“They’ve got you too!” he cried.
“They got me a long time ago,” said O’Brien with a mild almost regretful irony. He stepped aside. From behind him there emerged a broad-chested guard with a long black truncheon in his hands.
“You knew this Winston,” said O’Brien. “Don’t deceive yourself. You did know it – you have always known it.” (Orwell, pg.238)
I KNEW IT! I KNEW IT! I KNEW IT! O’Brien was never to be trusted. Between kids that turn in their own parents and thought-police everywhere, absolutely no one is to be trusted. O’Brien was sketchy from the start he was an operative of Ministry of Love. I knew it, I have always known it, but Winston knew it as well. He relied on false hope and false ideology, Winston was a rebel that committed to a doctrine that he didn’t even understand or question for his hate of the Party was so large he didn’t stop to rationalize his actions. In face of a common enemy even people that dislike each other from the start become best friends. O’Brien represented Winston’s hope. In the moment he rationalizes and recognizes he was betrayed like a kid that just learned that Santa does not exist and deep inside knew it all along.
“Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes, no heroes, he thought over and over as he writhed on the floor, clutching uselessly at his disabled left arm.” (Orwell pg.239)
Physical pain is so unbearable that torture is practiced as one of the most efficient methods to extract information. During the “Regime Militar” in Brazil many of those that went against the party in control were imprisoned and tortured to extract information and when those do not help the only escape is death. What happened during the Military Regime in Brazil with the members of revolutionary groups is exactly what is happening with Winston.
At the end of the day I am shocked and disappointed at Winston, my idea that he is weak and a failure has only been confirmed. His “love” for O’Brien and his failure to realize he is to blame for his initial torture makes me mad!
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Victor
4/10/2013 07:13:55 am
STOP IT
He paused for a few moments, as though to allow what he had been saying to sink in.
'Do you remember,' he went on, 'writing in your diary, "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four"?'
'Yes,' said Winston.
O'Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended.
'How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?'
'Four.'
'And if the party says that it is not four but five -- then how many?'
'Four.'
The word ended in a gasp of pain. The needle of the dial had shot up to fifty-five. The sweat had sprung out all over Winston's body. The air tore into his lungs and issued again in deep groans which even by clenching his teeth he could not stop. O'Brien watched him, the four fingers still extended. He drew back the lever. This time the pain was only slightly eased.
'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Four.'
The needle went up to sixty.
'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Four! Four! What else can I say? Four!'
The needle must have risen again, but he did not look at it. The heavy, stern face and the four fingers filled his vision. The fingers stood up before his eyes like pillars, enormous, blurry, and seeming to vibrate, but unmistakably four.
'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Four! Stop it, stop it! How can you go on? Four! Four!'
'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Five! Five! Five!'
'No, Winston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are four. How many fingers, please?'
'Four! five! Four! Anything you like. Only stop it, stop the pain!'
The most intense part of the book for me. The punctuation, the short sentences, the repetition , the quick “back and forth” of the lines of the speaker, all those elements together, I believe, where able to give to the reader, an idea of how intense a torture session is. When reading this part, I was uncomfortable, I was worried about Winston, about his mental health, it was just too much for me. The fact that O’Brien is trying to change Winston’s mind, I believe it was useless, because O’Brien know that Winston has strong ideas and a strong mind and that he would not just start believing on something because he said so. However, when petting dogs, in general, when the dog is able to accomplish what it is proposed by owner, the owner gives a reward to the animal and through repetitive moves, the dog learns that this is the right to be done. The same logic O’Brien tries to apply to Winston, by diminishing the pain when he says what he wants to say and augmenting the pain when he has opposite ideas to the party. I believe that Winston will not fall for that and eventually, O’Brien will realize that and “eliminate” Winston.
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Nevo
4/10/2013 07:19:12 am
My Prediction = Correct
"They’ve got you too!" he cried. "They got me a long time ago," said O’Brien" (Orwell 239)
In the blog where I created a following chapter I showed how the book would continue, where Winston would be betrayed by O'Brien. After that blog I continued reading and the idea of O'Brien being the betrayer was growing in my mind, so when I finally got to the Part 3 of the book and saw that my predictions were right, I got even more into the book trying to unveil the truth of that society.
