1984

"His heart leapt. Scores of times she had done it; he wished it had been hundreds-thousands. Anything that hinted corruption always filled him with a wild hope. Who knew? Perhaps the Party was rotten under the surface, its cult of strenuousness and self-denial simply a sham concealing iniquity. If he could have infected the whole lot of them with leprosy or syphilis, how gladly he would have done so! Anything to rot, to weaken, to undermine" (104)! Julia's revelation of how she has had sex with members of the Party hundreds of times excites Winston because this is something that he needs to show that the Party is not as "picture perfect" as they claim to be. This detail is what makes the Party is hypocritical because they try to set the example that sex is reserved only for having new members of the Party; however, Julia reveals that this is not the case at all. The Party puts on this very pristine demeanor to show its citizens that this is the way they must c...

"How could you tell much of it was lies? It might be true that the average human being was better off now than he had been before the Revolution. The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in your own bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different. It struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness" (63). As Winston read the children's history textbook to find out more about the past, he is aware of the fact that it is not a reliable source because the Party has tailored it to be in their favor. The book claims that the Party built remarkable cities, but according to the picture that Winston has painted for us, it is anything but lavish. Orwell's use of personification when talking about how Winston feels that his circumstances prior to the Revolution we...

"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten" (46). As I read what Syme said, I was appalled by his intentions of hindering a person's range of thoughts by not allowing them to learn any words that are related to thoughtcrime. Syme wants to take away one of the most important things that makes a person unique: a person's distinct way of thinking. If everyone thinks the same way, it is almost as if everyone is an immature child who follows everything his or her parent does because the child does not know how to think for himself or herself. This reminds me of the movie Tangled,  because the protagonist, Rapunzel is locked away in her home because her ...