Vol. 16, Issue 1, Jul-Dec 2023

Page: 78-90

Between Reality and Dystopia: A Study of George Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four and Ahmed Saadawi's Frankenstein in Baghdad

Huda Khudhair Abbas

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Accepted Date:

Published Date:

Dystopian literature portrays a world where things are imperfect, messy, and distorted. It displays a horrible picture, yet it is real in some irritating places. It essentially handles subjects like wartime, oppressive factors, and miserable conditions. Dystopian fiction contains elements of reality particular to the period in which it was written, with imaginative factors that depict our gloomy direction. Past and contemporary writers write a fictional text as an allegory of political events. This study aims to look at Nineteen eighty-four written by George Orwell, and Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi as dystopian fiction, as a satire of the political systems, and specify what makes these texts dystopian supernatural elements or in their terrible reality. In Orwells Nineteen eighty-four, the citizens of Oceania are under the control of the ruling party. Orwells dystopia of fear, surveillance, and perpetual war is present in the current democracies, and it can be mirrored after decades in Saadawis text. In Saadawi's writing, the elements of dystopian literature are genuine, and these elements are present in the spot where the events occur and are presented in peoples fear of the ruling system, the terrorist attacks, and the American armed forces. Frankenstein in Baghdad reversed the standard equation; the dystopian features in the text are not displayed in its legendary traits but in the real violence that Iraq, generally, and Baghdad, in particular, passed through in and after 2005. Then Orwell’s prophesy proves itself to be accurate.

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