So I could understand how Winston could be feeling I tried placing myself in his place and asking myself a question, What would I feel if the person that I would be placing all my trust on would betray me?
I realized that I would feel really bad not just for being betrayed but also for being tortured by that same man. As Liz posted this chapters can be compared to the tortures that were occurring during the "Ditadura Militar" in Brazil, where people were being brutally beaten up for information. Also another comparison of both the Brazilian regime and the novel is that some of the tortured people would start loving the torturers for their minds aren't thinking clearly. For example, the torturer leaves you starving for awhile and when he comes back with food you see him as a "good hearted" torturer and starts feeling something for him. Winston shows that he starts loving O'Brien for the fact that he stops the pain that he is causing making it ironical to think about but true in reality.
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Tiago Fonseca
4/10/2013 07:23:51 am
Prompt #3
Misery
No one likes being alone, people feel miserable, and they feel like Atlas with the weight of the world crushing their shoulders. Winston was a rebel at heart, and since he was alone in his cause he felt the need to have some backup. Going up against the Big Brother and The Party is a monumental task, one that brings a lot of pressure, and stress, therefore it is obvious that Winston wanted someone to share the load, to take some of this weight of him, “ ‘You knew this Winston,’ said O’Brien. ‘Don’t deceive yourself. You did know it – you have always known it’ ” (Orwell 238). Winston convinced himself that O’Brien was someone he could trust, even though he knew it was a mistake. He had already convinced himself he was going to fail that he sabotaged himself. It became irrelevant if he could trust O’Brien or not he gave up on the cause before he even started to fight for it. Julia was just another way of taking out a bit of the pressure, because misery loves company, and I believe he only allowed his relationship with Julia happen as a way to enjoy his last moments. They admitted themselves that they were dead, and the time they spent with each other was a way to find some relief. Now Winston is suffering exactly what he wanted, if he knew O’Brien was not to be trusted, and he still did it, then the cause was lost since the beginning. If he had more confidence then maybe, he could have caused an important impact on the world.
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Gabriella Goldenstein
4/10/2013 08:48:44 am
"How many fingers, Winston?"
"Four! Stop it, stop it! How can you go on? Four! Four!"
"How many fingers, Winston?"
"No Winston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are four. How many fingers, please?"
"Five! Five! Five! Anything you like. only stop it, stop the pain" (Orwell 250).
This section was definitely the most disturbing yet and the scene described in the passage above was even more upsetting. This is when Winston "gives up" on his beliefs and trusts O'Brien unconditionally, with no reason for doing so. He agrees to admit something he does not believe because he is feeling pain and he can't bear it any longer. Before this he did the same, he confessed crimes he hadn't commit for the sake of his protection. Alike Liz, I couldn't help but associate this section to the brazilian dictatorship where the oppressive government had the same tools as the Party: torture. This extreme physical pain is the way dictatorships find to control people, by punishing them the worst way they can. This quote also reveals how Winston is already lost and his thought crimes can't be hidden any longer. Even when he says he is seeing five fingers O'Brien knows what is really going through his head. This shows how minds are in fact controlled by the Party. When Parsons tells Winston that he was caught while he was sleeping I was also shocked. The poor man simply dreamt about the Party and ended up speaking while sleeping and was sent to the Ministry of Love. Worst of all, his daughter was the one to tell on him. This is another proof that the concept of family is completely different from the one we are used to. Parson's own daughter was controlling him, there is no way to find freedom.
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Leonardo
4/10/2013 09:14:30 am
A Military Dictatorship
Reading chapter two, made me feel very uncomfortable on the chair I was sitting. I couldn’t stop changing positions all the time. O’Brien just went on and on with the torture, making it more intense every paragraph. My body shoulders contorted and I felt and emptiness in my stomach... Really...
