The Uncanny Similarity

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Ayn Rand’s We The Living at first glace are not books that one would expect to be able to compare. Nineteen Eighty-Four is set in a parallel dimension where it is the year 1984 and London is ruled by a government known as Ingsoc (Orwell, 8), whereas We The Living is set in revolutionary Russia, at the height of the Communist’s power in the year 1922 (Rand, 12). However, because of the nature of human beings, the allegorical story of Nineteen Eighty-Four and the semi-fictional We The Living have more similarities than it seems. Both are constantly faced with a tyrannical government that knows their every move and is an insurmountable force. Both books have a love interest that for one reason or another, end up dying as a direct result of the protagonists’ actions. Both books even have a similar song that runs through the stories, which foreshadow events that eventually lead to the protagonists’ demise. Both stories are tragedies in that the main characters end up dying at the end, as do most of their friends and family. The authors of Nineteen Eighty-Four and We The Living had most likely never met, but the similarity between their stories tells the world an important lesson—that the human spirit triumphs over every difference, and everything set against it, tyrannical government, torture, or even death.

The main character of Nineteen Eighty-Four is a man named Winston Smith. He is neither young, nor handsome, which immediately makes this story different from any other like it. The protagonist is not an action-hero, but a simple man like any other his age. “Winston was thirty-nine… a smallish, frail figure... His hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razorblades” (Orwell, 7). Similarly, the protagonist in We The Living is a young woman by the name of Kira Argounova who could not be called beautiful in the traditional sense, but her body has a certain beauty in its construction. “She had a calm mouth and slightly widened eyes with the defiant, enraptured, solemnly and fearfully expectant look of a warrior” (Rand, 11). She is eighteen years old (Rand, 15). Both protagonists feel isolated because neither of them believe in the government set in power, Winston because of the fact it is tyrannical and changes the past to control the future (Orwell, 239), and Kira because it is also tyrannical and running the country into the ground (Rand, 12). And when one feels like they are being opposed, the natural reaction is to rebel against it. Winston does this by writing anti-government statements in a diary he bought off of the black market, which snowballs into much greater and riskier transgressions such as meeting a woman in her late twenties by the name of Julia whom he falls in love with—something that doesn’t appear to be much of a rebellion, but in reality, was a crime punishable by death. “This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonable certain that it would be punished by death, or at least twenty-five years in a forced labour camp” (Orwell, 11). Kira, on the other hand, is much more open about her rebellion, but at the same time, must concede many of her ideals because otherwise she will starve to death. “ ‘I… you see…’ Kira knew it wiser to explain. ‘I’m working and very active socially in our Marxist Club.’ ‘So? You are, are you? We know you bourgeois. All you’re active for is to keep your measly jobs. You’re not fooling anyone’” (Rand, 191). It is on the basis of tyranny, near-starvation and the outrage that the human spirit feels that both of the books, and the events therein, are written.

The government of Ingsoc is one that is very different from most revolutionary powers. Most revolutionary powers do not claim to do things they have not done, been places they have never been, or invented things that were obviously invented before the party was even founded, yet the government of Ingsoc does all of these things.

Often she Julia was ready to accept the official mythology because the difference between truth and falsehood did not seem important to her. She believed, for instance, having learnt it at school, that the Party had invented aeroplanes. (In his own schooldays, Winston remembered, in the late fifties, it was only the helicopter that the Party had claimed to have had invented. (Orwell, 136)

Because of the apathy that the citizens of Oceania feel towards the true past, it is easy for the government to keep a stranglehold on their citizens and their obedience toward the greater ‘good’. The Soviet government in We The Living does not go to such ends to achieve their goal—they are not nearly as intellectual in their take-over of the country. They relied on eloquence and sheer number to get into power, and rely on near-starvation and brainwashing to keep in power. They force everyone to work, and on the hours they are not working, they spend standing in line to get food at the Co-operative, or memorizing figures and statistics to save them from the next Party purge. “She Kira would not allow herself to reach the state of Comrade Nesterova, an elderly guide who had been a school teacher for thirty years. Comrade Nesterova, between excursions, school classes, clubs, and cooking for a paralysed mother, spent all her time reading the newspapers, memorizing every item word for word, preparing herself for the next examination” (Rand, 311). The governments may go about their goals in different ways, but their aim is the same—the complete control of all human actions within the state, a totalitarian police state.

