orwell makes us more aware of the intricate nature of humanity by demonstrating how it can be robbed by suppressive governments and collective hysteria. (A linking sentence that sums up the paragraph).

By making us aware of how totalitarian governments suppress meaningful human experiences both individually and collectively, Orwell challenges us to resist so we can preserve our intricate nature. (This third paragraph discusses Orwell’s purpose as a composer. This can in general be a helpful way to structure paragraphs: Collective, Individual, Purpose) Orwell’s service in the 1930s Spanish Civil War as part of the Republican militia fighting against fascist-supported rebels positions him to satirise the political apathy of his audience. (Integration of personal context is useful here to justify Orwell’s motivations. It’s also a lot fresher than just including another totalitarian regime Orwell was exposed to) Orwell alludes to this through the metaphor of Winston’s diarising as an anomalous individual experience of resistance, ““[Winston] was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear,” which highlights how his intricate nature persists even in a suppressive society. Often, Orwell meta-fictively addresses his own context, as “a time when thought is free…when truth exists”, to establish an imperative to preserve our intricate human nature while we still can. The Julia romance trope (It’s good to include terms such as ‘trope’ which reflect your understanding of narrative structure and the overall form of the work.) represents how Winston’s gradual rejection of his political apathy empowered him to experience an authentic, intricately human relationship that subverts his totalitarian society: “the gesture with which [Julia] had thrown her clothes aside…[belonged] to an ancient time. Winston woke up with the word ‘Shakespeare’ on his lips.” Orwell juxtaposes Julia’s sexuality to Shakespeare, an immediately-recognisable metonym for culture and history, to argue that human intricacy can only be restored by actively resisting the dehumanising influence of the government. Orwell also represents Winston’s desensitised and immediate devotion to the Brotherhood to reflect how the preservation of human intricacy is a cause worth rebelling for, even by paradoxically unjust means: “[Winston was] prepared to commit murder…acts of sabotage which may cause the deaths of hundreds of innocent people…throw sulphuric acid in a child’s face.” (More chronological examples that show Winston’s transformation throughout the text. It’s useful to explore and contrast those who resist with those who don’t resist, and how just the act of resistance in some way restores our humanity! That’s why this paragraph comes after the ‘brutalised individual experience’ paragraph) However, Orwell ultimately asserts that it is too late for Winston to meaningfully restore humanity’s intricate nature, and concludes the text with his symbolic death and acceptance of the regime, “[Winston] had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.” (It’s important to remember that Orwell ends the text so miserably so that he can motivate his audiences not to do the same thing). The futility of this ending ignites the idea that we must not only be aware of our intricate nature, but must actively resist oppressive governments while we still can in order to preserve it. (A linking sentence that ties the paragraph together and justifies the futility of the ending)

Therefore, Orwell’s representation of human experiences in Nineteen Eighty-Four encourages us to reflect personally on our own intricate human nature, and challenges us to fight to preserve it. (Engages with the question (through the reflection point), and includes Orwell’s purpose as a composer). His depiction of a totalitarian government’s unchecked assertion of power on human culture and freedom, and the brutalising impact this has on individual and collective experiences, ultimately galvanises us to reject political apathy. (Your argument summaries can often be combined into a sentence or two in the conclusion now that the marker knows what you’re talking about. This reinforces the cause and effect structure as well.) Thus, the role of storytelling for Orwell is not only to make us more aware of our intricate nature, but to prove that we must actively resist oppressive governments while we still can in order to preserve it. (The clincher! It’s often useful to add “not only” in your final sentence to reinforce the massive scope of the text)

If reading this essay has helped you, you may also enjoy reading Marko’s ultimate guide to writing 20/20 HSC English essays .

P.S If you have any questions about aceing HSC English , you are welcome to learn from Marko and join one of Project Academy’s HSC English classes on a 3 week trial .

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Nineteen Eighty-Four

George orwell.

The story is set in a dystopian vision of England in the year 1984. Britain, now known as Airstrip One, is a province of the superstate Oceania, which is perpetually at war with its rivals Eastasia and Eurasia for global dominance. The governing body of Oceania, known simply as “the Party,” is headed by the even more mysterious “Big Brother,” whose face appears in posters and on screens around the city, constantly reminding citizens of the threat posed by dissidents, spies, and war. 

We are first introduced to the protagonist, Winston Smith, as he returns home from work at the Ministry of Truth, where he edits historical records to conform to the state’s constantly changing needs. It is immediately clear that Winston resents his life: his living situation is dire, he suffers from a physical ailment, and he is unconvinced that life under the Party is better than how it was before the Revolution. 

During a visit to a “prole” area of the city, Winston enters an antiques shop owned by a Mr. Charrington and purchases a diary. Writing, especially the recording of events, is strictly prohibited by the Party. Nonetheless, Winston writes his thoughts down, concluding that “if there is hope, it lies in the proles.” Somewhat unnerved but also excited by this burst of rebelliousness, Winston visits another prole area, where he is disappointed to find that the people there have no political consciousness; an old man struggles to recall what life was like before the Revolution. 

At the Ministry of Truth, Winston notices the movements of a colleague, Julia, who works the novel-writing machines. Winston suspects her of being a spy against him, and develops an immense, violent hatred of her. Meanwhile, he has also come to think that his superior, O’Brien, is actually part of the secret resistance known as the Brotherhood, formed by Big Brother’s rival Emmanuel Goldstein. 

Winston has lunch with his colleague Syme, who appears remarkably intelligent but is also obviously completely consumed by the Party’s mandate. Syme is working on the updated version of Newspeak (the official language of Oceania, which resembles a basic version of English with extremely limited vocabulary). He reveals that the true purpose of Newspeak is to reduce the capacity of human thought. Winston acknowledges to himself that though Syme is an effective worker, he is doomed, for he is “too intelligent” – the Party will have him disappeared. The conversation switches to preparations for Hate Week, an event organised by the Party with the aim of energising the population and reminding them of who the enemy is. 

One day, Julia hands Winston a note saying the loves him. This marks the beginning of their relationship, which becomes for them both an escape from the cold, hostile world of the Party. The affair must remain a secret, making it even more passionate and intense, as the Party has strictly forbidden emotional relationships, going so far as to mandate people’s sexual partners, as the Party intends sex to be only for reproduction. The two bond over their shared hatred for the Party, but while Winston fantasises about revolution, Julia is disinterested and apathetic, and has accepted the Party’s rule. Their meetings move from the countryside to room they rent from Mr Charrington above his antiques shop. 

The affair reminds Winston of the life he shared with his wife Katharine, and the disappearance of his family during the civil war of the 1950s. He also notices Syme’s absence from work. 

Some time passes, and Winston is approached by O’Brien, who invites him back to his apartment. Upon his arrival, Winston immediately notices that the apartment is of much higher quality than his own. O’Brien reveals himself to be a member of the Brotherhood and gives Winston a copy of “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism,” Goldstein’s manifesto.

Later on, during Hate Week, as a Party official reads a speech denouncing Oceania’s enemy Eurasia, the official pauses for a moment before continuing, but it is now Eastasia that his words are directed against. No one seems to notice the change, but Winston is recalled to the Ministry in order to make the necessary historical revisions. After work, Winston and Julia read Goldstein’s manifesto, which articulates the nature of perpetual war, the meaning of its slogans (most importantly, “WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.”) together which form the basis of the Party’s strength. Winston notices though that the text fails to mention why the Party is motivated to maintain power. 

During one of their visits to the room above Mr Charrington’s shop, Winston and Julia are captured and it is revealed that Charrington is actually an agent with the Thought Police. The two are separated from one another, and Winston is taken to the Ministry of Love, where he encounters colleagues who have also been detained. O’Brien arrives and reveals that he too is a member of the Though Police. O’Brien states that Winston will never know if the Brotherhood really exists, and that Goldstein’s manifesto was written collaboratively by himself and presumably other Party members. 

Winston is tortured over the next few months, with the intention of moulding his brain to accept the Party’s ideology. The question of why the Party pursues power is answered by O’Brien – it “seeks power for its own sake.” O’Brien asks Winston if there’s any humiliation he has not yet been made to suffer, to which Winston points out that he has not yet betrayed Julia, despite the concessions he has made about the Party’s absolute power. Though Winston has revealed Julia’s crimes, he believes that by continuing to love her, he has remained loyal to her. He fantasises about dying a martyr. 

In order to break this one last strand of rebelliousness within Winston, O’Brien takes him to Room 101, which contains each prisoner’s worst fear. Here, Winston is confronted by a cage holding rabid rats. It does not take long for Winston to betray Julia by wishing the suffering upon her instead. Realising he has been successful, O’Brien stops the torture. 

Winston is released back into the community. While at the Chestnut Tree Café one day, Winston encounters Julia, who was also tortured. Both reveal that they betrayed the other, and no longer have any feels for one another. Winston returns to the café, where an emergency broadcast announces a massive victory for Oceania over Eurasian forces in Africa. 

The novel concludes with the passage 

"He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the side of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother."

Context and Purpose

Orwell’s dystopian social science fiction novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was first published in 1949, a time where the world found itself still reeling from the devastation of the Second World War, but was also confronted with the new, even more terrifying threat of the Cold War. The Cold War began at the end of WW2, as the alliance between the US and USSR became strained as both powers turned their attention towards what the world should look like following the collapse of fascist, imperialist and colonialist powers. With the collapse of fascism in Europe and colonialism in Asia in particular, the USSR sought to establish communist rule in those regions, whereas the US endorsed capitalist democracies. Naturally, these competing visions brought both powers into conflict with one another, resulting in the latter half of the twentieth century being dominated by proxy conflicts such as the Korean and Vietnam Wars as both sides competed for global dominance. 

