Winston Smith Individualism

Having fought against the fascist regime during the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell found himself astounded and distressed by the sheer volume of his contemporaries that so easily accepted Stalin’s totalitarian dictatorship. The focus of the novel, the character Winston Smith, seeks to demonstrate the importance of maintaining a balance between internalising individualism with oneself and conforming with the ideals of a society which seems absurd. As a social democrat, Orwell placed great emphasis on the democratic part of his ideology and set out to warn others of the true reality which might occur when ideology begins to supersede ethics or truth. With reference to the statement made by Orwell about his novel, ‘I do not believe that the …show more content…
His political views were widely shaped by his experiences of totalitarianism and socialism in the countries in which he both worked and lived. In his essay Why I Write he acknowledged that ‘Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly against Totalitarianism and for Democratic Socialism, as I understand it’ . Set in a hideously desolate and repressive future world, Orwell’s dystopian society created and depicted in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four represents an oligarchy which has scrupulously and rigidly eliminated the fundamental values of an autonomous and democratic society. During a period of time when much of the western world was celebrating communism, as a step towards progress in the development of government equality, Orwell distinctively and clearly spoke out against this practice. Through his creation of a totalitarian dystopia Orwell thus gave the world a glimpse of what might happen if it continued to laud over communism. As evidenced by its ability to break even an independent thinker such as Winston Smith, the novel shows how completely unflawed the party is in its total and universal control over