Final Essay

Alas, this is the last assignment for my Film & Lit Class. I tried to expand on my Response Paper about Orwell and make it more about the way that the formula of fiction is used in Dystopian texts. Enjoy.


How to Tell a Dystopia: How Authors Make the Abstract into the Concrete.

Any dystopian story can be broken down to two basic elements and a simple equation. The elements are opposites – or ay least in opposition – and are also interrelated. Most simply, the elements are these: a controlling society, and a protagonist who is flawed in some fundamentally human of way. The equation is just as simple: controlling society + human protagonist = dystopian exploration of a contemporary society. Virtually every dystopian tale of any note or worth is explained away with this formula, from 1984 to Fahrenheit 451 this formula has been used without fail to tell the Dystopian tale. The reasons for this are not complicated: this formula is both simple and effective.

Simplicity of story is of particular importance in dystopian fiction. Traditionally these are stories of large ideas. The ideas themselves can be complicated and they often ask the reader to confront his or her own preconceived notions of class, social structure, equality, identity, etc. While calling into question everything that the reader believes, it is best to present a plot that is straightforward and engaging. Examples of this abound in all the best fictional dystopian stories. In Orwell’s 1984, Winston finds himself at odds with the totalitarian state. In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the fireman Montag wants to read books instead of burn them, in Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Rick Deckard hunts down renegade cyborgs. These are simple and engaging plots that are used like a Christmas tree. A Christmas tree is just a tree until it decorated. It is simple and common, but (in this metaphor) the storyteller hangs large ideas like ornaments, strings it with incisive language, and at its pinnacle (the climax) the storyteller tops it all with some great and glowing revelation about the real world.

It is important to remember that there is no point in evaluating dystopian fiction without connecting it to contemporary society and issues the reader recognizes. That is to say, the story and society in which it plays out, must wrap around one another in a way that not only furthers the plot, but also furthers (or furthers subversion of) the ideology of that particular dystopia and it much connect back to the reader’s own world and worldview. This is quite a lot to ask of a plot and of a reader. By keeping the plot simple, the storyteller is able to lay down layer upon layer of deeper meaning without losing the audience. This multi-layered dystopian model of storytelling is exemplified in Orwell’s novel 1984. Orwell employs numerous devices (verbal, aesthetic, ideological, etc.) to induce the reader into a particular position relative to the society being described. In this way, Orwell is in fact doing two things simultaneously; he is rendering dual worlds concurrently. In the first world, Orwell is crafting the society in which Winston (his protagonist and everyman-hero) lives. This first world is (as required by the formula) deceptively simple and immediately engaging; the energy of all citizens is directed toward upholding (ideologically) and supporting (through physical labor) the reining government of Big Brother. In creating this first world (the world of the story), Orwell is using his powers as a writer. He renders a world that is grey and cold and dirty. The duality of Orwell’s writing becomes apparent though in the way that he is clearly seeking to evoke emotional reactions that can be linked to political realities. In the second world that Orwell builds (that of the reader), he is playing upon the reader’s preconceptions and, manipulating the reader in such a way that the emotional becomes tied to the social and political. This is the layering on of meaning, the decoration of the Christmas tree, so to speak.

On the very first page of his book, Orwell works to carefully craft a well-thought-out and fully realized dystopian society, but more than that, he immediately connects the visceral to the political. Ever aware of the importance of even the most subtle of language, the author uses the novel’s first sentence to give the reader his first lesson in the sociopolitical reality that is being creating. Orwell wrote, “It was a bright and cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” (Orwell, 5). The pluralization of clock to clocks lends itself to the idea of a communalization of society. The reference is not to Winston’s specific clock, but to all of the clocks of society, striking at once, as if of a single mind and purpose. Additionally, by referencing time as thirteen, Orwell is able to force the reader into making a cognitive connection between military-time and the society in which Winston lives. This first sentence served Orwell’s dual purpose well in that it established Winston’s world, but also provides the reader with a template for how to think about the novel. By immediately connecting the cold April day with the communal clocks, Orwell has bound these two worlds together. In other words, communization (re: Communism) is cold and lonely. However, look at the simplicity of the sentence from the standpoint of plot alone; it is a simple statement. It is easy and engaging, it very well had to be because of the deeper layers of meaning.