The world at this time should be imagined as being divided into two distinct blocs. It is life within the USSR that is the focus of Orwell’s text, but it must be remembered that in satirising the excesses of Stalinist Russia, he is cautioning audiences to be vigilant to the emergence of any similar forces within Western democracies, and ultimately to beware the inherently nefarious nature of tools such as propaganda and surveillance, which the West of course employed too. Of particular concern to Orwell were the cult of personality, by which Soviet leaders were elevated to God-like status, totalitarianism, which requires complete submission to state power, and mass surveillance, which is used to enforce that submission. 

Referring back to Orwell’s broader global context, his text also reflected the aforementioned state of perpetual war the world ostensibly found itself in from the 1950s onwards. War itself was weaponised against local populations as a means of securing conformity and justifying repressive government tactics such as censorship and historical negationism, by which history was whitewashed so as to minimise governmental accountability and encourage support for current developments. 

Human Experiences Explored

The human capacity for "double think".

A central inquiry of Orwell’s text is the capacity of humans, both on an individual and collective scale, to convincingly lie to themselves in order to appease some other urge or objective. But at the same time, that motivating purpose – to appease something – is suppressed, and the act of lying to oneself, of disbelieving what your eyes see, is masked as the obvious, natural thought process, with no further questioning about it allowed. In 1984, we see this most clearly as the Party rewrites history, and the population accepts it with no hesitation. The strain this process puts on an individual who is even just slightly more aware of their oppression is captured in the scene where Winston is forced to accept that “2 + 2 = 5.” 

Orwell’s purpose in exploring this phenomenon is clear: he is scrutinising the way in which humans can so easily deceive themselves and can be deceived by others. In doing so, he touches on the immeasurable scale of the power held by institutions, especially political and corporate ones.

The Cost of Asserting Individuality in a Repressive Society

Orwell’s protagonist is raised as a glimmering sign of hope against the totalising power of the Party. As we follow his journey, we are torn between allowing ourselves to feel that his acts of individualistic expression will somehow inspire a rebellion and recognising that such a feat could never happen in this world: the Party is simply too oppressive and too efficient in its governance. And it is because of the unflinching grasp of the Party that Winston’s small acts of expressing his humanity become elevated to something resembling martyrdom, and why he and Julia are punished so severely. We see that in a repressive society, asserting one’s individuality is met with swift resistance, as it constitutes one of the most significant threats to any authoritarian or totalitarian regime, which require absolute submission to their agenda, or at least the capacity to silence any dissent.

Humanity as Resistance and Rebellion

Orwell counterpoises the cold machinery of the Party with the deeply human qualities and desires of Winston – curiosity, freedom, romance, companionship – to demonstrate the extent to which in such circumstances where an oppressive force is demanding total obedience, even such ordinary things as the aforementioned qualities can become subversive. Through his exploration of this dynamic, Orwell reminds his audiences of the capacity we all have as individuals to express ourselves, and cautions us to hold close the things that make us human. Orwell’s exploration of the way in which human forms of expression can be exploited for both subversive and suppressive aims is best captured in his metaphor of sexuality.

The Party has essentially eradicated sex from people’s lives, reducing it from an expression of emotion to its function as a reproductive act. It is no coincidence then that Winston speaks of the “Two Minutes” hate in terms of sexual excitement; here, Orwell conveys the extent to which the Party has displaced organic human emotions and desires with manufactured experiences, in order to keep the population more submissive. Similarly, that Winston and Julia pursue an affair together is symbolic of the power of expressions of humanity to challenge systems that thrive off dehumanising their subjects. Though Winston fantasises of large-scale rebellion, Julia does not, and as the reader, we see that their romance, fleeting and secretive as it may be, is the most powerful act of resistance they could perform, because it is so totally counter to the Party’s orthodoxy. 

Abuse of Power

1984 provides a haunting vision of a future where humanity has become complacent with the power structures that exist, to the point where societies lack the resources to restrain them, and those bodies of power are free to do as they please. Orwell satirises this abuse of power through the Party’s motific slogan, which in its three contradictory statements, reveals the grasp the Party has on all aspects of life, and the freedom it enjoys to do whatever it wants without any accountability. That the Party is personified in the form of the enigmatic ‘Big Brother’ – who is obviously not a real person – is seen to be the basis of how they sustain their abuse of power, as they manipulate traditional conceptions of the family unit to subdue the citizens of Oceania into thinking their leader plays a protective role in their life.

The abstraction of the Party into the singular figure of ‘Big Brother’ serves another purpose: to diffuse the Party’s sources of power into an intangible target, so that it cannot be pinned down or attacked – it is omnipresent and infallible. The Party’s understanding of power is surmised by O’Brien as “not a means, it is an end.” It is because power is an end that the Party is so free to abuse it, because it has nothing more to achieve. 

Loss of Freedon

Orwell’s text is best known as a warning of what inevitably follows the rise of authoritarian power structures, and when people become complacent to infringements on their liberties: the total loss of freedom. The ‘Thought Police’ represent the completeness of this loss of freedom, as even people’s private thoughts are regulated, with the actual impossibility of this being dismissed – the Party’s power overwhelms rationality. In response to the motific “2 + 2 =5,” Winston’s reflection that “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows,” provides a haunting summary of the extent of the loss of freedom that exists in Oceania, where even basic truths and logic itself are manipulated by the Party, and its subjects are forced to accept the delusions they witness.

1984 - Video Summary

Tired of reading? Watch BTA's short video summary for a quick analysis of 1984 including: 

- Main Themes

- Characters

- Things to keep in mind

Sample Essay Response - High Range

How does your prescribed text’s form contribute to its depiction of the human experience?

Tip: When given a question like this one where something like form is singled out, you may feel caught off guard.

Remember to make the essay question work for you, form just means the things that are specific to the text, so lean into language techniques, narrative/poetic structure or film devices in your analysis. Use your analytical language to shift the question to work for what you have prepared.

Authors seek to guide audiences to understand the absurd, ineffable and Divine, acting as translators for the very essence of human experience and distilling it into literary form. George Orwell's prophetic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) manipulates ideas of language, identity, government surveillance and autonomy and human consciousness to fold the audience into the world of Oceania and the rebellion enacted by its protagonist. The book itself becomes part of the fiction through Orwell’s use of metalanguage and the crafting of Goldsteins Manifesto, allowing Nineteen Eighty-Four to become a mirror through which audiences see their own experiences reflected, regardless of context. Thus, through the blurring of contextual lines and reflection of timeless fears of corruption and loss of self, Orwell inducts the audience into Winstons rebellion as he controls the language of his text to reflect that of a decaying society.

Manipulation of language and incongruence of meaning shapes experiences and distorts reality through the deconstruction of stability, knowledge and truth. Through Orwell’s creation of “Newspeak”, he manipulates the language and form of the novel both in fiction and within the audience's own perception as he utilises uncommon novelistic structures such as indexes to add to his fiction and social critique. This is highlighted through the erasure of descriptive language and adjectives, instead being replaced with “plus good, double plus good, double ungood, ungood”, thus removing human capacity to communicate pain, discomfort, or any experience that The Party deems anomalous from their preconceived understanding of the ‘ideal’ human experience. This restriction of expression is contrasted by Winston’s diary, the personal tone communicating a sense of voyeurism from the perspective of the reader, not dissimilar to the invasiveness of the “thought police” and “telescreens” as Winston declares “Down with Big Brother”. This “destruction of words” serves to limit the human experience through restricting expression and communication, thus creating a sort of paradox for the reader as Orwell describes the destruction of words in a seemingly joyous way, thus being dissonant with the act of freely reading the novel. Thus, through his metalinguistic approach to discussing language itself, in conjunction with the thematic rebellion associated with reading, Orwell skilfully utilises his novel to tell a story of persistence and warning by its very existence.

In a totalitarian state, the human psyche and sense of individualism can become warped, perverted and ultimately void. Herein, Orwell demonstrates the corrosion of individual identity by way of forced acclimatisation as he utilises violent imagery of human psychosis and pain to explore the corruption of the individual. With Winston as an ‘everyman’ monolith his corruption and endangerment directly contribute to Orwell’s exploration of individualism, highlighted as O’Brien serves to encapsulate societal paranoia personified, “the friend” turned “tormentor” as Winston begins his initiation into the cult of ignorance in “Room 101”. Societally ingrained ignorance and lack of empathy serves to further corrupt the very idea of humanity as physicalising emotions is vilified, “a nervous tick…a look of anxiety, anything that carried a sense of abnormality” results in punishment. This limitation of expression to stoicism and “victory”, whilst portraying an image of dutiful industrialisation, is rather corrosive and corrupting as Winston is stated to be “the last man”. By Orwell's crafting of Winston to represent the audience and free humanity, he furthers then as imagery of manipulation of “tearing [the] human mind to pieces” conjures visceral reactions of disgust and fear, despite the process leading to joyous ignorance as Winston, striped of his humanity, finds peace within the cult of ignorance. Orwell displays a highly elegiac novel, a testament to dying humanity as he tortures his characters for the benefit of the reader, crafting a cautionary world so as to warn of the corrosive power of ignorance disguised as joy. Thus, it is through the characterisation of Winston as an emblematic sacrificial warning that Orwell utilises form to heed caution to his readers of the dangers of blind ignorance, joy, and the corrosion of the self.

