Blog #1: Theme (Book#2)

* What is the major theme of this novel? Why is this theme important to a teenager living in 2007?

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work. Theme of the 1984 is psychological manipulation. Throughout the novel 1984, the theme of mind control keep appears through readers’ mind. The party controls people’s mind. Party changes history, and makes new words. For example, Ministry of Truth controls the history. Winston Smith changed the news about 30 gramme of chocolate reduction to 30 gramme of chocolate increased. Just like this quote," Who controls the past, controls the future, who controls the present, controls the past”(page 32), shows that the Ministry of Truth is manipulating people’s mind. After the change has made, everybody believed it. Moreover, there is ministry that controls over dictionary. What it does is very simple; eliminate the words that have negative meanings. For example, if I am the ruler of one country and I do not want people to rebel against me, I can eliminate all the words that are related to rebellion. Let’s assume that my people said “I hate David, he is very bad leader, and it is not fair for us.” And If I eliminate the words such as hate, bad, and unfair, and replace it with positive meanings, than my people will not rebel against me since they do not know what words to say. Therefore, this theme of mind control is very important to teenagers living in 2008. These days’ teenagers seem to depend on the media too much. The society in the novel 1984 has very highly developed technology such as tele-screens, microphones, and other machines those track humans’ thoughts. What I want to say is that what you see on TV is not always true. Just like quote from i-Robot, “If you guys are relying to us, you are controlled by us." If we depend on the technology too much, we will be controlled by technology just like society in 1984. Society in 1984 is not far away!