Language and human rights in Nineteen Eighty-Four and Never Let Me Go

Abstract

In his thesis, the main objective is to look at the connection between language and human rights in two dystopian novels, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005). This thesis also proposes how these two novels, and literary texts in general, can be taught to pupils in upper secondary school. As the lack of or loss of human rights is an element in many dystopian novels, this thesis explores how the societies in the two novels accept this due to the use of certain words by the governing body. This thesis seeks to prove that, in these two dystopian novels, language can lead to groups of people loosing their rights as human beings, either at the whims of a totalitarian regime that controls the population through fear or by a society where they were never even considered human in the first place.