| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中興大學 === 外國語文學系 === 88 === In George Orwell''s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the world Orwell depicted is supposedly divided into three super states. The protagonist, Winston Smith, works in the Ministry of Truth, whose main task is in fact to make up lies, to correct lies, and to erase the historical record and human memory. In the world Winston lives in, two and two does not necessarily make four. Every "truth" has been controlled by the high-tech machine―the omnipresent Big Brother. In the text, many prophecies have their symbolic significance. In the contemporary postmodern world, we are dominated by a culture of simulation that proliferates many illusionary but seemingly real images, just like the mysterious image of Big Brother.
My thesis contains three main chapters. Chapter One deals mainly with the resemblance between Big Brother''s mysterious significance and postmodern hyperreal simulation. In some postmodern debates, people often speak of the crisis in history, representation and narration. We cannot really see the reality but only the media-derived simulation. And in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Big Brother is like that kind of detached media, which dominates history, representation, and narration. Chapter Two is mainly concerned with the romance of Winston and Julia, in which I compare it with the postmodern scene. In addition, in this chapter, I also introduce the postmodern theatric theory to analyze the romance. In Chapter Three, I focus on the main character, Winston Smith, whose rebellious attack on representations resembles some postmodern phenomenon. Besides his deconstructive spirit, Winston''s postmodern tendencies include schizophrenia and nostalgic disposition, coming out of a distorted of non- human freedom and privacy.
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