1984 Point Of View Analysis

Point of View: 1984 is told through third person limited. In the beginning of the novel, the audience sees Oceania and the Party through Winston’s eyes. We are able to keenly feel his sense of isolation and misery, as a result of this narrative technique the audience is able to relate with Winston and root for him. However, by using third person we are more distanced from Winston than we would be a first person narrator. This creates the feeling of watching someone else, who we see ourselves in, navigate the precarious world of 1984 instead of feeling like we ourselves are navigating it through the eyes of some character. At first the audience identifies with Winston. Like him, we are baffled by Oceanic society and the people able to mindlessly swallow the doctrines of the Party and false information. The audience is off put by this world, we are uneasy because our outside knowledge of the merits of democracy tell us how wrong the Party is. Winston mirrors our unease, though he doesn’t remember exactly what society was like before the Party he comments on the innate sense of perversion of the human spirit in Oceania. Because Winston is so highly rational and able to find the same faults in the Party as the audience, we naturally align ourselves very closely to his character. We want him to uncover the injustices of the
Because we are watching in on Winton and not being fed information through his character, an unreliable narrator is incapable of existing as we are witnessing the events, not being told that they have happened. As a result of this even when Winston departs from rationality and begins to accept the Party’s doctrines, the audience knows he was never initially unable to separate reality from