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 In Part III we get to see the long-anticipated revelation occur: Winston discovers just to what extent his words and actions have been tracked by the Thought Police. But Orwell delivers us this realization in a striking way. We find along with Winston that not only are we dead when the hidden telescreen reveals itself, we were dead from the very beginning. That sounds like the Ingsoc rhetoric of manipulating one's own knowledge of the past, but in this instance we must concede that our vision of all past events relating to opposing the Party are completely wrong. I have compiled a short list of the actions Winston has done that betray his thought-crime below: Buy a diary from Mr. Charrington. Write lots of anti-Party stuff in there. Buy a paperweight from Mr. Charrington. Rent Mr. Charrington's upstairs room to continue his affair with Julia. Go to O'Brien's house (with Julia!) to be inducted into the Brotherhood. Pick up a copy of the book . Read the book . Winston ge...

We read Chapter 1 of Goldstein's book along with Winston so that we could have an important facet of Oceanic society articulated to us: that there are no laws. No rules, no legal framework, nothing. ..That sounds strange now that I say it, and maybe there are technically rules, but even if there were, it's not like that would make any difference. Every situation is handled in the exact way that concentrates the most power in the hands of the Inner Party. An important application of this rule is that "thought-criminal" does not describe someone who has thought thoughts that are against the Party. A thought-criminal is one who has done that, but also is not a member of the ruling class and now has the potential of resisting or rebelling against the class order. This might be obvious - the Thought Police are only going to go after those who endanger the class order, as that is the singular goal of the Party. So, now that we are clear on what a thought-criminal is, let us...

 Perhaps most defining to the later half of Part II is the long excerpt of Goldstein's book which the reader reads along with Winston. Within that, I'll zone in on the discussion of how the three superstates function and how Goldstein theorizes that this produces and is produced by the waste of surplus goods/labor and war.  Firstly, I'll try to explain the causation (mostly for myself) in simple terms: We have a small group of people in power who want to stay in power. We have the trend of mechanization occurring all across the world. This trend, which explodes the production power of the world, also raises the standard of living for many. Raising the standard of living too much is dangerous to the people at the top. (Personally I question this, because I expect there to be a disproportionate amount of production power going into further bettering the positions of the rich & powerful in this scenario. Through an economic lens, when the poor aren't so poor but the ri...

In the beginning of Part II the fascinating development that is Julia takes place. She represents, to me, a completely unexpected direction of plot development. We had been hoping for O'Brien to somehow make an appearance, or for Winston to discover some resistance faction on his own; instead, we are taken on a roller coaster of Winston's emotions as we uncover through Julia an entirely new method of secret opposition to the Oceanic regime - secret sexual liberation. However, is it fair to phrase it that way - that is, that secret sexual activity is a method of opposition? Couldn't we see secretly opposing the Oceanic regime as a means to pursue sex? Certainly, for Julia, this lens may be more accurate. She has clearly developed a wealth of experience in surreptitiously alerting men to her motives and meeting with them secretly. Most of the steps in between noticing a man who "doesn't belong" and having sex with him involve repeated and serious violations of r...

Below is Winston's axiom, as he writes it at the end of chapter VII: "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows." I call it Winston's axiom even though it is really only a pair of sentences among many he has written in his diary. It's less about accurately describing the context for and role of the two sentences than it is about emulating and strengthening Winston's feeling "that he was setting forth an important axiom". As far as axioms go, it's got its problems. For one, if axioms are supposed to be as general as possible, why does Winston center the logic of his sentences around a very specific mathematical fact, that 2 + 2 = 4? But I'm going to veer away from semantics and call this part of the diary entry Winston's axiom, for funsies if nothing else. So anyways, what the heck is Winston saying? Unfortunately, I cannot provide answers, but I'll make some guesses. To start with ...

A very small thing that stuck with me within this reading was the mention of a seemingly unremarkable slogan of the Party that goes: "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." I found it hard to relate to many aspects of 1984's world, but this slogan struck a chord in me, because the time we're living through right now has seen a movement to re-examine our understanding of our nation's past. While we Americans don't try to control the past the way Oceania would (or do we? Let me know in the comment section :D), we have the hindsight to see how historical attitudes about various topics has changed over time, and we see that those attitudes depended entirely on the cultural attitudes of that time - or we could say, what vein of ideas was "in power" at the time.  As it's Black History Month I might use the topic of black history for an example. As we all know, race relations between black people and othe...