George Orwell's 1984

            Very rarely does an author write a novel that will be remembered for decades after his death. Very few writers are privileged enough to bring up even the slightest controversy over there book. When a writer is able to make the reader think, that is what sets him aside from other authors. This is the case for George Orwell and his famous controversial book, 1984. In his book, Orwell speculates on what he expects the future to be like in the year 1984. He wrote this book in 1949 as a warning to the public about totalitarianism. Orwell believed that if the world began to evolve down the road that it was headed towards, ultimately the world would become the world in his book. To do this Orwell writes about many key topics, topics not easily brought to mind. .
             Have you ever considered where our power to withstand the pressures of conformity comes from? Perhaps it's our power of imagination. How can we expect to imagine and dream if we don"t have the words to express ourselves? This is one of the questions George Orwell asks us in his book. By limiting the number of words we have to express ourselves we are limiting the mental capacity we have to think independently. With out individual ideas we can not change the world, and thus we are forced to believe and do as we are told. As George Orwell wrote it best, "Don"t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it." George Orwell, 1984, Pg. 58. He goes on to elaborate on this thought in his essay THE PRINCIPLES OF NEWSPEAK, "It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought - that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc - should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependant on words." George Orwell, 1984, Pg. 327.