Help me better understand 1984... (spoilers, of course)

Cafe Society
1

Just finished Orwell’s masterpiece, loved it, was enthralled in shivering fascination at certain moments. Yet I am not quite sure about certain things, such as:

  1. Doesn’t 'O Brien, by understanding so clearly what Winston is about, not fit in with the Party? At one point, 'O Brien showed Winston the photograph proving that Rutherford and friends were guilty of a specific charge that the Party claimed, even though the official history and stance of the Party were contrary to this. Furthermore, the charges against the three men and falsification of documents occurred so long ago (a decade or more) that everyone involved, including 'O Brien, should have had plenty of time to “doublethink” it out of memory by then, if they were indeed going with the flow of the Party’s conscious unconsciousness. Doesn’t this show that 'O Brien has the capacity to really truly understand that the Party’s line of history was not always 100% accurate, that they did not completely control the past? At various points, he seemed to understand Winston’s point of view while simultaneously torturing him to get him to align with the Party; isn’t this and his acknowledgement of Party fallability make ‘O Brien himself a big fat thought criminal? Sure, he is a zealous instrument of the Party, but surely he can see that he is too aware, too conscious, to really belong there? I understand that “doublethink” can let one accept contradictions, but it seems that O’ Brien’s mind is too dynamic to not be thoughtcrime…

  2. I am a little confused by the ending; did Winston die at the end or was he simply imagining the scene with the bullet (he certainly had many mental scenes going through his head as the book came to a close)? It would be fitting that he died, as it would render his earlier hope of being able to die with at least one rebellious thought defeated, as “he loved Big Brother”. One of the least happy endings of any work of fiction I’ve ever read, in any case.

  3. What do you guys think? Did the Brotherhood exist? Or was it merely a tool of the Party to lure potential thought criminals? From what I took away, I can’t say one way or the other. Rumblings and grumblings about the existence of a rebellion could easily be the result of fact or Party fiction. Now that I think about it, though, perhaps the Brotherhood had to have been faked, as the Party, having such control over what people said and thought (well, almost), would not allow the people they controlled to even know about the Brotherhood unless the Party wished it to. Water cooler discussions about the rebellion would simply not exist if the Party really did not want knowledge of the rebellion to take place…

  4. Does Big Brother really exist? Crucial Party guy, obviously, serving as a focal point for Party loyalty. 'O Brien said he is immortal; does that mean the current Big Brother is just an actor? Or is he really the top dog, the guy who was in the original revolution leadership and the only one who managed to survive? If he is, will he be replaced by an actor at a future date and time?

  5. Was Goldstein who the Party said he was? I think Winston remembered Goldstein from the pre-Party days, so it is safe to assume that Goldstein did exist. But the current Goldstein being displayed for The Hate may just be an actor for the Party; in fact, it would make absolute sense that he was. I can’t see them letting the real Goldstein actually have a shot at undermining their authority like that…

  6. Did the old clothes-washing prole lady’s song have any significance (sigh, I already forget the lyrics…)? Or was it just supposed to be Party created banality?
    Discussion on any of these would be most appreciated. Perhaps a lot of these questions don’t really matter; perhaps their ambiguity is the point, as it would further illustrate that we don’t know jack shit and that the Party really does control their history. But I still want to try to figure out what the “external reality” is within Orson’s dystopia…

2

ack, replace Orson with Orwell. :smack:

3

Well, yes, but I think you’re underestimating just how insidious and effective doublethink was as a means of control. O’Brien and any other good citizen of Oceania could take contradictory ideas and just accept them, with none of the self-doubt or guilt one would normally feel. At O’Brien’s level of the Inner Party, the only thing that could actually bring him down would be another Party member who got a slight advantage over him (Orwell hints at this by referring to a Party member who was “out of favour”, suggestion factional fighting within the Party). Since O’Brien has an important post in the Ministry of Love, it’s pretty certain that among the few Party members who know what he does (Winston himself didn’t know for sure until his arrest), O’Brien is routinely viewed with fear and deference. Eventually, someone more ruthless than O’Brien will put on a boot and stamp on his face, I expect.

In any casea, there’s no indication that O’Brien is “faking it”. He gets thoroughly excited during the Two-Minutes Hate and shows other evidence of being a loyal Party member.

He didn’t die (though the 1950s movie version pointlessly changed the ending so he did) but he was anticipating his eventual execution. By this time, he’d been so emotionally crushed that this didn’t even bother him any more.

Well, the paranoid atmopshere of the Party is such that you believe enemies are all around you, so in that sense “the Brotherhood” (of people trying to get you) exists. I have no problem with Orwell leaving it unclear.