This part made me think of an era my grandparents lived here in Brazil: the military dictatorship. Just like in 1984, Brazil was taken over by fear, and the military had no mercy at all to torture and maltreat our population, who just wanted a better place to live in and express themselves... The torture however, had slightly different purpose, because besides fearing the citizen, it was used to extract some information (this, of course, was not as needed because of all the incredible spying and the whole “big brother is watching you” in Oceania).
“He had never loved him so deeply as at this moment,. and not merely because he had stopped the pain. The old feeling. that at bottom it did not matter weather O’Brien was a friend or enemy, had come back.” (252)
WHOOOOOOOAAAAAAA. What did I just read? That quote really made me stop, but after thinking for a while, I begun to understand more about Winston’s reaction. He was tortured “to the edge of lunacy”, and besides, his world had been torn apart. All of what he thought was true, was no longer true, and everyone who he believed were reliable, were no longer reliable. He lost his perspective in life completely. That moment was the process of restarting his own life. He didn’t know what to believe, where he should hold on. Along with that, we know that torture makes people confess and surrender their beliefs and thoughts because of the infinite pain.
But why did it make him love O’Brien? It is really creepy what I am going to say here, but there is research that proves it, and it was actually a topic discussed in Gerson’s class. Some people tend to develop a love relationship with the person who tortures. It is not masochism, but the loneliness and the impotence of the moment. Pages before, the narrator describes how Winston laid like a baby under O’Brien’s arms. He was the only support Winston had at that moment. It is crazy to think about that, but at this moment of such pain and suffering, anyone, anything can help him. At that point, Winston just wanted to survive, and his body would surrender anything to bring his life back.
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Leonardo
4/10/2013 09:27:54 am
(Orwell, 252)
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Julia Souza
4/10/2013 10:38:41 am
PROMPT #4
Love is Pain
Dear Diary,
This will most likely be my last entry and I know I shouldn’t even be writing this one, however it probably doesn’t even matter what I do right now since I am dead already.
Is it possible that love is pain? Is that one more of the Party’s mottos? Ever since I arrived in this room in which the lights are always on, I have been through so much physical pain that it is starting to affect my emotions. The pain has led my love for O’Brien to grow even more. I know he is a party member and should probably be regarded as an enemy by myself, but he holds the power of stopping my pain and so I worship him. His capability to inflict pain has led to an extraordinary emotional power over me. “He is the tormenter, he is the protector, he is the inquisitor, he is the friend” (Orwell 244). Perhaps this is one more of the methods utilized by the Party to control the citizens. Pain not only leads to love, but the fear of it also allows the Party to manipulate our minds. I know “I must hold out till the pain becomes unbearable. But three more kicks, two more kicks, and then I will tell them what they want” (Orwell 240).
My memories are now starting to fade away, but I remember once when altering one of the Times articles that there were cases during the dictatorship in Brazil that those who were tortured ended up caring and growing attached to their torturers. The position of being able to harm someone empowers that person.
Oh! Diary! I do not know what is happening to me. My memories are not the same and I am weak and afraid. The only certainty I have is that we have always been at war with Eastasia…
Goodbye,
Winston
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Nilo
4/10/2013 12:00:32 pm
MISUDERSTANDING
“One question at any rate was answered. Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase of pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes, no heroes, he thought over and over as he writhed on the floor, clutching uselessly at his disabled left arm.” (Orwell 515)
Winston does make a very solid point, physical pain is awful, but I believe that is due to the conditioning made by the Party. I believe that emotional pain is much worse than physical pain, and perhaps Winston would agree as well, but he is unable to comprehend. The Party has created a society where there is only hate and anger. Winston is unable to feel, or even comprehend, the anguish that can take over the heart. He could be fearful that Julia is suffering; he cannot understand the pain of being kept away from someone he loves. One question then, must be answered: does his statement of specifically, physical pain, being the worse thing in the world, go to show that he does not understand the pain that can occur within the mind, due to the Party’s strong control over thought and emotion? This is like Brave New World, where Lenina is unable to comprehend the concept of love. She would only want sex, but John was always looking for love. Winston’s statement is also him being unable to grasp the concept of inner, rather than outer, pain.
