And why does Ishmael drop out of the story for the last 200 pages? Was he hiding in the bathroom for the entire whale chase?
Winston Smith doesn’t narrate Nineteen Eighty-Four, but the story is told from his point of view. There’s one scene that makes me want to bitch-slap him–the scene where he questions an old man in a bar to find out what life was like before the revolution. Apparently he expects the man to tell him, either “Life kicked ass”, or “Life sucked”, and be done with it. Instead, he’s disappointed that the old man can only give him a series of disconnected personal stories, stripped of any political context.
Winston, you doofus, that’s exactly what you should be asking for! The man gives him a treasure trove of experience which totally refutes the Party line on the old days, if Winston would only listen. Winston would have made a piss-poor social historian.
Loved the book, but spent the first couple of chapters having to put the book down and argue with the main character. Lazy, rude, inconsiderate misogynist slob.
I liked that book a lot, including the narrator. Somehow, there’s a certain type of Brit that’s allowed to be lazy, rude, inconsiderate, and misogynistic.
I can’t believe I’m the first person to mention Holden Caulfield. I love The Catcher in the Rye, and it was my favorite book through my turbulent teen years. I used to reread it every summer, like a ritual. But now that I’m closer to 30 than I am to 20, I see that he was the original Emo Kid and really needed to get over himself.
Freddy, that’s the point of the novel. He’s not listening because he’s incapable of understanding the answers to the questions he’s asking. The constant blunt trauma Party orthodoxy inflicted upon him has rendered him incapable of detecting subtlety, and despite his efforts, incapable of true unorthodoxy. This is reflected in the narration and thus the points made are subtle.
And for what it’s worth, Winston was a social historian.
Wolfe makes a habit out of using the Unreliable Narrator in his fiction. the narrator I want to throw in a hole (but it’s not his fault) is the narrator from the Sidon books. I can’t remember his name.
The guy has severe short-term memory problems, forgetting everything each evening (his name, why he’s where he is, etc.). Makes for a very frustrating view by the reader!
I have a tendency of re-reading favorite books, sometimes starting the same book again immediately after finishing it. In so doing I finally wearied of the first person narrator in Nicholas Guild’s The Assyrian. Magnificent novel. First class research. Brings alive a period of history that few other authors have ever touched on. But o, ye gods! After Tiglath Ashur is robbed of his birthright by his father’s scheming number one wife, he steadfastly refuses to do anything about it. Yet every time the subject of the queen-to-be, Esharhamat, comes up, the stoic mask slips and he launches on a whiny soliloquy about how fair she is and how he loves her and fate is SOOOOOO cruel. When a died-in-the-wool hopeless romantic starts yelling “get over her!”, you know the simpering has gotten excessive.
Almost anything by H.P. Lovecraft. I love his work. God, how I love it. But every single Lovecraft narrator is essentially Lovecraft himself…weedy, anemic, and vaporish. Yes, yes, we know that the Cyclopean Horrors from the Deep Aether are beyond human comprehension and whatnot. I just wish the narrator wouldn’t keep fainting every other page.
I disagree. Winston is capable of all kinds of unorthodoxy. He persists in thinking of the past as better even after the failed interview–based on such subtle cues as Charrington’s nursery rhymes–but somehow misses the evidence the old man is giving him, only because Orwell wanted to make a point about de-politicized proles and had to temporarily “dumb down” Winston to do it.
By the end, I was prepared to forgive his manners, but it was an effort at the beginning (and the narrator does go through a mellowing of his cynicism through the novel).
The main problem was that I read it straight after Making History, which I was besotted with. They’re both just about equal favourites, by a long margin ahead of any of his other books.
The best example I can give is when Winston contemplates suicide and laments that it would be difficult to get hold of a gun or poison (or whatever). The narator points out that it didn’t occur to Winston to throw himself off the top of a building - it ties in with Ampleforth’s observation (I believe it was Ampleforth - been a while since I read it) that as Newspeak is refined as a language it will become more and more difficult to even concoct unorthadoxy thoughts because the language needed to do so will have been purged. This has already happened to some extent to Winston.
And Winston is only a Journalist in the most loose of interpretations of the word. He doesn’t write the daily, he re-writes the daily. He records history as seen through the kaleidascope of the Party, thus the history of the party and the history of Party orthadoxy.
Winston was a journalist.