Dick does something slightly different in the opening line of Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep but it is similar in purpose, if more complex in style, “A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard” (Dick 3). In this sentence Dick immediately lays out the tone of the novel in the way he describes something simple happening in a complex fashion. Essentially, he just explains how Deckard wakes up. Dick is correctly assuming that every reader will be familiar with alarm clocks and with being waken by them. He takes something as simple (though possibly steeped in deeper meaning) as waking up in the morning and complicates it with technology. By doing this Dick is immediately decorating the Christmas tree with an idea that will become central to the novel (and to the dystopia he creates), mainly that technology is affecting the society and the very existence of the human being. This idea is expanded upon in every page that follows and it is eventually given shape in the androids themselves. Dick is asking the question: if technology is affecting human existence, is it also affecting what it means to be human? Additionally, how does society adjust to this new meaning of ‘human’? In this way, Dick connects the simple to the complex and the singular to the collective, or rather, the individual to the society. Clearly Deckard lives in a dystopia where technology (in the form of an alarm clock/mood organ) is used by the society to control the individual (Deckard). Just as the dystopia in which Winston lives is controlled by the communalism of the clocks.
In some similar way, every dystopian story begins with a small commentary on some benign aspect of the society and how it controls the individual. This is the formula given shape. The society exerts control on the individual. It is then important that the individual (the protagonist) be fleshed out so that the reader can bond with them before they come into direct conflict with the society. That dystopian texts tend to focus on an every-man type character is important for reasons that Fredric Jameson points out in his critique of Thomas More’s Utopia, “The citizens of Utopia are grasped as a statistical population; there are no individuals any longer, let alone any existential ‘lived experience’.” (Jameson 39). Though he was examining the utopia texts, Jameson identifies that which is most important in the telling of dystopias, mainly, the human element. Jameson goes on to explain that in utopias, the individual is, “cast in the mode of a kind of anthropological otherness, which never tempts us for one minute to try to imagine ourselves in their place, to project the utopian individual with concrete existential density, even though we already know the details of his or her daily life.” (39)

Here Jameson is almost crying out for the kind of exploration of humanity that is central to dystopian stories. The informed reader is left to wonder, then, would 1984 be as seminal a work of dystopia if it were not for the doomed love story of Winston and Julia? Would Dick’s novel be nearly as effective in evaluating identity and race if it were not grounded in the reality of Deckard’s marriage (remember that Deckard is hunting the androids so that he can afford an artificial animal for his wife)? Here again is the narrative formula at work: controlling society + human protagonist = dystopian exploration of a contemporary society.

It is plainly apparent that Orwell is writing in response to the spread of Communism and his novel is diffusing abstract ideology into concrete reality. Big Brother does not tolerate Winston and Julia’s affair because it is a betrayal to the centrality of purpose and communalism of the society. By connecting the abstraction of Communism to the destruction of love, Orwell makes a statement about Stalinism that is clearer and more effective than if he had analyzed Marxist theory directly. Dick uses the same tactic in his exploration of society. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep was published at the end of the turbulent 1960s and as such, it is somewhat more complex, though only because Dick was hanging more ornaments on his metaphoric Christmas tree. Looking toward the future, though firmly rooted in the issues of the day, Dick dealt with nuclear war, race, identity, and technology but connected them all to the day-to-day banality of earning money.

Both Orwell and Dick made use of the formula in their important works of dystopia for a reason, mainly that it is a simple and effective way to reduce large and abstract ideas to down to familiar realities. In his article, “Orwell on Literature and Society” J.P. O’Flinn asserts, “that the history of the past two hundred years represents the cumulative ability of the written word to sway men’s minds,” (609). No where is this more apparent than in the writings of Orwell and Dick.
It would be easy to categorize these two novels as bold works of simple fiction, but a more clear understanding of how the formula is used and why, has (hopefully been useful. It makes it undeniable that these novels are transcendent works of great purpose that used a formula of fiction to explore the social and political aspects of society in important and relevant ways.



Dick, Philip K.. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. New York: Random House, 1968.
Jameson, Fredric. "The Politics of Utopia". New Left Review Jan-Feb 2004: 35-54.
O'Flinn, J.P.. "Orwell on Literature and Society". College English March 1970: 603-612.
Orwell, George. 1984. New York: Signet Classic, 1950.