Consciousness of society and the self shapes one’s capacity for empathy and thus their perceptions and experiences of the world, influenced by external factors such as societal pressures and propaganda. There is a sense of dread created by the novel through invoking primal fear within the reader, as Cognitive dissonance and paradox disables individuals from gaining social consciousness, and thus strips them of their ability to change within societal boundaries- through Orwell's use of these ideas within the text itself he echoes their impacts on the reader, creating a more engaging narrative that reflects our own experiences. Orwell’s paradox “until they become conscious they cannot rebel and until they rebel they cannot become conscious” elucidates the entrapment of society and humanity to approved experiences and thoughts, furthered by the prevalence of “thought police” and “double think”. Orwell displays a claustrophobic collective consciousness of ignorance, wherein those who remain unconscious are joyful in their ignorance, thus communicating the duality of human emotion and experience. By introducing linguistically and psychologically dissonant concepts such as “double think” and the previously mentioned paradox, Orwell highlights the mental strain and anguish of the citizens of Airstrip One, thus elucidating the corruption of individual and collective consciousness. Additionally, societal consciousness is further controlled as “[Winston] wasn’t sure that it was 1984” as “he who controls the past controls the future”. The manipulation of the past so as to create a sense of utopia and victory presents an artificial happiness within Orwell’s bleak utopian society. For the unconscious citizens of Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is a utopia crafted of manmade happiness, trapped in an ingenuine cycle of victory. For the reader, the dystopic truth becomes apparent as the reader must share the suffering of Winston, together they are “the last [men] alive”, the sole bearers of consciousness and suffering within an artificially joyous world, furthered through the reflective form of the novel.

Holistically, it is by way of Orwell’s novel that much of human experiences, both real and imagined, are perceived as they are within our contemporary context. It is specifically through his creation of Winston Smith as an everyman protagonist, the metalanguage of Newspeak, and Goldstein’s manifesto that Orwell utilises form to explore his prophetic themes. His distillation of identity, individualism, autonomy, government control and language all live viscerally within the very text of the book, existing as a warning of a future that we are perhaps living through or are yet to see encompass society entirely.

What makes this a High Range Response?

Refers to the text by its’ proper name, Nineteen Eighty-Four, not the numerated version. If you wish to refer to the text as 1984, you must indicate this with brackets after the text to identify the abbreviation. Make sure that this is not confused with a date though.    

Utilises high modality language and a varied vocabulary in a skilful way. You shouldn’t throw a thesaurus at an essay and call it a day- when you learn new words make sure you fully understand what they mean and imply before bringing them into your writing.  

Links back to the question wherever possible and in a variety of ways to ensure a lack of repetition but the constant building of a strong argument.  

Topic sentences are thematic and immediately link to the rubric, thus showing the marker that this is at the forefront of your mind as you craft your response. Additionally, by crafting rubric-focused topic sentences prior to an exam, you can come into the HSC with a flexible and focused start to a paragraph that will be adaptable to most questions.  

Acknowledges important parts of the novel, such as Goldsteins Manifesto and Newspeak, in order to properly address the question in regards to form, but also to highlight an in-depth knowledge of the text itself.

Studying 1984 for your HSC?

Nineteen Eighty-Four - Visual Aid

1984  

The Crucible  

Billy elliot  , the boy behind the curtain, past the shallows.

Common Module: Text Analysis - Nineteen Eighty-Four

• Location: London, Airstrip One, Oceania
• Permanent state of war
• Totalitarian: government has total power and control over citizens
• Oligarchy: Power is in the hands of a minority
• Figurehead is Big Brother
• Socialism is a political ideology that advocates for greater economic equality through a state-controlled system of labour
• In essence, the government controls how much money everyone earns (which is the more or less the same for everyone), and big businesses are owned by the government
• English Socialism distorts the socialist ideology, so that the government works for its own benefit (and the benefit of the members of the Party) rather than the common good
• The Party uses mass surveillance, torture, manipulation, propaganda, and fear
• Newspeak limits the amount of words available in everyday speech, and the breadth and nuance of individuals’ thoughts
• The effect is that if you cannot communicate disagreement with the Party, then you have no way to disagree

Our story begins with our hero, Winston, writing down his thoughts on life in his personal (illegal) diary, hidden from the camera in his room.

Winston is just your average Joe government worker. He’s got a job he hates, a coworker he’s got a crush on, and a crushingly dystopic government hovering over him that has him and everyone else under the constant monolithic surveillance of the godlike Big Brother.

• Truth is whatever the Party claims it to be, and the only entertainment to be found is in the regular public executions of prisoners of war and citizens that dared step a toe out of line.

Mondays, am I right?

So Winston is an employee at the Ministry of Truth, the innocently-named government agency in charge of dispensing truths to the eager citizens at large.

But of course, the normal truth is nowhere near accurate enough for the illustrious Party.

So instead of relying on the facts of reality to conform to the narrative they need, the Party instead makes liberal use of, shall we say ‘alternative facts,’ in order to keep their citizens “informed”.

That way, if the Party benefits from the citizens believing that 2+2=5 for a day, the Party can say it with confidence and their citizens will happily oblige.

Or at least they’ll be smiling.

So the citizens are routinely subjected to this thing called the Two Minutes Of Hate, wherein Goldstein, the Party traitor supposedly bent on bringing Oceania to its knees, spews a whole mess of propaganda about the Party and how it’s wrong and evil and tyrannical and junk.

• Interestingly, we’re directed by the author to observe the fact that a persistent fear brought on by the Two Minute Hate is that, even though the propaganda is obviously lies, someone less level-headed might be taken in by it.
• This obviously promotes a feeling of persistent paranoia, that the people around you might have been brainwashed by the opposition.
• But it also ends up promoting the tactic of sticking one’s fingers in one’s ears and not listening to the opposition’s arguments, in case they end up making too much sense.
• Because if your enemies make sense to you, that must mean they’ve successfully brainwashed you.

As the hate continues, listening citizens get more and more freaked out, shouting and screaming over the broadcast to drown out the voice in order to avoid listening to the words that might subvert them from loyal citizens into spies and rebels if they let the message sink in.

• The message here is pretty clear: listening to people you disagree with is ill-advised by the Party, because, what’ll happen if you start agreeing with them?
• Better to pretend like nobody else could have a valid perspective.
• After all, there’s only one truth, and it’s whatever the Party says it is.
• It’s worth noting that even though it looks like Orwell is prompting the idea that fair and reasoned debate is the only real way to oppose the Party, that because one side is shouted down the solution must be to listen to what they’re saying, he’s actually kind of subverting that idea. Because, see, there is no reason debate because the Party is everything and the opposition is an illusion. The Party produces the illusion of alternative perspectives to convince their citizens that those perspectives have been fairly defeated, when in actuality, all they’re doing is propping up straw men and tearing them down as a show of strength.
• But the thing, is even though there is no real opposition in the form of Goldstein’s party, the Party does occasionally face real, internal opposition from citizens that have failed to be properly assimilated.
• And in those cases, we see the failure of “reasoned debate,” because our citizens are usually in the right.
• They’re usually having a crisis of faith brought on by the collision between real truth and what the Party claims truth to be.
• And they only lose because the Party gets to redefine truth, and essentially break the citizen’s mind until they agree.
• What may look like reasoned debate is actually un-winnable from one end, because the other is defining the nature of truth itself. It’s not always possible to defeat someone who’s demonstrably wrong, because there will always be people who believe them, no matter what they or you say.
• People are stubborn, and it’s not always possible to change someone’s mind.
• It doesn’t make them right, it doesn’t make you wrong.
• Orwell talks more about this later.
• The bad news for our buddy Winston is that, while he was having his flashback, apparently all his oppressed hatred of living in the iconic dystopia boiled over, and he’s written ‘down with Big Brother’ in big letters all over his diary, which means he’s officially committed a Thoughtcrime, and the Thought Police are pretty much inevitably gonna find him and do horrible, dystopian things to him.
• Now one of the many joys of living in dystopic London is that literally nobody can be trusted. Like, ever.
• Children are taught from a young age to recognize and report treasonous behavior, like wearing foreign shoes, or not being super chill all the time, and the behavior extends into adulthood, where anything less than ideal citizenship is liable to be reported by even one’s closest comrades.
• On top of that, almost all the citizens are under near constant surveillance, where although it’s not guaranteed that they’re being watched at all times, it is guaranteed that they COULD be being watched at any time.

It’s like your laptop webcam!

Winston believes that this has led to a loss of unconditional love, as it’s now impossible to carry on any kind of close relationship with any degree of privacy, and trust is a thing of the largely erased past.

So as Winston does his. Party-mandated morning workout, he contemplates the fact that the most terrifying thing about the Party is the nigh-universal gas lighting that it’s been doing to its citizens for decades.

See, the Party really likes claiming that certain things happened and certain things didn’t, and since nobody else keeps records, who do you trust; your own memories or the grand and illustrious Party?

After all, your memories are tiny. They only exist in the three pounds of sponge that lives in your head.

But the Party? Well, the Party’s huge; the Party’s everything. So obviously they’re more likely to be right than you are, right?

How real are your memories? How real is your past?

Someone’s personal existence seems very small and unlikely when faced with the universal insistence that it never happened.

So the Party has turned this unending existential crisis into something of an art form, called ‘doublethink’.

Doublethink

Doublethink is the art of simultaneously accepting two fundamentally contradictory concepts.

For example, the idea both that democracy is impossible, and that the Party is a bastion of democracy.

Doublethink is a necessity for every loyal citizen, but poor Winston can’t seem to get the hang of it.

He always hits a snag when he has to choose between his observed reality and the Party’s version of reality.

So Winston goes to work and sets about doing his job, which includes such matters as rewriting various forecasts who have been retroactively accurate.

For example, some government promises need to be un-promised, and everyone’s favorite Big Brother needs to have a recent speech retroactively corrected in light of current events.

• See, the Party is, by definition, always right.
• So whenever they make a prediction that turns out to be tragically misquoted in a way that would make it seem like they were wrong, the ‘misprint’ needs to be retroactively corrected and all evidence of the mistake destroyed.
• That way, the Party gets to still be always right without having to actually do anything right.

They also have a machine that makes pop music, because it wouldn’t be a dystopia without one.

But the most complicated and rewarding part of Winston’s job is definitely unperson-ing people.

See whenever the Party sees fit to disappear someone, they have to be completely unperson-ed, meaning no record of their existence can be anywhere.

Depending on how illustrious that person was, this means that sometimes Winston has to rewrite speeches from Big Brother himself, if he happened to have congratulated the accomplishments of someone who has now never existed.

