The Banned ＂Ownlife＂ in George Orwell's 1984

Abstract

This paper suggests that the dystopian genre of George Orwell's 1984 centers around the social evil of destroying the sanctity of human privacy, above all. Accordingly, deviated from the general critical trend about this novel that has mostly focused upon the terrifying atmosphere of the dystopian elements, this paper has aimed to combine those past critical points and its new concentration upon the lyrical parts of the novel related to the main thesis of this paper. For its effective argument of this critical view this paper consists of the five parts in total. In Part I the importance of this topic, what Orwell describes as the "Ownlife," is presented and explained; and the general criticisms about the novel are also introduced to bring to the foreground one of the missing and neglected parts hidden behind its dystopian genre. Next, Part II deals with how the topics like free speech, thought, language and truth in the novel are all related to and revolve around the central theme of privacy and individualism, the timeless basis of utopian potential. The next part, Part III, concerns how love, sexuality and all those human feelings are the sacred ground of privacy in Orwell's imagination, which, nevertheless, when neglected, will be fated to be unsafe in front of all those totalitarian, dehumanizing forces around us. The following, Part IV, also suggests the way that love of the particular symbolized by the old bookstore (The junk-shop), is part of Orwell's same, thematic message. Lastly, the concluding part, Par V, in the process of summarizing all the points above, stresses again that such a novel should be read not just as a social satire targeting totalitarian socialism of its extreme type, but also as a classic warning against all those collective, anti-individualistic, dehumanizing forces in a variety of new masks, which all, in Orwell's thought, must impose pain and humiliation upon humanity.