Ministry Of Love Big Brother Essay - 1,899 words

... r, imagining himself floating inside the glass walls of the paperweight with his mother. The phrase "the place where there is no darkness" works as a symbol of hope throughout the novel, as Winston recalls the dream in which O'Brien tells him about the place and says they will meet there one day. The phrase therefore orients Winston toward the end of the novel, when the phrase becomes bitterly ironic: the place where there is no darkness is the Ministry of Love, where the lights remain on in the prisons all day and all night.


Winston's affair with Julia becomes an established part of each of their lives, leading up to Winston's meeting with O'Brien. Despite the risk given the thoroughness of Party monitoring, Winston rents the room above Mr. Charrington's shop so that he and Julia can have a regular place to meet. As the preparations for Hate Week cast a shadow of heat and fatigue on Winston's life, a number of important minor details surface throughout this section, each of which has some bearing on later developments in the novel. First, the return of the glass paperweight: A "vision of the glass paperweight" (Page 91) inspired Winston to rent the room above the shop.


The recurrence of this symbolic motif reemphasizes Winston's obsession with the past, and connects that obsession with his desire to rent the room; by renting the room for Julia, he hopes he can make their relationship resemble one from an earlier, freer time. After Julia leaves the room, Winston gazes into the paperweight, imagining a temporal stasis inside it, where he and Julia could float, free of the Party and free of time. Second, the prole woman singing outside the window. Winston has already thought -- and written in his diary that hope for the future must come from the proles. The prole woman singing outside the window, with her obvious virility, becomes a symbol of the hoped-for future to Winston; he imagines her bearing the children who will overthrow the Party eventually.


Third, Winston's fear of rats: When he sees a rat in the room he shudders in terror; his worst nightmare involves rats in a vague, mysterious way he cannot quite explain. This is another moment of foreshadowing: when O'Brien tortures Winston in the Ministry of Love at the end of the novel, he will use a cage of rats to break Winston's spirit. Fourth, the recurrence of the St. Clement's church song. The mysterious references the song makes continue to pique Winston's interest in the past, and its last line continues to obliquely foreshadow his unhappy ending. A more pragmatic interest makes the song relevant in this section: Julia offers to clean the St.


Clement's church picture had she done so, the lovers would have discovered the tele screen hidden behind it. The most important part of this section is Winston's meeting with O'Brien, which Winston considers the single most important event of his life. The meeting is brief but establishes O'Brien as an enigmatic and powerful figure. At this point we cannot tell whether he is trustworthy or treacherous, whether he is truly on Winston's side or simply wants to trap him for the Party. In the end, Winston will discover the answer to that question in the place where there is no darkness. The most remarkable aspect of the capture of Winston and Julia is that it comes as a surprise.


Even though Winston has predicted his own capture throughout the novel, Orwell manages to time the arrival of the authorities perfectly to catch the reader off-guard. The long excerpt from Goldstein's book is the mechanism he uses to accomplish this shock effect, and in this sense, at least, the excerpt is fully justified. Winston's obsession with O'Brien (which began with the dream about the place where there is no darkness) was the source of his undoing, and it undoes him now as well. Throughout the torture sessions, Winston becomes increasingly eager to believe anything O'Brien tells him- -even Party slogans and rhetoric. In the last book of the novel, Winston even begins to dream about O'Brien in the same way he now dreams about his mother and Julia.


This apparent death wish is the key to Winston's character is his fatalism -- he rebels against the Party not because he desires freedom, but because he wants the Party to kill him. Given Orwell's political aspirations for his novel, this seems an idle and unprofitable speculation. 1984 may include psychological imbalance among its list of ill effects caused by totalitarian government, but it seems clear that 1984 is not primarily about psychological imbalance. Winston no longer has any reason to think for himself: he loves Big Brother, and Big Brother will take care of him. His love of Big Brother has not cured his fatalism; Winston still envisions the day the bullet will enter his brain. The causes of Winston's shattered will. After months of agonizing torture and unrelenting brainwashing, Winston is nevertheless able to hold on to his love for Julia until O'Brien threatens him with the cage of rats.


At this point, Winston is finally faced with a torment he would rather see Julia experience than feel, and he calls out her name to save him. Once he has offered Julia as a sacrificial victim to take his place, Winston has finally been destroyed. The novel's pivotal scene in which O'Brien straps the cage of rats onto Winston's face seems an anticlimax. It has been argued that the cage of rats is not horrible enough to make the reader feel Winston's torment, and that it feels arbitrary, as though Orwell were simply reaching for some horrible device with which to conclud ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

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Essay Tags: big brother, one person, one day, ministry of love, civil disobedience

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