Seeking The Meaning Of Life In The Dehumanized Society

Nineteen Eighty-Four is one of George Orwell's masterpieces. Since its publication, it has attracted wide attention abroad because of its astonishing description of the future. Up to now, many critics have heatedly discussed it from the perspective of dystopian theme and analyzed it from the political dimension.Yet in this thesis, Fromm's humanistic ethnics and psychoanalysis are borrowed to demonstrate how man is deprived of his humanity under the totalitarianism. By identifying the problems like alienation, depressed social unconsciousness, and the abuse of desire for love in the sick society of Oceania, this dissertation intends to show how the despotism harms people's mental health. Through the illustration of Winston's psychic conflicts between the dehumanized society and life expectations, this thesis aims to find out how he becomes a real human being by individual struggle. In the interpretation of his struggle, some topics of Fromm's humanism, like love and freedom will be concerned. Besides, with the support of Holland's psychoanalytic reader criticism, this thesis identifies four themes in Winston's search for meaning of life: innocence and experience, conformity and rebellion, love and creation, living and death. They are all important themes of human existence and they occur in different stages of human life. Today's society is more democratic and humane than what Orwell envisions in Nineteen Eighty-Four, but there still remain conflicts between the social norms and human nature to be solved. The importance of the two approaches to this novel is that it requires us to examine our personal values in the modern world.The Originality of this thesis mainly lies in two aspects. First, the research perspective is new. Although Fromm's theory has been widely discussed, its application to the study of Nineteen Eighty-Four does not touch on this field. Second, scholars of socialist countries like China tend to be sensitive to the content of the fiction, so there are fewer inquiries than that of other works. It is until 1980s that the Chinese version of the book was published. Later, there appeared some studies on it.All in all, this thesis is just an experiment to analyze Nineteen Eighty-Four with the aid of a set of systematic theories. Fromm's ideas are mainly used to decipher people's mental state in a sick society while Holland's theory concentrates on the inner development of human beings.