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... r, imagining himself floating inside the glass walls of the paperweight with his mother. The phrase "the place where there is no darkness" works as a symbol of hope throughout the novel, as Winston recalls the dream in which O'Brien tells him about the place and says they will meet there one day. The phrase therefore orients Winston toward the end of the novel, when the phrase becomes bitterly ironic: the place where there is no darkness is the Ministry of Love, where the lights remain on in the prisons all day and all night.
Winston's affair with Julia becomes an established part of each of their lives, leading up to Winston's meeting with O'Brien. Despite the risk given the thoroughness of Party monitoring, Winston rents the room above Mr. Charrington's shop so that he and Julia can have a regular place to meet. As the preparations for Hate Week cast a shadow of heat and fatigue on Winston's life, a number of important minor details surface throughout this section, each of which has some bearing on later developments in the novel. First, the return of the glass paperweight: A "vision of the glass paperweight" (Page 91) inspired Winston to rent the room above the shop.
The recurrence of this symbolic motif reemphasizes Winston's obsession with the past, and connects that obsession with his desire to rent the room; by renting the room for Julia, he hopes he can make their relationship resemble one from an earlier, freer time. After Julia leaves the room, Winston gazes into the paperweight, imagining a temporal stasis inside it, where he and Julia could float, free of the Party and free of time. Second, the prole woman singing outside the window. Winston has already thought -- and written in his diary that hope for the future must come from the proles. The prole woman singing outside the window, with her obvious virility, becomes a symbol of the hoped-for future to Winston; he imagines her bearing the children who will overthrow the Party eventually.
Third, Winston's fear of rats: When he sees a rat in the room he shudders in terror; his worst nightmare involves rats in a vague, mysterious way he cannot quite explain. This is another moment of foreshadowing: when O'Brien tortures Winston in the Ministry of Love at the end of the novel, he will use a cage of rats to break Winston's spirit. Fourth, the recurrence of the St. Clement's church song. The mysterious references the song makes continue to pique Winston's interest in the past, and its last line continues to obliquely foreshadow his unhappy ending. A more pragmatic interest makes the song relevant in this section: Julia offers to clean the St.
Clement's church picture had she done so, the lovers would have discovered the tele screen hidden behind it. The most important part of this section is Winston's meeting with O'Brien, which Winston considers the single most important event of his life. The meeting is brief but establishes O'Brien as an enigmatic and powerful figure. At this point we cannot tell whether he is trustworthy or treacherous, whether he is truly on Winston's side or simply wants to trap him for the Party. In the end, Winston will discover the answer to that question in the place where there is no darkness. The most remarkable aspect of the capture of Winston and Julia is that it comes as a surprise.
Even though Winston has predicted his own capture throughout the novel, Orwell manages to time the arrival of the authorities perfectly to catch the reader off-guard. The long excerpt from Goldstein's book is the mechanism he uses to accomplish this shock effect, and in this sense, at least, the excerpt is fully justified. Winston's obsession with O'Brien (which began with the dream about the place where there is no darkness) was the source of his undoing, and it undoes him now as well. Throughout the torture sessions, Winston becomes increasingly eager to believe anything O'Brien tells him- -even Party slogans and rhetoric. In the last book of the novel, Winston even begins to dream about O'Brien in the same way he now dreams about his mother and Julia.
This apparent death wish is the key to Winston's character is his fatalism -- he rebels against the Party not because he desires freedom, but because he wants the Party to kill him. Given Orwell's political aspirations for his novel, this seems an idle and unprofitable speculation. 1984 may include psychological imbalance among its list of ill effects caused by totalitarian government, but it seems clear that 1984 is not primarily about psychological imbalance. Winston no longer has any reason to think for himself: he loves Big Brother, and Big Brother will take care of him. His love of Big Brother has not cured his fatalism; Winston still envisions the day the bullet will enter his brain. The causes of Winston's shattered will. After months of agonizing torture and unrelenting brainwashing, Winston is nevertheless able to hold on to his love for Julia until O'Brien threatens him with the cage of rats.
At this point, Winston is finally faced with a torment he would rather see Julia experience than feel, and he calls out her name to save him. Once he has offered Julia as a sacrificial victim to take his place, Winston has finally been destroyed. The novel's pivotal scene in which O'Brien straps the cage of rats onto Winston's face seems an anticlimax. It has been argued that the cage of rats is not horrible enough to make the reader feel Winston's torment, and that it feels arbitrary, as though Orwell were simply reaching for some horrible device with which to conclude his story. Winston's collapse does follow hard upon his passionate restatement of his love for Julia and hatred for Big Brother Throughout the novel, Orwell argues that physical pain and the sense of physical danger override human reason. When Winston is facing a writhing swarm of rats prepared to devour his face cannot act rationally.