So Winston takes his lunch break with a coworker. Syme, who’s been tasked with compiling the. Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary, ’newspeak’ being a paring down of the English language that Big Brother hopes will be able to eliminate thoughtcrime entirely by removing the freedom of thought required to have illegal thoughts.

Syme is pretty explicit about the nature of the whole thing, which leads Winston to conclude that he’s probably gonna get vaporized one of these days, not for disloyalty, but for being too honest with his loyalty.

But Winston notices one of his coworkers, a girl who works at the Fiction Department, giving him a kind of weird look, which he immediately interprets to mean that she somehow sensed his traitorous thoughts and is already planning on handing hime over to the Thought Police.

This of course turns his mind to thoughts of banging, an act tacitly discouraged by the Party, except for the purposes of making smaller citizens.

See, Winston is repressed as all get-out, just like the rest of the Party citizens, and it’s really starting to get on his nerves that he can’t just have a nice night with a woman he likes and who likes him back and has more personality than a wooden mannequin.

We also learn about the “proles”, that is, the uneducated working class, or proletariat, which according to Winston, are controlled by the government by way of propaganda, bread and circuses, and the occasional Thought Policemen eliminating the ones that seem inclined to ask inconvenient questions.

Proles are allowed an unexpected degree of freedom of action, in the same way that a cow is generally allowed to graze wherever it wants.

The proles are given certain freedoms to keep them complacent, because that way they stay docile and harmless. The proles are relied upon to keep the infrastructure running, to breed, and to provide occasional trysts with the horrendously repressed Party members.

Because frankly, the Party couldn’t care less what the proles do in their spare time as long as they do it un-traitorously.

• Winston believes that the proles may be their only hope of revolution, since they make up 85% of the population and could easily overpower the Party if they rose up.
• But unfortunately, the Party has succeeded in keeping them complacent and unwilling to rise up.
• Or, rather, they don’t even know that they should be rising up, because their lives are actually pretty cushy and the few proles that have access to the news obviously only have access to the Party propaganda.
• Since the only truth they know is the one the party gives them, and they’re discouraged from exercising curiosity or questioning the Party, he proles live in comfortable, entertained ignorance, while the 15% of the population that might possibly think they should rebel, are so rigidly controlled as to make it impossible.
• Winston also contemplates the fact that his problem with the world he lives in isn’t that it’s cruel or dystopic or whatever; it’s that it’s boring.

And it sounds dumb, but… hear him out.

• The Party projects an ideal of megastructures, shining cities, a glorious and terrible future of beautiful people and even more beautiful conquest.
• But the practicalities of the Party are dingy office environments, bombed out apartment complexes, poor health, a constant melancholic distaste for reality, and a longing for a past that the Party claims never existed.
• Winston once again considers the malleable past and what it means for him to seemingly be the only Party member who’s bothered by this.
• He wonders if he’s crazy, but he’s not so much worried about being crazy as he is about being wrong.
• But good news! Winston’s life isn’t totally bleak.
• In fact, he’s got faith in one particular coworker, a man named O’Brien, who Winston has a feeling might possibly share his thoughts about the Party.
• He might even, he thinks, be a member of the fabled Brotherhood, the mythical rebellion led by Goldstein that no one’s sure really exists.
• Regardless of the veracity of the rebel movement, Winston somehow trusts O’Brien, as a kindred spiritin an ocean of unfeeling puppets.
• While contemplating truth and memory and gaslighting and all that jazz, Winston has a bit of a revelation, which I think bears repeating in its entirety, because I really like. (You might want to learn this quote, or at least part of it)

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right!. They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change… Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall toward the earth’s center. With the feeling that he was speaking to O’Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote: …Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows.”

• So Winston decides to be a little rebellious and goes for a walk, which, while not strictly illegal, is definitely frowned upon by the Party as a whole.
• Winston stumbles into the antique shop he bought his precious diary from in the first place, and, in the fury of curiosity, sidles in and takes a look around.
• The friendly proprietor gives him a rundown of various ancient artifacts, like a paperweight and some old prints, and the shop doesn’t have a telescreen, which leaves Winston feeling uncharacteristically at ease, as he can’t be being observed by the Party at this point. The shop and the upstairs room feel oddly familiar and comforting; relics of the world he half remembers from his childhood, but never got a chance to appreciate.
• And the old proprietor himself, Mr. Charrington, is also a walking goldmine, casually expositing old nursery rhymes and notable but long since destroyed buildings.
• Winston leaves in a good mood, which immediately dissolves into panic when he spots the very girl who he’d noticed at lunch and assumed had been spying on him.
• Since this is no part of town for a Party member, obviously she must be following him and she probably saw him go into the shop, too.
• So obviously Winston turns to thoughts of murder, decides he really doesn’t feel up to it, and starts considering suicide instead.
• But he holds off, and this turns out to have been a good idea when four days later he runs into the girl again, and when he helps her up after a fall, she slips him a love note.
• Turns out her name is Julia and she’s had her eye on him and the prole neighborhood, because she shares his distaste for the Party and his passion for some nice non-wooden banging.
• After about a week of desperate maneuvering to try and get the chance to have a conversation with this girl without the Party getting suspicious, they managed to get somewhere private and even kind of pretty and share some chocolate, listen to the birds, and then have some genuinely nice anarchic sex.
• Interestingly, Winston learns that Julia’s done this before with lots of men, and he finds that really hot, because the Party espouses purity and virginity and stuff, and Julia expressing her bodily autonomy by being the polar opposite of a virgin is super attractive to our rebellious hero.
• So they carry on a surreptitious romance over the following months, wherein they manage to have a whole conversation and also some sex while holed up in a bombed-out bell tower.
• They discuss why the Party is so anti-sex, and it turns out it’s entirely for practical reasons.
• First of all, the Party wants to keep the population wound up like a spring so that they have boundless energy to be spent on patriotism; and second, if the people had a way to be really truly happy, why would they care about catering to Big Brother?

This is probably also why the chocolate is so bad.

• So Winston decides to be really rebellious and surreptitiously rents the upstairs room in Mr. Charrington’s antique shop so that they can have a comfy, nostalgic place, free of surveillance, where they can bang without having to plan it for a whole month in advance.
• They have a lovely afternoon where Julia smuggles out a mess of real, quality food, like bread and jam and real sugar and even some coffee and tea.
• Julia also managed to get a hold of a makeup kit and dolls herself up a little, continuing the trend of embracing her identity as a woman as an act of rebellion against a Party that owns her right to bodily autonomy.
• So the plot continues as the year advances toward the holiday known as Hate Week, which is heralded by an increase in nationalist propaganda, and also bombings; which riles the proles up in a very pro-Party-hate-foreigners sort of way.
• Meanwhile, Julia & Winston enjoys some genuinely relaxing quality time together, squirreled away in there hidden antique bedroom, while contemplating how super, SUPER dead they are when they get caught.
• They also discussed their differing views on the Party and the people it governs.
• Julia thinks everyone secretly hates it and would rebel if they could, but doesn’t believe there’s some secret organized rebellion trying to sabotage it from within.
• Winston, meanwhile, believes complacency runs rampant through some of the population, but there could be a secret cabal of rebels working to take the Party down and save them all.
• Julia also doesn’t believe that a war is really happening. She suspects the Party is bombing its own people to keep them angry and on their toes, which is disturbingly plausible, even though it turns out to not be true.
• So later on, O’Brien stops Winston in the hall and casually gives him his address, promising to lend him a copy of the latest Newspeak Dictionary.
• But Winston is pretty sure he’s actually gonna give him a copy of Goldstein’s guide to rebelling against the state.
• But before that, he has a dream about his mother and realizes something else about the Party: they convince their citizens that how they feel about stuff doesn’t matter. More specifically, how they care about other people.
• They’re taught to dismiss things like human life. A building getting bombed is just another crater and the people who died weren’t much of anything really.
• Compassion and empathy are completely squashed, most obviously for outsiders, but more impressively, even for other citizens.
• He contemplates that when they inevitably get caught, he’s gonna focus on not betraying Julia, as in he’s not gonna let the Party make him stop loving her.
• He and Julia agree that no matter what the Party makes them say, it can’t make them believe it.

Let’s hope that works out for ’em.

