I see it as more like the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe of the late '40s. When I visited Berlin and went to the former Eastern section I could have been on a 1984 set. No one paid much attention to North Korea in 1948.
One of my favorite dystopias.
I would give my right arm for a (non-Party-bowdlerized) in-universe history of the Revolution, the period leading up to it and the early years of the Ingsoc regime.
Also, I assume that religion has actually been eliminated in comparatively few areas. Surely in the former U.S. the various churches have simply been co-opted; the concept of American religious faith being wiped out within one generation completely destroys my suspension of disbelief. Similarly, in Ireland there must be a puppet pope whose bulls harmonize Catholicism with Ingsoc as closely as possible.
I strongly suspect that there are a whole lot of adults on earth who have never read 1984.
Out of interest, it was a prescribed school text for us [Australia 1980s]. Was that the case elsewhere?
I don’t remember for sure about where I was (a couple of private college prep schools in Northeast USA, 1960’s). I know I read 1984, Brave New World, and for that matter Fahrenheit 451; but I can’t remember whether I read any of them in school. And I’d expect that to be variable in the USA: that is, I’d expect it to have been standard in a lot of high schools but not all of them.
No necessarily prescribed, but it was assigned, possibly as one choice of several, both in HS and college (and maybe grade school, too, but I forget. We definitely were assigned Animal Farm in 8th grade).
Whether that means it is a worthy book, or the teachers were lazy, I can’t say. 
Not for us (Ontario, Canada, 1970s), but we were assigned Animal Farm and Brave New World.
Prescribed by whom?
I never had to read 1984 for school, but I did have to read Brave New World in 11th grade English. (I don’t know whose decision it was to read that particular book and the others we read—the teacher? the English department of the high school? the district?)
Another option would be Ira Levin’s This Perfect Day. More like Huxley than Orwell in that the “government” relies on drugs and ignorance than terror and torture to keep the masses in their place, but a dystopia all its own.
Don’t thank me, thank Uni.
There’s also Zamyatin’s WE.
Orwell scholars could explain some things I can’t understand.
Why he made Great Britain/Airstrip One aligned with the Western Hemisphere? At the time of writing, the US had cut off wartime credit to the UK right on schedule, despite reasonable pleas that it was still necessary. (Some speculation was that it was retaliation for voting in Clement Attlee’s Labour, which would have piqued Orwell’s resentment). Yet, as all-powerful the inner party on Insoc seemed, there was no trace of any puppet strings back to Washington or Ottawa.
And there was no mention of the English class system that I can recall. How that fell should have been a significant back-story to tell, because the system has been one of the most resilient in history. Orwell obviously based the image of Big Brother on the Lord Kitchener recruiting poster as much as the cult of Stalin, but otherwise the Old Order is handwaved away.
Oceania also included Australia and southern Africa. It was basically the English-speaking world plus Latin America.
Airstrip One is the third most populous province in Oceania, but London is not the capital, for Oceania has none. This decentralisation enables the Party to ensure that each province of Oceania feels itself to be the centre of affairs, and it prevents them from feeling colonised, for there is no distant capital to focus discontent on.
Working Class = Proles
Middle Class = Outer Party
Upper Class = Inner Party
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
I tend to interpret it as that there may be a bullet at any point in the future and that the indeterminate nature of it was just another aspect of the total control Winston was now subject to; he wasn’t just rehabilitated, he was destroyed then remade in the form that the Party wanted; there’s no reason why the brainwashing would falter, because it was total and inevitable (I feel like that’s part of the message of the narrative)
I’d say yes. Not because it isn’t written in Newspeak, but because of sentences like this:
It was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or Standard English, as we should call it) by about the year 2050.
It was expected. So it didn’t occur at that date. And tjat combined with the constant use of the past tense to describe Newspeak implies it didn’t become so later, either.
As for the other questions: I presumed he wasn’t actually shot, since the allusion at the end ties it up without him being shot, and means he wants to get shot, and Big Brother doesn’t give you what you want. But I can see the other argument.
And, no, I never assumed there was a real Big Brother, And I assumed the specific war they describe wasn’t real. However, I also assumed that they eventually lost a real war, and that is why Newspeak (and thus the Party) didn’t win out in the end.
I know, and said so. But I was responding to this: “its implication that the world of Big Brother and Newspeak has passed into history at the time of writing.”
Never mind the bit about Newspeak having passed into history; I’m asking whether Big Brother passed into history.
I read an analysis years ago that claimed the origin of “Airstrip One” was the US retention airbases in England. Which Orwell interpreted — and bitterly resented — as the US meddling in European affairs.
This isn’t the analysis, but (for what it’s worth) makes the same point.
I took that to mean that O’Brien and the Party in 1984 expected it. The narrator is describing how things looked at the end of 1984, not stating that it never happened by 2050.
Huh. I can’t parse it that way. To me, “was expected” always means that that the expectation didn’t manifest. If someone says “It was expected that Sally would go to jail,” they are inherently saying “Sally didn’t go to jail, despite expectations.”
Also, it talks about the 11th edition of the Newspeak dictionary as something that does actually occur, but it wasn’t finished by the end of the book. Winston was still “working” on it.
BTW, one more debate I didn’t talk about in my previous answer: I don’t agree that Winston is happy. He imagines himself as dirty, with the only way to be redeemed is when the bullet would go into his brain. Any happy memory he has is fake, and everything he does is unpleasant, including the alcohol.
Now, if he does get killed, then maybe you could argue that’s happy for him, since he now wants that more than anything. Except, would he have time to notice it before he died?
Big Brother seems to be big on making sure no one is actually happy. They can’t provide actual happiness themselves, so they can’t allow any other happiness to compete.
My 2¢:
First, as I think I’ve mentioned in a few previous threads, the story is not a tragedy in that Smith is not a hero. He is in fact a sniveling coward, a man so weak and contemptable that the Thought Police cultivated him as a victim precisely because having Smith as an example of your typical thoughtcrime traitor made Big Brother look good. He was a narcissist who was really broken long ago when as a child he let hunger turn him into a starving animal; the Thought Police simply finished the process.
Second, the story especially Smith’s interrogation and torture reads almost like a ghastly parody of a Christian tale of sin, confession, penitence and redemption; with O’Brien as inquisitor/confessor, the Party as the Church, Ingsoc as Christianity and Big Brother as God. Not surprisingly, given the ambition of the Party to be effectively be God. The pettiness and selfishness of Smith’s rebellion is hammered home to him, and in the end he accepts his inevitable death as a sort of redemption.
Didn’t you hear, Comrade? Emmanuel Goldstein has overthrown Big Brother! Big Brother was always bad for the Party. Under the new leadership, chocolate rations are up, the war against Eastasia is going better than ever, and Newspeak is being replaced with Improved English.