1984 George Orwell Analysis

The letter was written as an answer by George Orwell. His answer was to the question “whether totalitarianism, leader-worship, etc., are really on the up-grade, given that they are not apparently growing in England and the USA.” This question and answer was asked and replied to three years before he wrote 1984.

The audience for this letter is presumably the person who asked the question and maybe others who would be curious to see his answer (presuming they saw the question that was asked). The purpose of this letter seems quite obvious. The text is meant to be a reply to a fans question. The question and answer could have been one of the main reasons that Orwell decided to write 1984. Due to the fact that he must have thought that the question
He writes “I must say I believe, or fear, that taking the world as a whole these things are on the increase.” Which shows the reader his feelings towards a totalitarianism and the current global situation. “All the national movements everywhere, even those that originate in resistance to German domination, seem to take non-democratic forms, to group themselves round some superhuman fuhrer (Hitler, Stalin, Salazar, Franco, Gandhi, De Valera are all varying examples) and to adopt the theory that the end justifies the means. Everywhere the world movement seems to be in the direction of centralised economies which can be made to ‘work’ in an economic sense but which are not democratically organised and which tend to establish a caste system. With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer.” This extremely long quote shows his use of logos. He takes the example of people looking for a fuhrer (in this case because of the time period he uses Hitler) and thinks logically about why people follow people like him and what exactly he believes logically will happen and is happening to the
there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted”, “Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, aballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another”. In these two quotes he shows logos in the sense that logically he believes that there is no such thing as ‘one true’ history because logically each person from different countries would have their own versions and their own history. For example, there would be nothing in German history about the Russian revolution because it did not affect them. The second half of the second quote shows his use of pathos a lot more than logos because he uses the words “I am afraid” which show the reader again his emotions. However, the first half he thinks logically about what could happen if Hitler won that he could change the history about who started the war because he would have been the leader and like he believes people move towards a leader to help them with what to think and do