Room 101 Revisited: The Reconciliation of Political and Psychological Dimensions in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four

As a political allegory against totalitarianism, Nineteen Eighty-Four is in the company of such great documents of twentieth-century humanism as Huxley’s Brave New World and Camus’s The Plague. Yet Nineteen Eighty-Four is unique in its achievement of what has rarely been attempted before, and not accomplished even by Camus or Huxley — the successful meshing of a consistent allegorical structure with a psychologically plausible, realistic texture.