1984 - Imagery

"He looked around the canteen. A low ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of innumerable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close together that you sat with elbows touching; bent spoons, dented trays, coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy, grime in every crack; and a sourish, composite smell of bad gin and bad coffee and metallic stew and dirty clothes," (59).

Imagery is definitely one of the most noticeable aspects of this novel. Every new place was described in perfect detail with nothing left unmentioned. This is a crucial component to fully understanding the novel and what this totalitarian world was like. With George Orwell's frequent descriptions and attention to detail, the reader is truly in Oceania seeing what the characters are seeing. It provides a better foundation to understand how drastically different this new world is from what used to be. The descriptions always depict a dirty, rundown area. Everything feels gloomy and almost sickly. This also coincides with the differences in people as well as with these previously stated differences in the two worlds. People used to have more life, more freedom, more happiness. Now they lived in a world of gloom but were too brainwashed to know any better. They all just accepted the way things were.