O Que Seria Um Winston Smith Feliz? Uma unidade possível para a obra de George Orwell

In spite of the apparently dispersive, fragmentary nature of George Orwell’s life and work, a closer look at them allows for the perception of a certain unity of intention. This unity seems to consist not in a political, social or philosophical commitment, but in an intuition of a structural problem. It is as if in every discussion the matter was always the same. On the other hand, this intuition seems to grow evermore acute, during the course of his life, and one can sense the intensifying of an existential urgency within the political formulation of this problem. One realizes, then, that what is at stake in the totalitarian nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is not so much the world’s political destiny, as the possibility of a man ever being happy in such a world. At the same time, it is also possible to notice the existence of a desire for and an effort of synthesis in his way of treating certain oppositions, that the intellectuals of his time tended to reify and reduce to only one of its terms. Orwell’s work seems therefore to simultaneously present a unity of purpose and a purpose of unity. It is a constant concern for something, the existence of which the men of his time tended to erase and on which the unity of every factor ultimately depended. As a method to understand on what way is it that what is at stake in the various and well-known preoccupations of Orwell is always the same, two of his main points of discussion are analyzed in this work: first, the question of language and, then, the question of freedom. And what is intended by this work is to show, by answering the question “What would make Winston Smith happy?”, what is it that gives unity to the work of George Orwell.