One of the most difficult things to control in a totalitarian environment is love. Humans naturally feel affection for each other, and want to care and nurture for one another. The government recognizes this and makes attempts to stop this, but it does not always work. “The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and women from forming loyalties which it might not be able to control. Its real, undeclared purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act… The only recognized purpose of marriage was to beget children for the service of the Party” (Orwell, 60). However, because it is one of the most difficult things to control within people, it is not surprising that both Winston and Kira have lovers in the novels they are in. Winston is in love with a woman named Julia, who ends up being killed because the Party catches both of them while they are in their secret hideout over a proletarian shop. “ ‘The house is surrounded,’ said the voice. He heard Julia snap her teeth together. ‘I suppose we may as well say good-bye,’ she said” (Orwell 189). Similarly, Kira loves someone in We The Living. Her love is a man named Leo Kovalensky whom she meets when she moves to Petrograd. Leo, in the story, inevitably gets sick with the long hours he is working in the bitter cold and the malnutrition that almost every Russian went through during the revolutionary times. Kira tries to get him into a sanatorium in the Crimea, where they will feed him properly and allow him rest to get better, but because he was the son of someone the government deemed bourgeois, the officials are unsympathetic. “The Comrade Commissar said: ‘One hundred thousand workers died in the civil war. Why—in the face of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics—can’t one aristocrat die?’” (Rand, 216). Because Kira cannot afford to send Leo south, and because he will surely die if he remains in Petrograd, she decides to get the money by less-conventional means. There is a man by the named of Andrei Taganov—a Party member—whom she knows is madly in love with her. He is not a bad man, and does not agree with many of the things that the Party is doing now, and he and Kira are good friends. Kira begins to sleep with him and have a mock-relationship with him, while he is unaware of Leo, and his money is furnishing his trip to the Crimea. Andrei showers Kira with everything she could ever want or ask for, while in the meantime, Kira pretends to love him. When she finally tells him that she does not love him and what she has done with the money, his heart is deeply broken, and he takes his own life. “Then he turned, and took a piece of paper from the drawer and wrote: ‘No one is to be held responsible for my death.’ And signed: ‘Andrei Taganov.’ There was only one shot, and because the frozen marble stairway was long and dark and led to a garden buried deep in the snow, no one came up investigate” (Rand, 411). Leo does find out what Kira has done, and informs her of his plans to leave her to go on a vacation with an older woman to Causcasus, but only for the older woman’s money. Kira is broken-hearted and asks him whether or not he had planned to do this before he found out about Andrei. He says yes. “ ‘Leo, when did you tell her that you’d go with her?’ ‘Three days ago.’ ‘Before you knew anything about Andrei and me?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘While you still thought that I loved you?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And that made no difference to you?’ ‘No.’ ‘If Syrerov had not come today, you’d still go with her?’ ‘Yes, only then I’d have to face the problem of telling you’” (Rand, 424). In the end, the government has indirectly or directly taken both of their lovers from them, and they end up alone.

