A Study On Dehumanization Under The Totalitarian Regime Of Oceania In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four

Nineteen Eighty-Four, an extraordinary achievement, is Orwell’s last and most ambitious work. The novel has received flooding controversial criticism since its publication. The novel is a typical political fable, and therefore has drawn momentous criticism from the perspective of politics, in particular in the early stage after the novel was published. Some critics biased in ideology even treat it as a tool to attack socialism. Detached from political preference, this thesis tries to approach it by treating human beings as a whole, in order to reveal the risk of falling into totalitarian regime, which, once established, perpetuates its absolute power while destroying humanity to the utmost.This thesis gives a detailed delineation of how the all-powerful Party in Oceania employs controlling tools typical of totalitarianism as well as updated technologies to ensure its totalitarian control and thus completely destroys the last vestige of humanity in the society. Firstly, borrowing Foucault’s theory of disciplinary technology, which is mainly realized with the panoptical structure and punishment, this thesis exposes how the Party envelops the society in a state of terror by combining panoptical control and cruelty in punishment, revealing the pervasive and humanity-destructive nature of the totalitarian regime in Oceania. Next, probing into the Newspeak programme and the practice of reshaping history in the fictional state, the thesis explains how the Party brings totalitarian propaganda methods into full play and chills the hope for retaining the consciousness of humanity.After close reading of the dehumanizing process delineated in the novel, it is able to find not only a dehumanized society but also a pessimistic future in Nineteen Eight-Four. Through the study of the realization of totalitarian control with the designed mechanisms and technologies, it is also able to trace its reverberation in the real world which is just what the thesis targets at:to reaffirm the novel as a warning against totalitarianism, which, if not fought against while humanity still remains, could triumph anywhere.