The descriptions of the character (serious-faced, with a mustache) are pretty clearly a reference to Stalin and the relentless attempts to build a cult of personality around him but putting of posters and statues of him. My guess, the actually character doesn’t exist in Oceania but is merely being used symbolically, as the image of Stalin was, as were the images of Saddam in Iraq and the images of Kim Il Sung in North Korea. There is no central figure in Oceania’s government.

There may have been a Goldstein in Oceania’s past, but the use of the character is to tap into some kind of latent anti-semitism that Stalinism (and Europe in general) is noted for. I expect that’s how it started, but by 1984 (if it was 1984, the book makes a point of mentioning that the actual date is unknown), religion had been pretty thoroughly quashed so the idea of a Jewish enemy was meaningless. Nevertheless, Goldstein was a recognizable image and remained part of the culture.

In some sense, Goldstein may have been symbolic of Leon Trotsky, who was a founder of the USSR but driven into exile after a power struggle with Stalin. The symbolism is more apparant in the Snowball character in Orwell’s Animal Farm.

[quote]
6) Did the old clothes-washing prole lady’s song have any significance (sigh, I already forget the lyrics…)? Or was it just supposed to be Party created banality?
[/quote[

I think it was accepted that the Proles had to be kept entertained (this might even extend to reintroducing religion, if it seemed useful) so the Ministry of Truth kept cranking out the mental equivalent of swill. Even if the Proles thought the lyrics had some potential political significance, I doubt anyone in the Party would have cared, since the Proles are deemed beneath contempt.

You may be overthinking it. Orwell hated repression and arrogance, and that seems to be the motivation behind his writing. How much “external” do you need?

4

Hmm, my coding is screwed up. Must be the hamsters of Goldstein!

5

You asked for answers, but not for satisfying answers, so here is what you get.

  1. O’Brian is not bound by the same party rules that Winston is- kind of like how the proles follow different rules than party members. O’Brian understand perfectly well that the party is full of contradictions, and that’s okay, because he believes in his (and the party’s) ability to shape reality. Winston’s problem was not so much that he reached the same level of awareness as O’Brian (which he did) but that he reached that level of awareness without subverting it (like a regular party member would) or wielding that power to maintian the order of things (like O’Brian and the inner party)

  2. It doesn’t matter. To Winston now, there is no difference between the literal and the metaphor. For all intents and purposes he died.

  3. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is people’s perception of the Brotherhood, and that perception was certainly shaped by the Party (which needed an internal enemy like that to foster distrust more than to lure thought criminals, which would expose themselves pretty quickly anyway). You might even want to play around with the idea that the inner party was metaphorically the Brotherhood.

  4. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that people think Big Brother exists. I’d even venture that it’s pretty obvious to everybody that Big Brother is a myth created by the party. The trick is that most people are able to convince themselves to believe this myth (and that alone is a sign of their loyalty) even when they understand that it isn’t true. It’s one of those contradictions ( like “Freedom is slavery”) that the party expects people to internalize and embrace.

  5. Once again, doesn’t matter for the same reasons the physical existance of the Brotherhood doesn’t matter.

  6. Don’t know.

Your on the right track with your final comments. One of the themes of the book is the way that realities are created and controlled, and the relationship between reality, metaphor, and the individual. A lot of things are going to be uncertain not for the sheer fun of confusing the reader, but to illustrate how you can hold several contridictory beliefs at once, how the writer himself is constructing reality, among other things.

6

One thing that was never really explained, perhaops quite deliberately, was the question of whether there really existed any other governements at all. Or if there really was any war at all.
Most people seem to take it at face value, but I noted that, in true Orwellian style, the only informaion we really ever get about it is based on the Party’s own propaganda. How can we be sure its not just a faked up news broadcast.
We can’t.

7

I think Winston did remember witnessing a rocket-bomb explosion in London, though that could have been fired by Oceania itself.

8

I think Julia actually brings this up, telling Winston that she didn’t really believe they were at war in the first place.

We do some prisoners of war and they do appear to be a different race, but who’s to say they aren’t just prisoners from another part of Oceania brought in to play the part and stir the masses?

Some serious dog-wagging going on :slight_smile:

9

As far as the war and the existence of other governments, I always thought that the “Book” that O’Brien gave to Winston contained the actual truth…that the other countries did indeed exist and their societies were basically the same as Oceania, and the war was a constant and mutually perpetuated conflict that served the purpose of keeping the public in a certain mindset and burning up enough products to keep them in deprivation.

Obviously, it’s open to interpretation wether the “Book” was just more falsehood or not. But it’s keeping with the Party’s concept of double-think to release a factual underground history while condemning it at the same time. Towards the end, O’Brien mentions how having two different and opposing mathematical systems-----one for scientific research, the other for party propaganda-----would not be a problem under double-think.

10

I had this great idea for a book. A world controled by the Media. A Mediocracy, if you will. Then I realized the world had 1984.

Regarding the washer-woman: I thought she was a member of the Thought Police.