If there is any doubt about the persistent power of literature in the face of digital culture, it should be banished by the recent climb of George Orwell’s 1984 up the Amazon “Movers and Shakers” list. There is much that’s resonant for us in Orwell’s dystopia in the face of Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA [...]. We look to 1984 as a clear cautionary tale, even a prophecy, of systematic abuse of power taken to the end of the line. [...]

However, after “THE END” of his dystopian novel 1984, George Orwell includes another chapter, an appendix, called “The Principles of Newspeak.” Since it has the trappings of a tedious scholarly treatise, readers often skip the appendix. But it changes our whole understanding of the novel. Written from some unspecified point in the future, it suggests that Big Brother was eventually defeated. The victory is attributed not to individual rebels or to The Brotherhood, an anonymous resistance group, but rather to language itself. The appendix details Oceania’s attempt to replace Oldspeak, or English, with Newspeak, a linguistic shorthand that reduces the world of ideas to a set of simple, stark words. “The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought.” It will render dissent “literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”

Fonte: Frost, Laura. http://qz.com/95696. Adaptado. Acesso em agosto de 2019.

De acordo com o texto, em geral, os leitores do clássico 1984, de George Orwell, dispensam a leitura do apêndice da obra porque