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Comparison Of Aldous Huxley's Nineteen Eighty-Four

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George Orwell also took influence from authors who were active in his own lifetime, such as English author Aldous Huxley. Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four most commonly gets compared to Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World, which was originally published in 1932, seventeen years before Orwell published his own anti-totalitarian work. Comparable to Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World is a dystopian novel in which a political agenda is discussed via a fabricated government. However, while similarities can be drawn, the two differ in their content. In Brave New World, Huxley’s fictional society is controlled by drugs and efforts to distract its citizens who are immersed in a world of technology that could only have been dreamed of at the …show more content…

When read in the past, most would say that the world more closely resembled the existence of A Brave New World, save some specific countries where dictators hold the power in government. In the United States, at least, that point of view has changed in some people’s eyes. After the 2016 election of Donald Trump (or, possibly, during the campaign season), aspects of the United States started to change from Brave New World to Nineteen Eighty-Four. One of the most prevalent themes in Nineteen Eighty-Four is the alteration of facts; Winston struggles with the fact that he, nor anyone else, really knows what is authentically true and what has been fabricated by Big Brother and the Party to make themselves look better and given to the citizens to believe. This can be related to the fact that Donald Trump makes up blatant lies when evidence to the truth can easily be found and brought to light. When he is called out for his lies, however, he claims the truth to be “fake news” or calls “alternative facts” confusing the naive public into knot knowing what is real and what he has manufactured out of his own imagination for them to …show more content…

In the same fashion that he took influence from the writings of other authors before him, authors in the generations after him have done the same. Margaret Atwood, whose novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) has sparked political interest in its recent resurgence much as Orwell’s works have, was inspired by Orwell’s ideologies, mainly those represented in Animal Farm. As previously mentioned, Orwell is no novice at creating dystopian societies, a skill that Atwood, too, shows in The Handmaid’s Tale, the plot of which centers around the handmaids (women) being used strictly for reproductive purposes. The more substantial influence, however, is the use of satire in literature. In Animal Farm, Orwell created a politically satirical society of animals meant to represent the regime under Joseph Stalin, whom he opposed. In The Handmaid’s Tale, however, Atwood used satire for social justices rather than a political agenda, though the two often coincide. Atwood takes a dystopian view of a world in which women are used as objects to keep the population alive and uses it to make readers understand why feminism is needed; if women are not allowed to choose what they are able to do with their bodies, be it abortion or birth control, they will soon only be seen as a means of

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