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Ale Silveira
4/10/2013 01:53:36 pm
Theoretically you're not supposed to diagnose a fictional character with a real disease because there is no form or manner to prove the initial assumption, then again I argue that Winston is not a fictional character. Winston is a symbol of all political prisoners in the world today, on both sides of the diplomatic spectrum. The same way that he was tortured beyond comprehension with the finger trick, thousands of others are tortured through other psychological and physical pains. Earlier in the novel it is mentioned that war is not fought only with soldiers, but in order to maintain peace within Nineteen Eighty-Four there are also psychological measures, such as the Thoughtpolice to regulate the society.
“He had never loved him so deeply as at this moment,. and not merely because he had stopped the pain. The old feeling. that at bottom it did not matter weather O’Brien was a friend or enemy, had come back.” (Orwell 252)
From my shallow understanding of what I believe Winston has in this given moment, I am sure that he felt the way he felt as a result of Stockholm Syndrome, where the prisoner has positive feelings for their captors, which is seen as a form of traumatic bonding. He feels that way because in the end he knew, as stated O'Brien, that it would all go wrong, he knew he was in the wrong given that context, he knew he couldn't blame O'Brien for something he knew all along but wished to ignore. O'Brien is the product of his environment. Winston is the result of his own mental state of mind.
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Gaëlle
4/10/2013 02:05:00 pm
This is a perfect time to answer Prompt #5
Shooting for death
At this time, I would like to be the Director of the movie 1984. First of all, the setting of the filming would take place in a cell/room much like the rooms described in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, that is, an exaggeratedly white room, with very bright white lights, a high ceiling, and white porcelain bricks. There would be barely any windows, but no light would appear from them in order not to veil what time of day it was. The prisoners would have desolate, fearful, starving and anxious look on their meager faces so as to represent their terror "of speaking to anybody, and above all of speaking to one another" (Orwell 228). I do not believe that such details as Ampleforth's appearance would be granted a scene since I wish to focus more on the action and torture scenes where the revelations happen. Nevertheless, I would add a scene with Parsons entering the cell, and meeting Winston, in order to portray the gravity of the children's loyalty to the Party and the devaluation of family. I would make the scene of Winston in the white room seem endless and I would show a razor blade appear next to Winston as if it were a dream, and he were hallucinating.
In the scene with Winston and O'Brien, I would make Winston seem to be a very gullible person, unsuccessfully fighting against his own excessive credibility. I would display O'Brien as a confident man that hides a "hidden agenda," a man like a double agent. The moment Winston gets hit by the guard's truncheon, I would make the lights in the scene look yellow to represent Winston's agony and to make it seem as if "nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain" (Orwell 239). After that hard blow, I would make Winston seem as if he could not conjecture properly, forgetting things from time to time. The interrogators would be represented as "little rotund men with quick movements and flashing spectacles" (Orwell 241).
At some point, during O'Brien's torturous interrogations, I will represent him as having "the air of a doctor, a teacher, even a priest, anxious to explain and persuade rather than to punish" (Orwell 245). I will try to show how Winston's worship towards O'Brien is a consequence of mental manipulation which gets Winston into believing that O'Brien is "curing" him. Winston's credibility will augment as the pain and torture augments, and I will show all the details of Winston's facial expressions during the torture sessions. Hopefully, Winston's volatile emotions will also be able to be seen through the close filming of Winston's face.
The filming overall will have a large emphasis on manipulation, credulity, torture, and action. Facial expressions will be a key thing to pay attention to while watching my version of 1984!
