Themes+and+purpose.

Lord Acton’s comment: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely”, can be compared with O’Brien assuring Winston that a picture of the future is, “a boot stamping on a human face - forever.” Orwell’s message is very clear: totalitarian governments are only interested in maintaining power for themselves; they have no interest in the well-being of their citizens. However, Orwell clearly stated on more than one occasion, that //Nineteen Eighty-Four// was a satire, a parody, not a prophecy of the future. In his //The Novel Now,// Anthony Burgess writes: “It is possible to say that the ghastly future Orwell foretells will not come about, simply because he has foretold it; we have been warned.” That is what //Nineteen Eighty-Four// is primarily: a warning against allowing governments to have too much power. This warning is as valid today as it was when Orwell wrote his book in 1947-8. It is interesting to note how often Orwell’s work is misunderstood; perhaps because of a reader’s political position, or perhaps because, as T. S. Eliot puts it, “humankind cannot bear very much reality”. Some people say that //Nineteen Eighty-Four// is no longer relevant because the Berlin wall has come down and communism is a spent force. But it is clear that Orwell was not attacking the left or the right. He was attacking any government that sought to take over complete power. Orwell would include those who increase their powers of surveillance and arrest in the name of security. There are other themes in the book concerning the nature of law, language, family life and so on, but all are subordinated or contribute to the main theme: the danger to the individual, and to basic human decency, of an all-powerful oligarchy.