1984 Blog

Today I would like to touch a bit on the tactics the Party uses to misdirect the people’s hate and disapproval away from them. Throughout the book we see the many ways the Party accomplishes this, most notably the Two Minutes Hate. The Party uses this daily ritual to work the Party members into a frenzy against their enemies and to establish a sort of patriotism in them towards the Party. In addition, the Party uses war as a way to unite the public against a common enemy, which is exactly why they always seem to be at war with one country or another. War is a smart tactic to use because while it unites the public against an enemy, it also successfully cuts off the public from communicating with other countries, thereby preventing the exchange of ideas. We also see earlier in book two that the Party uses the convoy to take the public's disdain and direct it towards carefully chosen political enemies of the Party.  All these tactics the Party employs seem to be very effective as the ...

Today I would like to discuss a bit about the so-called power of love. Winston struggles immensely with the trauma of his childhood memories, his subconscious the only thing reminding him of what is fact. However, he is able to find connection with Julia, and unload some of the sufferings of his emotions and memory by have meaningful interactions with her (compared to the dull ones he has with other characters on this novel).  They both obviously know the risk they are taking, as if they get captured they are most likely to be tortured and eventually may be killed. However Winston and Julia mention that even though the torture makes them tell all of their secrets, they will still love each other no matter what. I'm not sure if them clinging onto this sense of "everything will be alright/love will prevail" is just a coping mechanism for the desperate situation they're finding themselves in, but I think that either way their words demonstrates that Winston and Julia are...

Many dystopian novels have something against books, writing, or anything in that general area. For example we can take BNW and Fahrenheit 451 as examples. All of these societies ban books and creativity in general to stop ideas of another way of life/freedom from spreading. We can also very prominently see the common theme of whoever controls the present, controls the past. Winston clearly doesn't remember his childhood well, and there is a severe lack of physical records that show anything from the past. We also know that a lot of documents have been altered by the current government. I find this fact particularly interesting about the society in 1984 because other dystopian novels tend to simply destroy historical records instead of completely changing it, but the society in 1984 seems to drastically change documents to tell completely different stories. I would think this is a bit risky on the part of the government because then it would make obvious the deceit of the government...