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Alana Cavalcanti
4/10/2013 04:20:17 pm
Ignorance is strength? Ignorance is indeed strength. We can clearly see the strength of the proles, the ignorant ones, when they demonstrate they are not afraid to fight against the prison guard, write in walls, yell back to the telescreen and smuggle in food. “ "Do anything to me!" he yelled. "You've been starving me for weeks. Finish it off and let me die. Shoot me. Hang me. Sentence me to twenty-five years. Is there somebody else you want me to give away? Just say who it is and I’ll tell you anything you want. I don't care who it is or what you do to them. I've got a wife and three children. The biggest of them isn't six years old. You can take the whole lot of them and cut their throats in front of my eyes, and I'll stand by and watch it. But not Room 101!" “ (Orwell 236), I honestly hoped from the bottom of my heart that this was Winston reaction to the entire situation not Parsons. Well, Winston is the type of character that loves to disappoint me. He impressed me in a extremely negative way, but I still have a weird kind of hope he will not disappoint me in the end (time is ticking and pages are going and he better do something worth it). He can’t even get food out of his pocket and eating it because a screen is telling him not to do so. He sits in silence and tries not to move at all. Where is the militant and rebellious Winston that we knew? The ignorance of the proles gave them the liberty to express and have the rebellious attitude that I was hoping Winston had. At the same time I was kind of disappointed with Winston, I was thinking about how since his passion and desire for rebellion never had a strong basis, it was reasonable not to expect him reacting in a rebellious way.
The idea of being tortured torments any human being. By leaving Winston waiting and thinking was probably the worst kind of torture. Thinking you are being remembered and if people know about your current situation probably is not a situation no one wants to face. In the whole torture thing, I could only imagine the concentration camps in Iraq or Guantanamo Bay, since they are the ones that absorve information and make the people admit crimes that they haven’t commited. But what made me relate to these concentration camps is the fact that there are some people that are released and actually “change sides” and that was O’Brien’s main goal. Once more I am disappointed in these chapters! This time was with O’Brien reply regarding The Book, when stating that the proletarian rebellion is nonsense. Please Orwell, prove him wrong! But right after the disappointed, Orwell impressed me with the comparison of the Party to the German Nazi and Russians (just like I did in a previous post!) and though it was interesting that what made the Party superior was the fact that there is no illusion of equality. I agree with this due to the fact that what is always the reason appointed by historians is that the ones in power often pretend that there is a sense of equality but do not abide to their own rules and since the Party is not doing that they wont have this issue.
PS:O’Brien saying that he likes Winston due to the fact he reminds of himself honestly Orwell couldn’t be more cliché right?
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Andrea
4/11/2013 03:44:22 am
Don´t forget the human in humanity
O’Brien, the man that brought hope of some kind of change, made Winston believe that is was actually possible to rebel against the Party, is a traitor. I knew it all along! Winston was too naïve to trust O’Brien, and even to trust Julia. They live in a society where people are not friends and don’t even talk to each other. Why would O’Brien be an exception? The Party has the power, and according to these chapters O’Brien seems to have an important role in maintaining the Party. We never know whether he is a friend or enemy with Winston, the only things we know about O’Brien are what Winston thinks about him. This situation is somewhat scary and unreliable because we will never know what was true or not. Winston may be an unreliable narrator, especially after all of the tortures and furthermore his perceptions about Oceania may be completely manipulated by the Party. It is possible that Orwell’s authorial intent is to fake Winston´s reliability to make the reader fall into the hands of the Party without even noticing.
This leads to a very philosophical question of what is true, what can you believe in, and how will an individual judge what reality is. As O’Brien tortures Winston he says that by torturing him he will be curing Winston from his insanity. But, why does O’Brien judge Winston to be insane? As a reader, the only sane character is, in fact, Winston. He is able to reason, to think by himself, he is the only one that seems to be “free”. In O’Brien´s point of view, Winston is insane because he thinks that there is a reality beyond the one the Party establishes. For him, the reality is what the Party says it is. However, how can we decide what reality actually is? O´Brien mentions that reality is in your head. He tells Winston that he could float off the floor like a soap bubble, but he doesn’t do that because the Party does not wish it to happen. However, if each one has its own reality, then how can the Party maintain its power over all realities?