He is a prisoner to his nervous system. And betraying Julia is his instinctive salvation. Rather than the rats themselves, it is the awareness the Party forces on Winston, that he is a prisoner of his body that ultimately breaks him. Once he believes his body limits him, he has no reason to think, act, or rebel. Doublethink is equally crucial to Winston's gradual process of conversion to love for Big Brother, because it enables him to accept his torturers words as true, even though his own memories contradict those words. The Supplemental Paper: The Principles of Newspeak 1984 's Appendix contains Orwell's ideas about Newspeak.
Although Orwell felt that these ideas were too technical to integrate into the novel, they develop the novel's stance on language and thought in the public's acceptance of governmental control. And although this paper is to long it is important that the principals of Newspeak be addressed. Newspeak is the official language of Oceania; it is scheduled for official adoption around 2050, and is designed to make the ideological premises of Ingsoc (Newspeak for English Socialism: the Party's official political alignment) the only expressible ideology. Newspeak is engineered to remove even the possibility of rebellious thoughts by eliminating the words in which thoughts might be expressed. Newspeak contains no negative terms -- the only way to express the meaning of "bad" is through the word "untold. " Something extremely bad would be called "double plus untold. " Newspeak's grammar is arranged so that any word can serve as any part of speech.
There are three different vocabulary spheres within Newspeak. A Vocabulary contains everyday words and phrases for such things as eating, drinking, working and so on. In comparison with Modern English, these words are fewer in number but more rigid in meaning. Newspeak leaves no room for nuance, or for degrees of meaning. B Vocabulary contains all words with political or ideological significance.
These words are especially tailored to provoke thoughtless acceptance of the Party's doctrines. As example: "good think" means roughly the same thing as "orthodoxy. " The B Vocabulary is formed entirely of compound words and often squeezes words into smaller forms to attain abstract ease. The English phrase "Thought Police, " for instance, is compressed into "think pol"; "the Ministry of Love" becomes "minimum. " C Vocabulary is made up of words that relate to science and to technical fields. It is intended to guarantee that technological information remains segmented among many domains. Thus no one person would have access to too much knowledge.
In fact, there is no word for science; Ingsoc already covers any meaning it could possibly bear. The particularities of Newspeak make it impossible to translate most older English (old speak) texts into the language; the introduction of the Declaration of Independence, for instance, could only be translated into a single word: crime think. Furthermore, each of the technical manuals must be translated into Newspeak; it is this bulk of translation work that explains the Party's decision to hold off the full adoption of Newspeak to 2050. George Orwell's novel is depressing and fatalistic in nature. There are parts that are difficult to read and are (for lack of a better description) boring. But this is one of those pieces that should be read.
Some students will get it but as teaching tools it, although it might be meet with some derision. The importance of Orwell's message is an important lesson. The Negative Utopia concept he presents is essential to any understanding of the future. The questioning of governmental programs, what this generation leaves behind for future age groups are concepts that need to be addressed by the young, if not at least introduced to. The importance of technology and business are also a consideration. Does it control society or does society command it.
Going hand in hand with the concepts of governmental power is the antithesis of Civil Disobedience. Which might make an excellent supplemental reading. While the body of this essay did not (purposely) contain mention of Big Brother it is another reason for reading this novel. Big Brother is the figurehead of a government that has total control. The Big Brother regime uses propaganda and puts fear in its citizens to keep the general population in line. Big Brother is watching you (5) is just one example of many party slogans that puts fear in its citizens.
Big Brother uses various ways to catch people guilty of bad thoughts And the term Big Brother is used though out other literature as well as other forms of media and communication. 1. The entire class would have to comply with the societal rules that Winston has to. By either having the class have a discussion on how to make everyone completely equal. If one person has glasses they all would have glasses. Etc. 2. Write a paper in Newspeak, or have a class conversation in Newspeak. 3.
How would they feel if their entire life was predestined? What if the only was to survive was to conform. 4. What is freedom? What is this type of society born from? If a class of seniors is they involved with government or do they allow it to happen? 5. Might teach Civil disobedience along with this.
At least a supplemental reading for a one-day discussion. Bibliography:
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Research essay sample on Ministry Of Love Big Brother
