Mood - 1984

"A kilometer away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape... Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth- century houses, their sides shored up with balks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow herb straggled over the heaps of rubble: and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger path and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken houses?" p. 3

Descriptions such as this litter the novel of 1984. These can of course be contributed to setting, but that also set the mood for the novel itself. In this futuristic view of London, despair is evident in the ramshackle living of the people. The four Ministry buildings rise above all else. This can set a mood of overpowering by the government, which stands high above the city. The people have been crushed and oppressed, which is visible in the housing descriptions provided. This sets a mood of helplessness, as even minimal repairs are crude and inadequate. These settings help for the reader to move forward in the novel with an understanding of the characters' own feelings and conditions, which further drive the story.