• So Winston and Julia seek out O’Brien to try and joined the rebellion. He grills them on what they’d be willing to do for the rebellion, - everything but separate, as it turns out - then he tells them that he’ll send them a super secret rebellion handbook and sends them on their way.
• So Hate Week rolls around, complicated somewhat by the fact that the Party is abruptly at war with someone different than they were at the beginning of the week.
• Which means five years of propaganda needs to be rewritten very suddenly to accommodate the change.
• So poor Winston has been horrifically overworked for the past five days, rewriting history, but he finally manages to get his work done and crawls up to the antique bedroom to read a beginner’s guide to overthrowing an oppressive regime.
• The book is a pretty solid rundown of the real history of the world, as well as a comprehensive study of why exactly the Party is at war all the freaking time.
• The answer is, as it always is, cheap labor and free resources.
• But more importantly, we learn why this dystopia happened, and you’re gonna love this: it’s because the vision of the future that was held in the wake of WWI was that the future would be bright and luxurious, and every citizen would be educated.
• And that is what inspired the Party to make such a grody, dystopic world.
• If the people become educated, they’re gonna realize they don’t need the bourgeoisie.
• A hierarchical society can only be maintained by keeping the majority of the population both poor and ignorant.
• Poverty wasn’t enough, and just strangling the economy wasn’t working, so they started the wars, because nothing keeps a population more poor and more ignorant than the routine devastation of their entire world.
• War destroyed supply, and therefore creates demand, and when your citizens are overworked to the point of insanity just to break even, they don’t have time to do inconvenient things, like learn or think. War is a socially acceptable method of wasting absurd quantities of material & resources in a way that also directs the dissatisfaction of your citizens outward, at some evil, foreign party, so they never question why the war is happening and who started it for what reason.
• They just embrace the certainty that their government is protecting them from the greater evil.
• They embrace the far off victory with a religious zeal, and in the meantime, will accept any sacrifice to see it through, even thought the Party has a vested interest in keeping the war going forever in order to maintain their status quo.
• Also, the book notes, the Party has removed the concept of science and empirical evidence from the English language, in order to better facilitate keeping the working population ignorant and unquestioning.
• It also turns out that all three of the world’s super-countries, Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, all follow basically the same dystopia how-to guide with marginally different names, and their social structures are all identical.
• The beginner’s guide to eating the rich also outlines the structure behind the Party and how it conspires to keep everyone simultaneously complacent and full of zealous rage at the enemies of the state.
• Ferociously angry and loyal, but not too put out of their way, and therefore unlikely to take action beyond government mandated hating-the-foreigners sessions.
• And of course, doublethink is in place to make sure that even when faced with stuff that makes literally no sense, our enterprising citizens can still put their total faith in the Party without too much cognitive dissonance.
• Unfortunately, he’s barely done through this part of the book when they discover that the quaint picture hanging on the wall has been, in fact, hiding a telescreen the whole time.
• So basically they’ve been under constant surveillance since the first day they came up here, and the Party absolutely heard the whole thing about the tough guy dismantling the government and also probably all the sex.
• So it turns out the charming old shop owner Mr. Charrington was a member of the Thought Police all along, and Winston and Julia gets super arrested.
• Winston gets dunked in a cell to wait for like EVER, while in the meantime, along with a string of other prisoners, two of his coworkers get dumped in with him, one for failing to remove the word ‘God’ from a poem, the other for saying treasonous things in his sleep.
• The days wear on, and Winston observes that whenever a prisoner is told that they’ll be taken to Room 101, they always freak the hell out. While he’s pondering this, O’Brien comes in, whereupon it becomes clear that O’Brien himself is also a member of the Thought Police, because Winston’s day wasn’t bad enough already.
• So they take Winston and O’Brien tortures the crap out of him for a while to get the standard confessions out of him, and then tortures him some more in order to cure his faulty memory that makes him remember events the Party says never happened.
• O’Brien systematically and calmly dismantled every memory he has that doesn’t line up with acceptable reality, and poor Winston once again revisits the age-old existential crisis of “did that happen or did I imagine it?” O’Brien explains that it’s an error to believe that reality is anything close to objective. After all, the only access you have to reality is through your own perceptions, and can’t your perceptions be wrong?
• Really, it’s Winston’s fault for failing to properly manage his perceptions of reality, so as to make him think that the things he saw had to be real.
• O’Brien explains to Winston that, even though they’re super gonna kill him, they’re gonna fix him first.
• So they do something weird to his brain, and for about thirty seconds, he’s actually complacent, the way the Party wants him to be. He sees five fingers, he remembers that he made up his perceptions of reality, all that good stuff.
• He snaps out of it, but he wants to go back, because it felt right. It felt like he was finally sane by the standards of society.
• So that fun situation continues for a while and we learn that the beginner’s guide to joining the rebellion was actually written in part by O’Brien, in order to entrap wannabe rebels and then cure them of their crazy.
• O’Brien goes back to the idea that reality is only what exists in the perception of humanity, and therefore by controlling perception, the Party controls reality. Winston is pretty insistent that reality is real, and something will make the Party fall, but his arguments get worn down, and eventually, he breaks.
• They plop him down into a cell, let him actually eat and exercise, and he gradually becomes more of a human being, while doing his best to re-educate himself in the tenets of the Party. He practices doublethink and crimestop, the act of not letting your brain even think traitorous thoughts, and gets decently good at it. He’s even comfortable for a change.
• He’s doing super well. But then he has a moment where he cracks and calls out for Julia, showing that there’s still work to do.
• And this is when he gets sent to Room 101.
• Now, Room 101 is specifically designed to be the worst nightmare of whoever’s being sent there.
• In Winston’s case, he’s got this terrible fear of rats.
• See, the idea is that, by using Room 101, the Party breaks down the last part of the subject’s mind, the one component that still holds out in the face of all the other stuff, and, using that, makes the subject love Big Brother rather than hate him, completing their assimilation into the Party.
• So they rig up this mask thing with a long cage in front of it, put Winston’s face in the mask, and put a bunch of rats on the other end. If O’Brien presses a button, the rats eat Winston’s face.
• Winston panics, panics a little bit more, then screams at them to do this to Julia, not to him.
• And with that, he is a free man; a free, good citizen who’s definitely gonna get shot one of these days, but in the meantime is absolutely free to hang out in a corner cafe & read the paper and solve the chess puzzles.
• He previously ran into Julia, who also looked rather the worse for wear. And it’s really clear that they can’t love each other anymore.
• After all, they both betrayed each other in Room 101, and they both meant it 100%. Winston is every once in a while troubled by intrusive false memories, but overall, he’s a fine citizen. He’s successfully conquered himself and come to terms with the reality in which he lives. The end.

British Imperialism

Imperialism is when one country tries to rule over other countries economically, politically, and sometimes culturally

To control other countries, empires usually turned to colonialism and slavery

Britain held the largest empire in the world during Orwell’s lifetime

Orwell joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, rather than going to university, as his school grades were fairly low

• Orwell observed and participated in British imperialism firsthand
• As a police officer, he was responsible for eliminating resistance to British rule, as Burmese independence would be a threat to the British Empire
• Reducing Burmese resistance was achieved through violence, and fuelled by bigotry and racism

There are clear parallels here to the Party in 1984. Both the Party and the British Empire worked to achieve total control, and to do this, they attempted to suppress any form of rebellion. Potential Thesis Statement: “Orwell portrays the brutal effect of total control through the lack of freedom of the characters in 1984.” Potential Short Response Question: “Explain how Orwell portrays the effect of total control in 1984.”

Orwell developed a deep hatred of authority and British imperialism

In his essay “Why I Write” (1945), he condemned the uneven power dynamics he had witnessed:

“I felt that I had… got to escape. Not merely from imperialism, but from every form of man’s dominion over man.”

Spanish Civil War

• The Spanish civil war was fought between the socialists and the fascists
• It solidified Orwell’s political stance, and informed how he would write about Ingsoc in 1984
• As this was the first war he had been exposed to, Orwell was extremely idealistic, and joined a socialist militia with the goal of fighting fascism
• Orwell quickly realised that political ideologies are easily distorted by political power, and that the socialists were just as obsessed with worshipping a dictator as the fascists

1984 is an explicitly political novel that criticises dictatorships and totalitarianism. The terrorism used by the party to rule over Oceania is heavily influenced by Orwell’s observations of the oppressive nature of dictatorships and totalitarianism. The inconsistent ideologies of Ingsoc (e.g. “War is Peace, Ignorance is Knowledge, Freedom is Slavery”) links directly to the corruption of socialism for the sake of individual power in the Spanish Civil War. Potential Thesis Statement: “Orwell uses the Party as a warning of the corruption present in the leaders of ideological movements.” Potential Short Response Question: “How does Orwell portray corruption in 1984?”

• Orwell saw his dreams of socialism corrupted by the ideas it was designed to oppose: dictatorships and totalitarianism. This served as a major influence for the ideology of the Party in 1984.

Rise of Totalitarianism (1930s and 40s)

Josef stalin.

• The rise of totalitarianism in Europe influenced the propaganda and censorship present in 1984
• Orwell had a strong distaste for totalitarianism after his experiences in the Spanish Civil War
• Although Orwell was pro-socialism, he was extremely against Stalin, the leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1922-1952
• Orwell saw Stalin as a fraud who pretended to be dedicated to socialism in an effort to increase his own power and influence
• Orwell believed that Stalin was a prime example of what could go wrong when a dictator was able to warp socialism for personal/political advancement

Adolf Hitler

Orwell was fascinated by the success of the Nazi Party and, in particular, their leader, Adolf Hitler

By the late 1930s, Hitler’s word was considered above the laws of Germany

Many of his political stances were rooted in racism (e.g. the Holocaust) and aggressive nationalism (e.g. Lebensraum )

Hitler used mass manipulation, racial purity programs, censorship, and the destruction of art and books, to fulfil his goals.

Totalitarianism was a breeding ground for restricted freedoms, censorship of information, and real life Big Brother figures. The Party used the Ministry of Truth to revise historical material in order to support whatever standpoint was required at the time. This is one of many parallels between the Ministry of Truth, Glavlit (The Soviet censorship body) and the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (the Nazi censorship body).

• Orwell’s decision to set 1984 in London rather than in an existing dictatorship was intentional: he believed that giving power to a small group, using the front of an ideology, results in an oppressive government no matter where in the world.

The Cold War

After World War II, the USA and Soviet Union emerged as rival superpowers with contrasting ideologies. The USA believed in capitalism , while the Soviet Union believed in Communism

Orwell published 1984 in 1949, 2 years into the Cold War

However, Orwell was actually the inventor of the term “Cold War,” as he used it in his 1945 essay You and the Atom Bomb, a commentary on the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Orwell imagined a war between 2 or 3 superstates (hmm), each with extreme technological capabilities and, most importantly, nuclear weaponry, fighting for world domination

Orwell (and basically everyone not in politics at the time) was aware that a hot war between nuclear powers was MAD (MAD, in this case, stands for Mutually Assured Destruction, and yes, that is the techincal term for it). The idea of a Cold War is that the superpowers do not openly fight each other, but instead indrectly conflict, such as through proxy wars or arms races. You can read more about it here .

