1984 - George Orwell - Part 3

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 9

 January 9, 2017 

Book 2 - Nineteen Eighty Four (1984)
by George Orwell (1948)

 Part 3 - Pages 152-216

Reading Time -53 minutes

Ah, Winston, he has begun a romance with Julia, the dark-haired girl from work whom he initially thought was a member of the Thought Police. Love seems to agree with Winston - he is putting on weight and his health has improved. While he and Julia share a certain rebelliousness against the Party, they have very different views on how that is carried out.

Winston remembers pre-Revolution days. He thinks that there is a Brotherhood that resists the Party and Big Brother. He believes that if people could only gather together and rise up, they could topple the Party. Julia is 10 years younger than Winston and for her, politics is immaterial. She doesn't care that history is being modified everyday, that the Past is meaningless and changeable. What matters for her is breaking the rules while still staying alive. For her, revolution of the kind which Winston speaks, is stupid. She believes it has always been like this and will always be like this. Winston recognizes that many people like Julia likely exist: they speak the rhetoric of the Party but don't really understand it. It is "by lack of understanding, that they remain sane".

Poor Winston also believes that one of the Inner Party members at his workplace is a conspirator, a man by the name of O'Brien. Winston dreams of speaking to O'Brien and telling him about everything - about his journal, about Julia, about his rebelliousness. Deep down, Winston knows that his death is approaching him. He and Julia acknowledge though, that when they are arrested, tortured and induced to make confessions, as long as they retain their love for each other, they will have one. Confessions are meaningless as long as one's feelings remain pure. Optimistic folk they are.

I confess that I don't remember how 1984 ends. I can't remember if Winston and Julia survive. Perhaps they escape to Eurasia or Eastasia or join the Proles in the countryside? My normal tendency to read the end of a book is on abeyance because I don't want to ruin the suspense.

There are passing similarities between the world of Winston and our own world. Julia, for example, thinks that the rocket bombs that land on London are actually fired from within Oceania (their country) and not from an external enemy. It keeps the people scared and keeps the "War" front and centre. Today, while wars rage around the globe, we are faced with the War on Terror. We lose bits and pieces of our civil rights in the name of "Safety" and "Security". We give them up willingly in many instances, convinced by our government that Security is important in the War on Terror. At least in the world of Winston and Julia, surveillance is rather crude and rudimentary - limited to telescreens and microphones. Our world is slightly different - cameras are everywhere, GPS in our phones and Fitbits track us as we move through our day, emails and blogs are monitored.

I read a blog or a book a while ago that said that our world didn't really match Orwell's 1984 so much as it did Huxley's Brave New World. I'll be interested to read Huxley, another book that I read in high school of which I have only vague memories.