This book has many scary predictions of how the future really is. Televisions and devices that can see you or hear you in almost every home is a reality we live in. Our phones give access to anyone who wishes to peep through the camera hole. The difference here is that Winston and all others live their lives hyper-conscious of their surveillance and we are unaware.
Another little thing I found fascinating is the moment when Winston said it was hard to get into writing because they never do it anymore, our world is starting to be like this with fewer and fewer people who are able to write. The text-to-speech feature and keyboard typing have created a generation of youngsters who can barely write and studies show it will only get worse
One of my favorite characters in this book is Syme, as I find his character and purpose to be really interesting to me. Despite his total unwavering loyalty to the party, despite his clear usefulness in developing Newspeak, he is killed, due to simply being intelligent. Orwell's inspiration for such a character undoubtedly comes from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union's Great Purge included writers, scientists, and artists in an attempt to suppress intellectual thinking, mainly to control information, maintain ideological control, and eliminate targets that may have criticized or challenged him. Hitler did similar things, mainly targeting Jews or just anybody who opposed Nazi ideology, most famous event I can think of is the book burnings of 1933. These are only the events that inspired Orwell, there have been more recent ones, which is why The Party's suppression of intellectual thought is still an important message today, neat book.
While I liked the overall story of the book and the concepts it introduced when I first read it, I think I had mixed feelings about how it all ended. It cements itself as a cautionary tale about the dangers of totalitarianism, and rightly so, with many of the concepts it explores holding up quite well and becoming terrifyingly relevant in today's societies. I do think that it was a bit anticlimactic at the time however, and think it would have been fascinating to see how Orwell would tackle the inherent obstacle of overthrowing the party. Having Winston, or rather the idea of freedom lose to the Party seems all too easy for Orwell to implement, considering his personal views were very critical of the major totalitarian personalities that existed in the WW2 era at the time .
1984 undergoes this rigorous exercise of unravelling the oppressive nature of the Party and Winston's gradual disassociation from it all, and in my opinion builds up to the natural conclusion that something needs to be done about the Party. O'Brien being a double agent made to catch dissenters was a thrilling twist, but I didn't like that it quashed any hopes for Orwell to explore a post-revolution era. To me, it was already quite clear that the Party was bad, and it didn't need that extra inch of misery at the end to send the message home.