1984 Personal Response Essay

Fear is something all humans share. This unity of having fear connects all of us together, along with many other things. Fears themselves are not universal, and every human may have different fears. In the novel 1984 written by George Orwell many common fears are brought into perspective, many of which I can say I fear myself. While the question asked for the implications of the ending, for me to fully understand the ending I must start from the beginning. The concern about the truth of history and truth of the past, that the people in power are always watching you, and not being allowed to have real emotions except towards the government are all fears brought on in the novel, especially with the implications of the ending. As much as it sounds odd, our past is very much so in our present. The newspaper, the television news, our high school social studies classes, our casual conversation about things that have already happened, our textbooks, and many other things that are a part of our lives are the past. The fear here is what if all that past is just an ever changing lie? To add on to this, even if you know it’s a lie you can not even prove it for there is nothing for you to compare the lie to, since everything is a lie in this respect. Also, what happens when you die? Your name can just be erased from history and thus you are erased. The possibility that no one knows you exist or existed is quite fearful. We, or at least I have always regarded the past as the truth and now this novel as put a wavering in my trust, sending a hint of doubt and fear in everything associated with the past. More than ever “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU”. The cookies you leave from surfing on the web, the call history log on your phone, the microphone and camera that are the phone in everyone’s pocket, all leads to a sheer lack of privacy. I am not saying that these things are actually being used to create individual profiles of everyone in some secret government agency, but the