Novel Project - Second Entry for "1984"

! Spoiler Warning: This entry contains some spoilers that might make you mad if you haven't yet read 1984. Don't read if you don't want the story spoiled. !


o---Winston and Julia---o

Well, my suspicions of Winston and ‘the dark haired girl’ are true after all, but not quite so much in the case that I was imagining. Julia, who reveals her name later on, and Winston end up being lovers. I was afraid that that would make the story turn cliché and romantic, but it did not. Adding in love to a story, many authors seem to focus on nothing but the love and it becomes dreadfully boring, but Orwell still keeps the story the same, just with an added flare of love and lust. It is important, however, for the story, and for Winston, to have Julia involved. She keeps Winston much more sane, and much more willing to oblige to the rules and practices of the Party so that he seems less suspicious. Julia is very clever and dexterous, but at the same time she is very naïve when it comes to the deeper things hidden in the Party, such as the destruction of the past. Winston, however, is obsessed with the past, trying to find out what exactly it was like. So all in all, I am only a little bit disappointed that he and Julia ended up in love, but I’m very pleased with the way that Orwell kept it so far from cheesy or cliché.


o---Sugar Pills---o

During the section of the book where Winston is reading the book (Goldstein’s book for The Brotherhood) I lost a lot of interest, especially when Goldstein is talking about the geography of the world. However, I understood the main ideas behind it all. There are three superstates, they are at ‘war’ for the land that rests between them, but the only reason they have a ‘war’ is to keep everyone on different levels of society. It really is an intense and confusing scheme, and a very clever one at that. It reminds me very much of sugar pills: the clever doctors know that the power of the brain is amazing, and so they give an ailed person pills they claim to be actual medicine, and the person gets better, off of sugar pills. It seems to me that the Party is feeding its people sugar pills. As for why Big Brother wants to erase the past and keep its people angry and hateful, it remains a secret I do not yet know. Winston stopped reading the book and set it aside, and if he ever gets to read the rest remains a question only Orwell can decide.


o---Newspeak---o

I’ve learned a few more Newspeak words that I would like to share. One of them is blackwhite. It is a very interesting word. Basically, it means to believe whatever the Party throws at you, even if the things may contradict. Such as: If the party tells you to believe that black is white, you must oblige, but not only must you oblige, you must be ready to accept that if they tell you that white is black, you must agree all the same. Another word is an old one I had been trying to understand: doublethink. To be frank, doublethink means “the power of holding two contradictory belief in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” The reason it requires doublethink to understand doublethink is because if you believe it, you also must disbelieve it, and so on forever. It’s a crazy spiral that I find very clever and ingenious on Orwell’s part.


A former friend has turned out to be a member of the Thought Police, turning in Winston and Julia, so I am very excited (and nervous) to read the last section of 1984.