Music is a large part of any good government’s propaganda. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, there is even a propaganda week called Hate Week in which a special secular hymn is composed just for the occasion. The aim of this hymn, called The Hate Song is to drive the listener into such a frenzy of rage that it is terrifying to all. “The new tune which was to be the theme song of hate week (the Hate Song, it had been called) had already been composed and was being endlessly plugged on the telescreens. It had a savage, barking rhythm which could not exactly be called music, but resembled the beating of a drum. Roared out by hundreds of voices to the tramp of marching feet, it was terrifying” (Orwell, 131). Music is important to all aspects of the life, so it should be no surprise that there are several songs in both books which run through the entire novel and foreshadow events to come. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the most important song is the children’s rhyme about the church bells in London “Oranges and lemons say the bells of St. Clement’s…” (Orwell, 89) and the song that was made up for the novel, “Under the spreading chestnut tree”(Orwell, 70). Both of these songs are present within various points in the novel, most of them with some foreshadowing element to the plot, and at the end, there are revelations that have to do with both of these songs. The first revelation is that the kindly elderly shopkeeper, Mr. Charrington, is actually a much younger member of the Thought Police. “And then, another quite different voice, a thin, cultivated voice which Winston had the impression of having head before, struck in; ‘And by he way, while we are on the subject, “Here come a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head”!’” (Orwell, 189). The other revelation that comes as a result of the song about the chestnut tree is just how long the Thought Police have been watching him. The song is introduced quite early on in the book, and it is only in the final pages that we make the connection between the chestnut tree in the song and The Chestnut Tree Café, which is both a real location, and a hallucination of Winston’s at the end of the book before he is killed. “He was overwhelmed by a desire not so much to get away from Julia as to get back to the Chestnut Tree Café, which had never seemed so attractive as at this moment… And then—perhaps it was not happening, perhaps it was only a memory taking on the semblance of sound—a voice was singing: ‘Under the spreading chestnut tree / I sold you and you sold me—’” (Orwell, 252-53). Likewise, there are several songs called The Song of Broken Glass, Internationale, John Gray and Song of the Little Apple in We The Living, which always seems to be around at important times during the novel. When Kira is walking through the snow towards her impending death, she hears a song in her mind. “Then she heard a song, a tune not loud enough to be a human sound, a song as a last battle-march. And it was not a funeral dirge, it was not a hymn, it was not a prayer. It was a tune from an old operetta, the ‘Song of Broken Glass’” (Rand, 445). Both characters hear songs throughout the entire novel, and yet neither make the connection to the foreshadowing until the last time they hear the songs—and in both situations, the songs are not actually being played, but that are remembering the songs in their minds.

Both Nineteen Eighty-Four and We the Living are tragedies because the main characters end up dying. How they deal with their impending fate is a lot different between the two books. Winston, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, is always aware of the fact he will die at the hands of the government, and he accepts this as a part of everyday life. “You were the dead, theirs the proletarian’s was the future… ‘We are the dead,’ echoed Julia dutifully” (Orwell, 188). He never once questions the fact that he will die, and when he ends up in the Ministry of Love, he is not surprised in the least, only that the manner in which he was captured was so unexpected. He is actually happy when he dies: “He was walking down the white-tiled corridor, with the feeling of walking in sunlight, and an armed guard at his back. The long hoped-for bullet was entering his brain” (Orwell, 256). In Ingsoc, no one lives in fear of death, or tries to prevent it if it should come by any governmental means, but very few actually make an attempt to live—to be more than a walking corpse, computing things for the government, having any independent thought. In We The Living, the case is quite different. This could be because the government does not have nearly the totalitarian control that the one in Nineteen-Eighty Four­ does. In We The Living, Kira does not know she is going to die—there is still a hope for her to go on to something better, something that they referred to as abroad. The characters in We The

Living know that it is possible for them to die, but they do not think of it as a definite, inescapable sentence. “She felt suddenly as if the words of his answer were the links of a chain she would never be able to break: ‘It’s also possible for every one of us to have to face a death sentence some day. Does that mean we have to prepare for it?’” (Rand, 266). Kira knows that her only hope for a life better than the one she leads, the one of starvation and cruel slavery at the hands of the Red government, is to go abroad somehow. When her foreign passport application is rejected, she decides to do something very dangerous, to cross the border illegally into the Latvian border. Even as she sits on the train, going to where she needs to begin her long walk to the border, she does not think of the fact that she may die doing this—she still has hope. “She was not dead. She was only waiting to be born” (Rand, 435). Inevitably, as she tries to cross the border, she is shot. Similar to when Winston is shot in the Ministry of Love, Kira is also happy when she dies, although she does not realise it until the last moment that she actually is indeed dying. “She smiled. She knew she was dying. But it did not matter any longer. She had know something which no human words could ever tell and she knew it now. She had been awaiting it and she had felt it, as if it had been, as if she had lived it… Life, undefeated, existed and could exist” (Rand, 446).

The common theme in these two books is that of the indissoluble human spirit. Both books represent a triumph that only comes when humans overcome the adversity and tyranny and actually live life, rather than going through it existing. It represents the moment of epiphany when these characters actually come to terms with all that surrounds them, and the answers are given to them. These books represent the pinnacle of human existence, that moment of self-actualization. Unfortunately, these characters have to go through a veritable hell to get to this point, and have this epiphany moments before death. These books also send a warning to the governments and peoples of today, that of totalitarianism and police state control. We must heed these warnings or go down the same path outlined for us in these novels.