1984: Style 1 key example

Most of Orwell's fiction seeks to expose power dynamics of varying kinds. In line with this, he is rather heavy-handed about his political message in 1984. Orwell was a socialist, but disagreed vehemently with the repressive features of Soviet communism and Stalinism. He claimed that everything he wrote after 1936 was written "against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism." The novel is thus a way for him to express his fears of what the world would become if the fascist forces of Nazism or totalitarian forces of Stalinism went unchecked.

Although 1984 is certainly a plot-driven work of fiction, it contains many lengthy passages that read as political reflections that belong to the real world of the reader. Orwell takes this especially far in the book, Goldstein's manifesto, of which he includes long excerpts. While these excerpts read, on the one hand, like a parody of communist manifestos and dogmatic texts from the 19th and 20th centuries, they also function like short, somewhat speculative essays on where the world could have ended up if the Nazis won World War II or if Soviet Russia took over more of Europe. Orwell uses this fictional book-within-a-book to lay out his visions of historical developments and the political systems of the 20th century.