The fear of war and destruction by the enemy is used by the government to justify the more extreme components of the Party’s policies (e.g. constant surveillance)

The war in 1984 is an example of “a peace that is no peace” (Orwell, 1948)

• You know, I don’t think I ever really got dystopias.
• Actually, I think this dystopias might just be too familiar to a kid.
• The people in charge have weird arbitrary rules about what kind of things you can draw or say, they insist that you treat them with respect, even though the only thing they have over you is age and authority, they don’t tend to be as objective or fair as one would like, and, to top it all off, you live with the knowledge that if you step out of line, one of your fellow kids might tattle on you.
• A dystopia is written with the overwhelming attitude that the characters are largely powerless, but a kid already knows what that’s like.
• It’s only when you become an adult and get used to having some kind of power that a dystopia really starts to sink in.
• After getting used to having autonomy, a story where autonomy is impossible stop sounding like so much fun, and it becomes less ‘sticking it to your mean school principal’ and more ‘getting your kneecaps confiscated by the secret police’.
• I’d say out of all the modern dystopias, the one with the least potential for fun is probably 1984.
• Now, 1984 was written in 1949 by George Orwell, and it was pretty much 100% social commentary on Orwell’s criticisms of both Hitler and Stalin, who, despite being in opposite ends of the political spectrum, struck him as frighteningly similar. As a result, the antagonist of the story, the Party in control, manages to be completely unidentifiable party-wise, and could fall on either extreme of the spectrum. Un-personing, the Thought Police and the Party interrogation methods are all thinly veiled re-skins of Stalinist Russia, but Newspeak, doublethink & the Ministry of Truth have shades of Nazi Germany in their influences.
• It’s kind of an apolitical fusion of both totalitarian regimes.
• Our POV character, Winston, is basically a conduit by which Orwell can discuss his thoughts on the political climate.
• The book is essentially a series of events, interspersed with inner monologue essays, as Winston tries to reconcile his thoughts on the Party and the nature of reality.

Lots of fun stuff.

Last updated on November 17, 2021

Paper 1 - Section I - 10 Full-Length Reading Tasks

Paper 1 - Section II - 60 Practice Essay Questions

This article contains several sample HSC questions for all modules of the year 12 Advanced English Course.

5 minute read

Last updated 

October 8, 2021

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Six Second Summary

Introduction.

As regular practice is essential to effective study regimes, students should utilise these questions in the lead up to trial and HSC exams. Questions are best practised under timed conditions to best prepare for the exams in an authentic environment.

These questions have been prepared by top state-ranking tutors at Premier Tutors with several years of experience teaching the new syllabus, including three tutors who have placed 1st in NSW for English Advanced.

Common Questions

“Through the language of emotion, texts may provide timeless and universal portraits of humanity.”

To what extent does this statement relate to your own understanding of your prescribed text? In your response, refer to the quotation and your prescribed text.

“Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it but moulds it to its purpose.” – Oscar Wilde

Assess the effectiveness of your prescribed text in providing an authentic image of reality. In your response, refer to the quotation and your prescribed text.

“It is difficult to maintain individual identity in the face of homogenous collectives.”

To what extent does this statement relate to your own understanding of your prescribed text?

How does your text represent the paradoxical nature of human behaviours and motivations?

Literature’s power comes from its ability to confront the reader’s assumptions by representing new perspectives on the human experience. How does your understanding of your prescribed text reflect this statement?

“One’s identity is a culmination of their individual and collective human experiences.”

To what extent does this statement align with your understanding of your prescribed text? In your response, refer to the quotation and your prescribed text.

How does your text represent the inconsistencies between morality and human behaviours?

“The medium is the message” – Marshall McLuhan

How does the composer of your prescribed text communicate their perspective on the human experience through their form choices? In your response, refer to your prescribed text and the above statement.

“Despite our different behaviours, human motivations are all the same.”

How does your composer respond to their context to represent enduring ideas about the human experience? In your response, make close reference to the given statement and the prescribed text.

Question 10

“If the world were clear, art would not exist.” – Albert Camus

How does your prescribed text use storytelling to clarify the uncertainties and inconsistencies of the human experience? In your response, refer to the given statement and your prescribed text.

Question 11

How does the composer of your prescribed text experiment with form to challenge readers’ perspectives about the human experience?

Question 12

“The only constant within the human experience is change.”

To what extent does this paradoxical statement reflect your understanding of your prescribed text?

Question 13

How does your text use storytelling to deepen the responder’s understanding of the power of human relationships?

Question 14

How does your text develop a strong voice to shape the reader’s perspectives about the nature of individual experiences?

Question 15

“The most powerful and transcendental human experience is love.”

Love can come in many different forms. How does your text represent the impact of this emotion on individual and collective human experiences? In your response, make close reference to the above statement and your prescribed text.

Form Questions

Question 16 - prose fiction.

“The primary purpose of prose to create an authentic representation of the human experience.”

To what extent does the given statement align with your understanding of your prescribed text? In your response, discuss how narrative voice and structure help create this authenticity.

Question 17 - Poetry

“The power of poetry is not so much in the literal meaning of the words, but in the feelings that it evokes through imagery and other creative choices. It is through those feelings that we learn about the human experience.”

To what extent does this statement align with your understanding of your prescribed text?

Question 18 - Drama/ Shakespearean Drama

Analyse your prescribed text’s use of performance devices in representing human emotions.

Question 19 - Nonfiction

Analyse how the narrative voice of your prescribed text deepens your understanding of the individual experience represented.

Question 20 - Film & Media

Analyse how visual techniques work in conjunction with dialogue to accurately portray the interaction between individual and collective human experiences.

The following are all text-specific questions:

All the Light We Cannot See (Doerr, Anthony):

Question 21.

How does Doer represent the impact of adversity on the individual and collective behaviours?

Question 22

“So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?”

How has Doer’s representation of hope deepened your understanding of the human experience? In your response, make close reference to the given quotation and your prescribed text.

Question 23

How does Doer’s complicated portrayal of heroes and villains reveal the universality of our underlying humanity?

Vertigo (Lohrey, Amanda):

Question 24.

How does Lohrey represent the importance of connection with place in shaping the individual human experience?

Question 25

“To awaken human emotion is the highest level of art.” – Isadora Duncan

Discuss how Lohrey’s representation of the range of human emotions has enhanced your understanding of the human experience. In your response, make close reference to the given quote and your prescribed text.

Question 26

How does Lohrey represent the impact of loss and grief on individual human experiences?

Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell, George):

Question 27.

“Don’t let it happen. It depends on you.” – George Orwell

How does the above quotation resonate with your understanding of Orwell’s authorial intent?

Question 28

How does Orwell represent the power of collective narratives to homogenise individual human experiences?

Question 29

How does Orwell represent the nature of human emotions within a totalitarian regime, and how does this representation help support his authorial purpose?

Past the Shallows (Parrett, Favel):

Question 30.

“No man is an island entire of itself.” – John Donne

Does the above quotation affirm or challenge Parrett’s representation of isolation in Past the Shallows?

Question 31

Analyse how Parrett’s representation of fear shapes your understanding of human behaviours and motivations.

Question 32

How does Parrett represent the influence of setting on individual and collective human experiences?

Rosemary Dobson Collect Poems

‘Young Girl at a Window’, ‘Over the Hill’, ‘Summer’s End’, ‘The Conversation’, ‘Cock Crow’, ‘Amy Caroline’, ‘Canberra Morning’

Question 33

How does Dobson experiment with form to examine the impact of internal conflict on the individual human experience? In your response, refer to AT LEAST TWO of Dobson’s prescribed poems.

Question 34

“His eyes lit windows facing west / to the lemon-coloured light.” - Over the Hill, Rosemary Dobson

How does Dobson’s poetry engage with the different human reactions to change? In your response, refer to the above quotation and TWO OR MORE of Dobson’s prescribed poems.

Question 35

How does Dobson use her poetic form to explore the depth of human emotions? In your response, make clear reference to specific FORM choices made by Dobson in NO MORE THAN TWO of her poems.

Kenneth Slessor Selected Poems

‘Wild Grapes’, ‘Gulliver’, ‘Out of Time’, ‘Vesper-Song of the Reverend Samuel Marsden’, ‘William Street’, ‘Beach Burial’

Question 36

How does Slessor use imagery to evoke confronting emotions and experiences? In your response, refer to AT LEAST TWO of Slessor’s prescribed poems.

Question 37

How does Slessor highlight the paradoxes and anomalies inherent within the human experience? In your response, refer to NO MORE THAN TWO of Slessor’s prescribed poems.

Question 38

How does Slessor’s use of poetic personas allow him to shine light on complex aspects of the human experience? In your response, refer to AT LEAST TWO of Slessor’s prescribed poems.

The Crucible (Miller, Arthur)

Question 39.

“Whilst The Crucible is clearly a response to Miller’s context, it also contains enduring messages about human behaviours and motivations.”

How does the above statement reflect your understanding of the human experience represented in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible?

Question 40

How does Miller represent the power of institutional narratives to overwhelm and shape individual and collective human experiences?

Question 41

“Fear is the primary motivator within the human experience.”

To what extent does this statement reflect your understanding of the human experiences represented in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible?

The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare, William)

Question 42.

How does Shakespeare represent differing motivations and their impact on human behaviours?

Question 43

“Life itself, my wife and all the world / Are not with me esteemed above thy life.” (Bassiano to Antonio, IV.i.275-276, The Merchant of Venice, William Shakespeare)

How does Shakespeare represent the importance of connection with others in providing value to human experiences?

Question 44

How does Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice represent the influence of social laws and norms on both individual and collective human experiences?

The Boy Behind the Curtain (Winton, Tim)

Question 45.

How does Winton’s memoir form invite the reader to reflect upon the impact of past experiences in shaping individual identity? In your response, refer to AT LEAST TWO of Winton’s stories prescribed for study.

Question 46

To what extent does Winton engage with the tensions between individual motivations and collective expectations? In your response, refer to NO MORE THAN TWO of Winton’s stories prescribed for study.

