Oceanian

There were a lot of Oceanian teachers at the English conversation school I went to previously.

Although the proles are on the fringe both of Oceanian society and of the action, it is their values which provide the only warmth in the novel.

Orwell’s point was that the Oceanian government had effectively invented the idea of opposition in order to reinforce the status quo.

The situation for Oceania, which appears as a significant space in the narrative, can be expressed as follows: Though the Party adopts a repressive dictatorship, it never accepts decentralized management so that Oceanian people do not feel colonial.

In order to ensure that the Oceanians do get excited about Big Brother—displace, that is, eroticism from its natural object, another individual, to the State—the Party attempts in every way “to remove all pleasure from the sex act. . . . The only recognized purpose of marriage was to beget children for the service of the Party. Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting operation, like having an enema” (p. 57).

We might suppose that Orwell’s claims about the beliefs of Oceanians are simply implausible: after all, as the little thought experiment I started with demonstrates, we cannot just make ourselves believe on command.

Accordingly, the Ministry behaves in favor of the Party by making necessary amendments and manipulations in mass media to earn the sympathy of Oceanians.