061009 Orwell Introduction

Semi- Generic Introduction Example: (In response to the question below)

You should try to use most/ all of 'Despite Winston's belief that it is inevitable that he and Julia will be captured, readers these strategies! are surprised by the brutal ending of Nineteen Eighty-Four.' response:

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1949 with the horrors of World War II still fresh in the minds of the novel’s original readership. Descriptions of life in this futuristic London, now ‘Airstrip One’ are unrelentingly bleak for the proles and even most of the Party members; the only luxuries are reserved for the Inner Party and a black market in commodities like real coffee. The images of the novel’s first page ‘Victory Mansions’ (the name itself doubly ironic) with the ‘swirl of gritty dust’ and the pervasive smell of ‘boiled cabbage and old rag mats’ would have been familiar to any Londoner living through the winters of reconstruction and rationing that persisted until the early 1950s. In this grim setting unfolds an even grimmer story, punctuated by the love between Julia and Winston and the hope, though faint (and possibly orchestrated by the Party anyhow), of rebellion and an overthrow of the perfect system of totalitarian rule: Ingsoc. While it might be natural to hope for a miraculous turnabout, a heroic act that will make Winston the hero and unite the lovers, the brutal ending of the main narrative should come as no surprise to a perceptive reader. The novel has foreshadowed both Ingsoc’s strength and Winston’s fears and weaknesses. Indeed, Winston seems to know his fate from the first chapter, realising that “sooner or later they were bound to get you.” Orwell’s grim narrative is only possibly balanced or countered by a hope that lies in the Appendix of the novel: a discussion of the future world’s vocabulary that, in its use of the past tense seems to indicate that the reign of the Party has ceased. This was not a novel designed to cheer up Britain and congratulate the people for their part in winning the war. This was a novel to show that a state of unending violence would be the most effective way to suppress the human spirit; a warning that the future could in O’Brien’s words be: ‘…a boot stamping on a human face -- for ever.’ See if you can fill out the essay plan for the rest of this essay Paragraph 1:

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