Question 47

“For many, certainty has become the new normal, but it’s an illusion…We’ll forever be vulnerable to havoc.” – Havoc, Tim Winton

How does Winton represent the illusions within the human experience? In your response, make specific reference to above quotation and AT LEAST TWO of Winton’s stories prescribed for study.

I Am Malala (Yousafzai, Malala & Lamb)

Question 48.

“We realise the importance of our voices only when we are silenced.” – I am Malala, Malala Yousafzai

How does Yousafzai represent the importance of storytelling to empower individuals and collectives? In your response, make close reference to the above quotation and your prescribed text.

Question 49

How does Yousafzai represent the importance of maintaining individual values in the face of challenging individual and collective human experiences?

Question 50

How does Yousafzai in I am Malala represent the emotions and behaviours associated with experiences of inequality?

Question 51

How does Yousafzai in I am Malala represent our underlying, universal humanity despite our different beliefs and backgrounds?

Billy Elliot (Daldry, Stephen)

Question 52.

“We cannot change who we are, no more than we can change the rising of the sun or the coming of the tides.”

Does the above statement affirm or challenge your understanding of the representation of individual identity in Daldry’s Billy Elliot?

Question 53

How does Billy Elliot use visual techniques to engage with the difficulty of overcoming social expectations?

Question 54

How does Daldry in Billy Elliot represent the importance of acceptance to the human experience?

Go Back to Where You Came From (O’Mahony, Ivan)

Question 55.

How does Go Back to Where You Came From use documentary techniques which confront the viewer’s expectations to reveal the range of human experiences?

Question 56

How does Go Back to Where You Came From represent the power of new experiences to change existing perspectives?

Question 57

How does Go Back to Where You Came From represent our underlying, universal humanity despite our different beliefs and backgrounds?

Waste Land (Walker, Lucy)

Question 58.

“A powerful artistic vision is undeniable.”

Does the above quote affirm or challenge your understanding of Waste Land’s representation of the importance of artistic purpose for individual identity?

Question 59

How has your study of Waste Land enhanced your understanding of the power of creative expression to unite communities?

Question 60

How does Waste Land use visual techniques to shape our understanding of the timelessness and universality of human concerns and challenges?

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Fionn is a humanities tutor at Premier Tutors. Fionn attended Cranbrook School on a full academic Academic Scholarship and graduated as Dux with a perfect ATAR of 99.95.

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The Ultimate Nineteen Eighty-Four Cheatsheet | Common Module

Use this ultimate Nineteen Eighty-Four cheatsheet to get on top of your Common Module study for Year 12! Understand the context, themes, and characters central to Orwell's classic.

Guide Chapters

• HSC English Standard Cheatsheets
• The Merchant of Venice
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
• Henry Lawson
• Rosemary Dobson
• Nineteen Eighty-Four
• Go Back to Where You Came From
• Contemporary Asian Australian Poets
• Inside My Mother
• Past HSC exam paper guidelines and answers

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Vce english units 3 & 4.

Are you struggling to wrap your head around Nineteen Eighty-Four for the Year 12 Common Module? Don’t worry, unlike Big Brother, we’re really here for you! In this article, we give you a one-stop-shop for key ideas about Orwell’s dystopian classic!

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• The world of Nineteen Eighty-Four
• Plot summary

Important characters

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What is Nineteen Eighty-Four about?

Before we go into detail about George Orwell’s plot, we should familiarise ourselves with the dystopian world in  Nineteen Eighty-Four (note that it’s Nineteen Eighty-Four,  not 1984 ).  

The world of  Nineteen Eighty-Four

In  Nineteen Eighty-Four , the world is separated into 3 big nations as opposed to hundreds of smaller countries:

• Oceania (United States, Britain and its allies)
• Eastasia (China and its allies)
• Eurasia (Soviet Union)

The novel takes place in Oceania (specifically Airstrip One, where London used to be) and Ingsoc is the tyrannical government of the state with the enigmatic Big Brother as its ruler. The citizens are expected to worship him and maintain an unconditional loyalty to his regime, even if this involves betraying their closest family or friends. The world is constructed to deprive the individual of any happiness, as they are solely devoted to Big Brother and Ingsoc.

Ingsoc is bound by 3 principles. They are: “ War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. ”

These principles are demonstrated through the 4 ministries which govern the nation, these are all named ironically :

• Ministry of Truth : This is the ministry of propaganda. Their absolute control over the media enables them to rewrite history and inform the public with false information that supports their regime.
• Ministry of Love : This is a powerful institution that administers fear and suffering to brainwash rebellious citizens (including Thought Criminals). This is where Room 101 is located: the torture chamber where the Party uses a “thought criminal’s” worst nightmare and fears to break and convert them.
• Ministry of Peace : The Ministry of Peach is in charge of Oceania’s wartime affairs and decisions, including the armed forces. They orchestrate the perpetual war against Eurasia and Eastasia to maintain their citizens in a state of wartime poverty and hardship. This status quo ensures that the government will maintain supreme power indefinitely.
• Ministry of Plenty : This ministry is in charge of the economy. It is responsible for rationing all food and supplies. Ironically, it also ensures the nation is kept in a state of scarcity rather than prosperity. This is another method to maintain power, as the citizens, party members, and proles will never have the resources or desire to challenge the government because they have either forgotten, or have never experienced, better living conditions.

However, there is an underground organisation that attempts to overthrow the government: The Brotherhood . Big Brother claims that the leader of this organisation is a powerful and dangerous subversive, Emmanuel Goldstein .

These rebels believe in free will and individual rights . So, their members commit crimes like cheat and murder to betray Big Brother.

However, in Part 3 of the novel, we find out that The Brotherhood may not really exist. Instead, it is a false flag operation and Big Brother’s way of weeding out rebellious individuals so they can be publicly tried and brainwashed into compliance.

Plot Summary: Nineteen Eighty-Four

The novel commences with Winston (an Outer Party member who works at the Ministry of Truth) returning to his dilapidated home.

He is very cautious and wary of the surveillance. There are telescreens everywhere – including his home, the bathroom, and the streets – watching for any sign of non-conformity, which the Party refers to as “thoughtcrime”. Citizens are denied all freedoms and blindly follow the Party doctrine to avoid persecution. Persecuted individuals are tortured until they admit to all the crimes that the Party falsely accuses them of, hung in front of a live audience, and their existence is completely vaporised — that is, the individual’s existence is removed from all written media and denied by all other citizens (any mention of a vaporised person would be a thoughtcrime).

Winston shows disdain for the Party’s strict regime and despite the risk of persecution, he engages in increasingly severe acts of rebellion against the Party as the novel goes on. This includes recording his free thought in a diary (even the act of obtaining a diary is illegal), engaging in an intimate relationship with fellow Party member Julia, and eventually attempting to join The Brotherhood by reaching out to Inner Party member O’Brien, who he suspects is secretly a traitor to the Party.

Ultimately, we discover that O’Brien was manipulating Winston and is in fact dedicated to the Party’s mission to maintain “power for the sake of power”. O’Brien reveals to Winston and Julia that their rebellion was always being monitored by the Party, but they simply allowed them to continue to offer then false hope and subsequently crush any hope for freedom. After being tortured and humiliated in the Ministry of Love, Winston and Julia are defeated and left disillusioned. They betray one another with no desire to reunite. The novel ends with Winston expressing how he regrets betraying Big Brother and announcing his unconditional love and loyalty to the Party as fantasises about being executed to serve the party.

Winston Smith

Winston is our protagonist. As an Outer Party member, his freedoms are strictly confined by the regime and he is not ranked highly enough to receive any privileges. He is 39 years old and the novel makes several references to a varicose vein on his leg. He rebels with a dream to overthrow Big Brother’s regime.

Big Brother

Big Brother is the figurehead of Ingsoc and the totalitarian dictator of Oceania. It’s not clear whether Big Brother is a person who actually exists, but even the belief that there is a greater power looking over the nation is enough to command loyalty from most citizens.

The Brotherhood

The Brotherhood is thought to be a coordinated underground rebellion against the Party. Like Big Brother, we never see proof that it actually exists. Nevertheless, the belief that it exists motivates Winston and Julia to rebel.

Julia is Winston’s younger lover who claims to have had multiple affairs with Party members. Julia rebels for fun and personal enjoyment. She is far more pragmatic than Winston who has grand hopes to overthrow the regime.

O’Brien

O’Brien is an Inner Party member who Winston believes is a member of the Brotherhood. However, he turns to be a true Party supporter and seeks to obliterate rebels like Winston and Julia.

Emmanuel Goldstein

Similar to how Big Brother figureheads the Party, Goldstein figureheads The Brotherhood. The Party uses Goldstein as a political scapegoat and compels its citizens to direct their frustrations towards him. The citizens shared hatred towards Goldstein unites them and motivates them to turn to Big Brother for protection.

George Orwell

Orwell was an Indian-born British writer known for his social criticism and advocacy for democratic socialism. Orwell’s experiences as an imperial police officer in Burma, voluntarily living in the slums of London, and witnessing the horrendous acts committed by fascist regimes during the Spanish Civil War shaped his strong opposition to political control.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is only one of his many works, including the highly influential political satire  Animal Farm (1945), that challenge totalitarianism and authoritarian social and political practices.

End of WWII

Orwell began writing Nineteen Eighty-Four  only a few years after the end of World War II and the novel contains many references to the nuclear warfare that the U.S. instigated with Japan. The under-supplied and bland living conditions of Oceania were also probably inspired by those in London during WWII. Furthermore, Orwell captures the atmosphere of paranoia and uncertainty that clouded all nations during the war that threatened global destruction.

Spanish Civil War

Orwell was initially supportive of the Spanish Revolution and even volunteered to fight against the Fascist government in the Spanish Civil War (you can read his autobiographical account of this in Homage to Catalonia ). However, he became disillusioned by the atrocities committed by both sides. Events like organised purges conducted by the Nationalist forces and mass executions by the Republicans were all real events that Orwell emulates in Nineteen Eighty-Four .

