Both the text 1984 and the film V for Vendetta are satires that criticize humanity, society, and individual thought. Orwell and Brothers both make an effort to criticize each of their government’s practice of manipulation. For example, “Ignorance is Strength” sheds light on the oxymoronic messages the government expresses that manipulate their people. It shows that the government wants people to be ignorant and not to second think their actions or what is being fed to their minds, particularly. Thereby, it makes the government superior and in control of what people know about itself, its affairs, and even what they know about themselves.
Nevertheless it is in fact through the authors’ depiction of these characters that they present crucial metaphors for the characteristics of oppression. Both authors can be seen as having negative reactions to contemporary political regimes. Orwell chose to write “1984” in order to reflect the ever growing fear that some Britons held towards their own government, and for the novel to also serve as a warning to society as to the dangers of allowing the reign of an autocratic government. This was due to the rapid rise of dictatorship in the mid twentieth century, in particularly the rise of Stalinism. These surrounding political issues inspired Orwell’s’ perception of authority as he uses a stereotypical male who embodies masculinity, and whose very name connotes that of a dominating and controlling individual.
The novel Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, and the 2002 movie Equilibrium directed by Kurt Wimmer, are in fact, perfect examples of this. Both the book and the movie, use censorship to illustrate a utopian society gone wrong, or in other words, dystopia, in which thinking and feeling are executional crimes. The novel Fahrenheit 451 and movie Equilibrium have comparable characters, themes and settings, and both conclude that forced utopian societies always fail, and that unfortunately there is no “perfect world”. First of all, a comparison can be made between the protagonists, antagonists and secondary characters of the novel and movie. These characters
Utopian and Dystopian texts are heavily influenced by the societies and realities which shape/d their world. Often the context of the composers will be not looked on as ideal in the present, like those ideologies in the 20th Century which sought to create a world at the cost of the rights and freedoms of people. Therefore, these texts demonstrate the consequences of such, and are therefore didactic in purpose. This is apparent in the novel 1984 by Orwell and V for Vendetta by McTeigue as both are allegories of the oppression by government. 1984 is a product of Orwell’s 20th Century context as it reflects the oppression of totalitarian governments of Communist Russia and Fascist Germany.
Scott crafts the future city to look like a hell on earth. The director implies this dystopic world dehumanises its citizens, and therefore the replicants fighting for a future reveal more emotion and will to survive. This view of the city provokes the notion that technology, scientific achievements and media or commerce have infected the earth but there is ‘a golden land of opportunity…’ known as ‘the off world’ and is available to you as long you are perfectly healthy and are not a replicant. Society’s lack of caring for nature is linked to its moral corruption. Deckard’s ‘routine retirement’ of the replicant Zhora shows his coldness, however his voiceover notifies the viewer, that this “didn’t make me feel any better about shooting a woman in the back”.
The Great Gatsby may appear to be a simple tragic romance, however this may not have been the case had the aspect of social status not come into play. Social status, or class, played a large role in corrupting the original idea of the American Dream in the story of The Great Gatsby. With the goal to gain the attention from Daisy Buchanan and the East, Jay Gatsby experiences love, tragedy and moral struggle throughout the novel, resulting in the harsh reality that social class is distinguished by more than just wealth. The Great Gatsby teaches a fine lesson on how money cannot buy happiness and therefore, cannot buy love. In the beginning, very little is known about the life of Gatsby but the reader is quickly introduced to his goal of gaining the attention and ultimate love from the woman which he claims to be
In Miller’s case, his status as a celebrity did not confer immunity from suspicion. Quite the reverse actually. Miller’s repugnance and revulsion at the practices of the House of un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), chaired by the ubiquitous McCarthy, motivated him to pen the novel “The Crucible” as an allegory of that sad epoch. In “The Crucible” Miller skilfully wove together the 17th Century Puritan religious fervour and superstitions with that of America’s hysterical and paranoid suspicion of Communism as the modern day Devil Incarnate in the 1950’s. The forums of suspicion and hatred in which trials were staged left the accused with little recourse to natural justice or legal redress.
Orwell’s perspective as a reluctant and disgusted colonizer shapes his essay’s development, detail and main thesis. The essay’s first-person narrative, causal analysis and the detail it employs obviously produce a powerful condemnation of British colonialism. However, while Orwell briefly lists the obvious abuses of colonialism---the torture of prisoners, the appalling conditions in imperial jails, the destruction of the colonized’s spirit---he focuses his essay’s detail and development on colonialism’s effects on himself as colonizer, how this system causes his degradation and corruption as a human being. He presents his younger self as tormented by his role in this system, but also as someone who has absorbed its racist attitudes. He emphasizes his “intolerable sense of guilt” (313), but also his contradictory hatred of the Burmese, those “evil-spirited little beasts” (314), as well as his callous disregard for the native man killed by the elephant (319).
1. Explain how the characters in William Wells Brown’s novel, Clotel, illustrate an individual’s desire to be free In Clotel or the President’s Daughter, the characters have a tendency to be a great deal too conventional. Brown attempts to place a humane facade on this most vile of American catastrophes in its existence. The propinquity to the stories here are of slave auctions, separation of families, gambling of humans lives, ailing slaves are resold for medical experimentation upon their deaths, suicides and of many more mortifications and brutalities, which no one can accurately describe. In the event of Thomas Jefferson’s death, the novel begins with the auction of Currer, his believed mistress and their two daughters, Clotel and Althesa.
Because of Who They Are One always looks to blame someone for the way that they have chosen to live their lives or for the way they have acted. Such is what occurs in the fiction novel Once in a Promised Land written by Laila Halaby. Halaby’s novel incorporated the ways in which the characters in her novel were either individuals or outcasts of their society and the manner in which culture seemed to affect such relation after the tragic 9/11 events. Each character, such as Jack, Jassim, and Salwa, faced a different problem in society, though all issues seemed to originate from the effects of two cultures colliding, American and Islamic. While two of these characters attempted to make one culture by combining their two cultures, the other