this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2026
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I dropped it about halfway through. I'm sure at the time it was bold, but today you can find totalitarian regimes reshaping society unrecognizably in an average YA romance novel. I got tired of it explaining how awful the depicted world was when I got it the first time. Basically no plot was happening at all. Just one long, establishing scene setting up the world as Winston did his 9 to 5.
I read some summaries about the later parts enough to write a report on it. So I knew that (Spoilers ahead) eventually he starts attempting to rebel beyond sneaking out to hire a prostitute once. But he doesn't really accomplish anything significant before getting captured and converted, because the entire point of the book is to show how awful that potential future is supposed to be, meaning of course the characters don't need real agency.
The lesson it's trying to explain is pretty obvious to anyone with basic familiarity with history around WWII. Of course we shouldn't let governments get enough power to establish a police state that can preempt rebellion. They will use propaganda to rewrite even recent events, establish a bogeyman enemy to blame any problems in society on, change what terms and values are acceptable, and otherwise control every aspect of their populations' lives. Obviously, some people need to hear that, but it was mind-numbing to listen to someone use a boring dystopia to argue for something you already agreed with. It was nearly as unsubtle and anvilicious as Fahrenheit 451.
How do you feel about Bradbury's claim that it was less about a totalitarian state than a condemnation of the effects of mass media?
If we're still talking about 1984, then from what I read I would still say it was meant to cover a totalitarian state as a whole. We get to see the Ministry of Truth the most because that's the department Winston works at, and controlling what information the populace receives is certainly important for the state. But there are other implicit criticisms to the society's structure that aren't really related to just media.
And if anything, I think we could only read a criticism of government-controlled media from the book. We can't infer if Orwell has a problem with private media when it doesn't feature at all in the story. And personally, I would say a free press serves as a check against the descent into this kind of society by informing the public about their government. Private media has its own agendas, but at least it's only incentivized to lie when there's a profit motive.
If you mean Fahrenheit 451, then yeah, I agree he focusses on media. The government is still tyrannical, but other abuses are smaller than in 1984 and are more in the background compared to their focus on eliminating media they didn't control. It mostly cares about hitting you on the head that burning books is what the bad guys do.
Also spoilers ahead here.
I've read it, and i completely agree. The plot is quite sluggish, and after i was finished reading, i wished that i would have dropped it halfway through. The last third, is basically graphic descriptions of torture. And i wouldn't have needed that to get the point of the book. I don't need a happy ending. This isn't what the book is about. But i also don't want 150 pages of literal torture.