Radical dystopia: The comic modernism of George Orwell's <i>Nineteen Eighty‐Four</i>

Abstract The present essay turns the received view of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty‐Four on its head, arguing that Orwell's dystopian classic mobilizes the modernist techniques of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land to lampoon the ideological fatalism of Eliot and other cultural conservatives. Via a painstaking close reading of the puns and other literary devices that Orwell makes use of, the essay shows how the plot of the novel amounts to an example of doublethink in practice, inviting the reader to see through the limited point of view of Winston Smith that is being satirized throughout. Such a view of the novel makes evident that Orwell's dystopian story is fully consistent with his socialist vision that recognizes the faux‐revolutionary pathos of Winston as little but a bad joke.