Orwell intended Goldstein's book to parody Trotsky's (on whom Goldstein is based) The Revolution Betrayed: What is the Soviet Union and Where is it Going?, published in 1937. The book is a literary device Orwell uses to connect the past and present of 1984. The pages were worn at the edges, and fell apart easily, as though the book had passed through many hands.' The print also looked slightly irregular.

The protagonist of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith, describes it as 'a heavy black volume, amateurishly bound, with no name or title on the cover. What is known of the society, politics and economics of Oceania, and its rivals, comes from the in-universe book, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism by Emmanuel Goldstein. George Orwell, author of Nineteen Eighty-Four, whose wartime BBC career influenced the creation of Oceania The nations appear to have emerged from nuclear warfare and civil dissolution over 20 years between 19, in a post-war world where totalitarianism becomes the predominant form of ideology, through Neo-Bolshevism, English Socialism, and Obliteration of the Self.

All that Oceania's citizens know about the world is whatever the Party wants them to know, so how the world evolved into the three states is unknown and it is also unknown to the reader whether they actually exist in the novel's reality, or whether they are a storyline invented by the Party to advance social control. In George Orwell's 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the world is divided into three superstates: Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, who are all fighting each other in a perpetual war in a disputed area mostly located around the equator. 'Disputed territories' are also indicated. The three fictional superstates of the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four are Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia.

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