Orwell uses Nineteen Eighty-Four  to portray how those desiring political control often disguise their intentions well, which highlights the need for society to maintain critical thought and agency.

Soviet Union

It is widely believed that the world of Oceania is a reflection of Joseph Stalin’s oppressive dictatorship over the Soviet Union. The description of Big brother as “the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features” uses imagery to make a clear reference to Joseph Stalin. In fact, “2 + 2 = 5” was actually a slogan that the Soviet Union used to reinforce their promise to complete their ‘Five-Year Industrial Plan’ in four years. Orwell twists the meaning of the slogan to warn how authoritarian regimes manipulate reality.

Surveillance and propaganda

The Party demands the sole attention and commitment of its people, and prevents its citizens from finding greater value in other relationships and experiences that could undermine their loyalty to the Party.

This is stated with a factly tone in what Winston believed to be Goldstein’s Manifesto: “A Party member is expected to have no private emotions and no respites from enthusiasm.”

In order to enforce this, the Party creates the impression that they are constantly monitoring each citizen and have a dedicated Thought Police. Moreover, propaganda is strictly censored to support the Party’s narrative and is “plastered everywhere”.

Absolute control

Orwell portrays a frightening world where the government has complete control over every action, motivation and thought that its citizens have. With this, the government is able to impose any ideology that suits their regime, even if it is completely absurd. The Party’s paradoxical slogan “WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH” is a recurring example of this.

In fact, the citizens of the regime help enforce the Party’s control by reporting any unorthodox behaviour, even if this means their own family and friends will be persecuted. As a consequence, no opposition to the regime will be able to gain traction and influence

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Freedom and Identity

The citizens of Oceania are barred from any freedoms because any individual thought or identity that does not exactly align with the Party’s regime threatens its infallible status. Winston’s diary, coral paperweight, and relationship with Julia symbolise his desire to be autonomous and to be appreciated as a unique individual.

The only people in Oceania who actually have any form of freedom are the proles, but they will never rebel because they don’t know any better and they will never experience any better if they don’t escape the Party’s control. Winston perfectly captures this concept in the paradox:

Until [the proles] become conscious they will never rebel, and until they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.

This paradox, coupled with Winston’s realisation that the proles are the only people with enough man-power and freedom to rebel (“If there is hope, it lies in the proles”), foreshadows the futility of Winston’s rebellion.

Rebellion and Hope

Without Winston’s desperate hope for freedom, the novel would have been a predictably bland one, as Winston would have just blindly followed Big Brother like his fellow citizens. Instead, we get to see how Winston’s hope for freedom motivates him to rebel in ways, which deep down he knew he would be caught for, but desperately hoped he would be able to get away with. Winston was aware of the paradox that,

as a dead man it became important to stay alive as long as possible

In fact, Winston clings to the hope that the Brotherhood and its supposed leader Goldstein exists, even though he is perfectly aware that the Party fabricates news and narrative to affirm their regime.

[Winston’s] heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen, sole guardian of truth and sanity in a world of lies.

The metaphor, “his heart went out”, emphasises Winston’s humanity and empathy, which continually skews his judgement throughout the novel. So much so, that Winston buys multiple banned items (a coral paperweight, furniture, even renting a room), is sexually intimate with Julia, and confesses to O’Brien that he wants to join the Brotherhood, even though there was nothing (except for big stretches of his imagination) to suggest that an Inner Party member like O’Brien would rebel or benefit from rebelling.

Ultimately, we learn that Winston’s rebellion was hopeless all along, but it’s interesting to consider whether his fleeting experience of freedom was worth it. Moreover, it reminds us to be politically active and critical to prevent our world from becoming hopelessly controlled like Oceania.

Written by Matrix English Team

© Matrix Education and www.matrix.edu.au, 2023. Unauthorised use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Matrix Education and www.matrix.edu.au with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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All The Light We Cannot See: Quotes and Analysis (HSC & VCE)

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by George Orwell

1984 essay questions.

Compare and contrast Julia and Winston. How does each rebel against the Party, and are these rebellions at all effective?

Trace Winston's path towards destruction. Where do we first see his fatalistic outlook? Is his defeat inevitable?

Discuss the role of technology in Oceania. In what areas is technology highly advanced, and in what areas has its progress stalled? Why?

Discuss the role of Big Brother in Oceania and in Winston's life. What role does Big Brother play in each?

Discuss contradiction in Oceania and the Party's governance, i.e. Ministry of Love, Ministry of Truth, Ministry of Plenty, Ministry of Peace. Why is such contradiction accepted so widely?

Discuss and analyze the role O'Brien plays in Winston's life. Why is he such a revered and respected character, even during Winston's time in the Ministry of Love?

Discuss the symbolic importance of the prole woman singing in the yard behind Mr. Charrington's apartment. What does she represent for Winston, and what does she represent for Julia?

1984 is a presentation of Orwell's definition of dystopia and was meant as a warning to those of the modern era. What specifically is Orwell warning us against, and how does he achieve this?

Analyze the interactions between Winston and the old man in the pub, Syme, and Mr. Charrington. How do Winston's interactions with these individuals guide him towards his ultimate arrest?

Analyze the Party's level of power over its citizens, specifically through the lens of psychological manipulation. Name the tools the Party uses to maintain this control and discuss their effectiveness.

Outline the social hierarchy of Oceania. How does this hierarchy support the Party and its goals?

1984 Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for 1984 is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Describe O’Briens apartment and lifestyle. How do they differ from Winston’s?

From the text:

It was only on very rare occasions that one saw inside the dwelling-places of the Inner Party, or even penetrated into the quarter of the town where they lived. The whole atmosphere of the huge block of flats, the richness and...

What was the result of Washington exam

Sorry, I'm not sure what you are asking here.

how is one put into the inner or outer party in the book 1984

The Outer Party is a huge government bureaucracy. They hold positions of trust but are largely responsible for keeping the totalitarian structure of Big Brother functional. The Outer Party numbers around 18 to 19 percent of the population and the...

Study Guide for 1984

1984 study guide contains a biography of George Orwell, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• 1984 Summary
• Character List

Essays for 1984

1984 essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of 1984 by George Orwell.

• The Reflection of George Orwell
• Totalitarian Collectivism in 1984, or, Big Brother Loves You
• Sex as Rebellion
• Class Ties: The Dealings of Human Nature Depicted through Social Classes in 1984
• 1984: The Ultimate Parody of the Utopian World

Lesson Plan for 1984

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to 1984
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• 1984 Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for 1984

• Introduction

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Course Structure

10 weekly engaging online 1984 Classes

Term 4: Mastering 1984

• Week 1:  Mastering the Rubric & Introduction to Common Module 
• Week 2:  Deep Dive into Context, Summary, and Text-Specific Vocabulary
• Week 3:  Exploring Key Themes & Human Experiences 
• Week 4: Discussing Characters,  Genre and Form + Finding and Analysing a Related Text
• Week 5: Writing Analysis and Developing Your Personal Interpretation + Applying to Related Text
• Week 6: How to Create Your Multimodal Assessment Script and Turn that into Your Common Module Essay for the HSC
• Week 7:  Writing Your Common Module Response 
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• Week 9: How to Answer Unseen Texts Questions
• Week 10: How to Answer Unseen Texts Questions II & Sample Paper

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HSC Texts and Human Experience Sample Essay with Essay Analysis: 1984

Subject: English

Age range: 16+

Resource type: Other

Last updated

25 July 2022

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This is a three-part resource for students undertaking the NSW HSC Common Module Texts and Human Experience.

A generic essay plan shows students how to compose an essay suitable for Stage 6, progressing them from the simpler PEEL/TEAL models of Stage 4 and 5.

A sample essay for the prescribed text, Orwell’s 1984, answers a NESA question for this module.

There is also a second copy of the essay, marked up to show how it follows the plan, and with five short questions which require students to engage critically with the essay and its form.

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HSC Texts and Human Experience Sample Essay with Essay Analysis: 1984

Description

This is a three-part resource for students undertaking the NSW HSC Common Module Texts and Human Experience.

1. A generic essay plan shows students how to compose an essay suitable for Stage 6, progressing them from the simpler PEEL/TEAL models of Stage 4 and 5.

2. A sample essay for the prescribed text, Orwell's 1984 , answers a NESA question for this module.

3. There is also a second copy of the essay, marked up to show how it follows the plan, and with five short questions which require students to engage critically with the essay and its form.

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1984 & Metropolis – Essay

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Resource Description

A small snippet of the essay;

The social, cultural and historical milieu of a composer’s era significantly shapes the construction of their text and the ideals, values and attitudes that they choose to address within it. These influences offer a unique distinction between different texts, however, also highlighting notable commonalities. Fritz Lang’s expressionist silent film, ‘Metropolis’ (1927), can be interpreted as a reaction to the rapidly fluctuating, economically unstable social milieu of Germany during the immediate post WWI era, in which the newly emerged, controversial Weimar Republic gave birth to new individual freedoms and consequent cultural diversity. Lang’s physical depiction of the segregation between the upper and lower classes of Metropolis prompts his audience to question the distribution of power and authority, subtly highlighting the flaws in Germany’s new government system and asserting the need for compassion in the rebuilding of a thriving society. Contrastingly, George Orwell’s dystopian novel, ‘ Nineteen Eighty-Four’ (1949), is a pessimistic vision of the future, responding to the horrific authoritarian regimes witnessed in the years following WWI and during WWII. Orwell provides an unsettling warning of the capacities of dictatorial control systems and their ability to extend control over all aspects of an individual’s life; stifling their freedoms, dignities and morality. Through the comparative study of both texts, we observe an evident series of commonalities and diversities in their construction, contextual influences and explored themes. Furthermore, we discern the fundamental relationship between a text and its contextual origins and how the exploration of similar content in both texts highlights their fundamental significance.

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