Symbolism in Orwell's 1984

V.S. Pritchett (124) contends that George Orwell's 1984 "is a book that goes through the reader like an east wind, cracking the skin, opening the sores." Though relatively simple, this novel is nevertheless filled with a number of symbols that underscore Orwell's central thesis - that totalitarian societies create lives that are not worth living and that the moral corruption of absolute political power is inevitable in a totalitarian system. This brief essay will examine a number of the key symbols used by Orwell to explicate this thesis.

The basic framework of the novel's plot is said by Pritchett (124) to be straightforward. In 1984, Winston Smith, a civil servant and Party member in the English Totalitarian State, develops political doubts, drifts into rebellion, is detected after a short period of happiness with a female Party member and rehabilitated. Mario Varricchio (98) describes this as a society emptied "of a sense of history and of memory of the past" in which "the emptiness is filled by a host of images of propaganda."

One of the most significant symbols present in the novel is that of the glass paperweight. According to Troy Place (108), "the paperweight symbolizes escape from a self-defeating and unnatural routine, as it represents the suspension of time." Indeed, the literal characteristics of the paperweight suggest suspension of time as well as life. Winston compares the glass to rainwater which implies purity and rebi

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the Party's eye, Big Brother's huge face is to be found everywhere, on stamps, coins, and posters in all streets and buildings." Climbing the stairs of the high rise building in which he lives, Winston must walk past on each landing "one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran" (Orwell 157). The eyes, in the view of Varricchio (99), "are indeed the windows to the soul in Orwell's novel. They can either disclose or conceal new perspectives and are associated with positive or negative meanings according to the different characters and to Winston's capability to see through them." For example, Winston is able to spot the fierceness in the look of Mrs. Parson's children (Orwell 176). At the same time, Winston completely misinterprets the gaze of his interrogator, O'Brien, at the end of the Two Minutes Hate: "momentarily he caught O'Brien's eye. O'Brien had stood up. He had taken off his spectacles and was in the act of re-settling them on his nose�. There was a fraction of a second when their eyes met,� Winston knew� that O'Brien was thinking the same thing as himself" (Orwell 170-171). Just as the eyes of the picture o

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