Big Brother (Nineteen Eighty-Four)

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Big Brother is a character and symbol in George Orwell's 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. He is ostensibly the leader of Oceania, a totalitarian superstate wherein the ruling party, Ingsoc, wields total power for its own sake over the inhabitants. His image appears everywhere on posters within Oceanian society as a metaphor for the Party's complete control of the population. Orwell was deeply concerned with the rise of totalitarianism in the 1930s and 1940s, particularly in Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany and Poland and wrote his novel as a warning about the potential of a totalitarian leader destroying objective truth. In the novel, the slogan "Big Brother is watching you" serves as a constant reminder that Party members in Oceania are not entitled to privacy. They are subject to constant surveillance to ensure their ideological purity. This is primarily through omnipresent telescreens, two-way video devices used for broadcasting propaganda and for spying on individuals by...

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