HISTORY LOOKS INTO FUTURE: NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR: FICTION OR REALITY?

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to review the literature on Nineteen Eighty-Four published in the decade of 1980s. The aim is to revisit the novel and its author from the perspective of political developments in 1980s. In 1949, George Orwell made vivid imagination of the future political system of the world in his classic political fiction of the 20th Century Nineteen Eighty-four, a novel that unleashed a debate among academia on its prophecies and interpretation. Its language felt deeply by the masses; its ideas used to define Cold War actors and its impact was visible in popular journalism and in literary writings. Orwell was among the few memorable writers who had made an eternal mark on English Literature. Is Nineteen Eighty-Four a master piece political literature of the 20th Century? What message George Orwell intended to convey to the readers? And who is the addressee of the novel, socialist state or capitalist world? Is it a prophecy of the decade of the 80s? Critiques are preoccupied with these questions to resolve the mystery which still surrounds the novel. The literary response to this novel holds public interest until today that made the novel an all-time best seller. No doubt Orwell has earned name as the most powerful writer and satirist of the twentieth century the author, the environment in which he wrote and the novel are examined by scholars from time to time. The most unique feature of the novel is that it maintains confusion in the minds of its readers that for whom this novel is about. And what circumstances motivated Orwell to produce such a political fiction.