Sarcouncil Journal of Arts and Literature Aims & Scope

Abstract: Personal freedom is one of the most productive analytical categories for comparing dystopian and post-totalitarian prose, because it allows the researcher to trace how power reshapes subjectivity through surveillance, language, memory, and juridical procedures. This article develops a comparative typology of personal freedom in George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” (1949) and Nazar Eshonqul’s “Go‘r o‘g‘li yohud hayot suvi” (2018). Using a comparative-typological algorithm (motif → plot model → narrative mechanism → ideological discourse → character system → genre-poetics), we code the texts by two axes proposed in political theory: negative freedom (a protected sphere free from interference) and positive freedom (self-mastery and self-definition). The results show five recurrent invariants of freedom’s erosion: (1) collapse of privacy through panoptic visibility; (2) reduction of language to a regulatory code (Newspeak slogans vs bureaucratic-protocol speech); (3) monopolization of truth via memory politics (history rewriting vs documentary existence); (4) conversion of the body into an object of discipline and fear; and (5) ritualization of power through institutional performances (ministries, trials, “procedures”). While Orwell constructs an explicit dystopian “state machine” that reprograms the subject through knowledge control and terror, Eshonqul models the same process as an absurd-labyrinthine “documentary regime” where existence itself must be bureaucratically proved. The proposed matrix clarifies both the universal mechanisms of totalitarian domination and their culturally specific aesthetic articulations.