It is only in the alternative reality that Big Brother has power. For example, every time Winston was with Julia, his reality was to have fun, to discover, and to enjoy life; he even thought of a possible reality where a rebellion would occur. Once he was working, and he knew that he was watched, his reality was another one. Walking in the streets, at work, at lunch, he would behave how the Party judged it would be “orthodox”. Winston lived two (or even more) realities at once. There is no absolute reality. How can I tell someone that what I did yesterday was real, if the other person did not experience it? Each individual sees the world in a different way, and even though we each see it alone, we are all together.
We, humans, are connected by our humanity. By love. By happiness. By friendships. By emotions. By experiences. By all “the subjective expressions of human consciousness”. We can’t forget, after all, that we are all humans. It may be hard to think that we are all alone, and while comparing each individual to the universe, we are no more than a particle of dust. It is inevitable, each human depends on the other to live. I want to believe that humans are born “good”, that we understand that the “other” comes first than the “I”. This novel is by no means revealing this message. The Party wants power because it wants power, not because it wants “good”.
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Daniel Pinho
4/11/2013 10:35:38 am
A shade of green
I do not have words to explain what I am feeling about everything that’s happening right now at the book. Everything is just a melting pot of ideas all mixing up together in a boiling, viscous, obscure substance that I am sure what it is and, at the same time, don’t. I was so overwhelmed with this reading that my sleep was lightly uncomfortable – it is really, really hard to take out of sleep – and the first thought I had as soon as I was conscious that I was awaken, probably since I was dreaming about it, was that I was being tortured. My body, uneasy, uncomfortable, firm, was lying like a corpse in a coffin on my own bed. It was only after a few minutes that I could see that I was not dead or in pain, but just physically agonized with Winston’s suffering. It was only then that I could blink a few times just to understand that I had a life, that I could breathe in some air into my lungs and finally release my body out of tension and discomfort. I got up noticing that my arms were attached to my thighs and hips. I loosen them off as how a mummy would get out of its sarcophagus, probably having some dust coming out from my joints, got out of bed and went on to pluck my day.
Now, refreshed from every pessimism and negativity that the chapters might and will expose to everyone who reads it and kind of away from the inner submersion that a deep and eloquent writing like the book’s has, I am able to make a conclusion.
My conclusion, thus, is that I am a, as oxymoronic – or doublethinkistic – as it may sound, I am an optimistic solipsistic. One of that reasons is that I can bite all the truth that O’Brien talks about in the torture. What are we if not what we perceive as world? We feel, we think, we do based on everything that is in shock with what we have as frame of reference. We are alone in a mystical atmosphere of oblivion, where everything is by not being. In other words, what we know is only an estimated illusion we naturally do in order to have some sort of assimilation, to have some sort of meaning. We talk to friends, we have family, we all love and procreate based on the selfish desire of not being alone, not being forgotten, not falling into oblivion. However, and that’s the reason it is oxymoronic, I don’t think it is a pessimistic thing to be alone. It is good to be essentially something unique, the minority of one. And thus it is even better to be able to express this uniqueness to other creatures that probably like us -- since they are also mere “us in our own image”, which we’ve created to subdue to our lonesome – get bothered by similar things and can assimilate to similar ideas. That being said, the world is whatever we want it to be. The way we perceive things is how the world will be, and being able to alter that is up to us, as free is up to us in our heads. The only problem, specifically directing to 1984, is that the Party had made it difficult for the people to think otherwise. They had manipulated things to be always slanted for their purposes since they are using physical torture to infiltrate men’s minds – as O’Brien is probably doing to Winston. Or at least, Winston thinks or we are manipulated to think that this world is this way.
We are the others just like they are ourselves. We are part of everything and everything is part of us. If we are capable of twisting reality on our own minds spontaneously for something we want to believe, THIS is the ideal. Not lie to ourselves, but consciously comprehend life in a new way, different from what the “default setting” says us to. For example, this “default setting” would be the crude stuff, what you perceive without questioning – your senses, your surroundings. What you question, think, express and comprehend from others’ experiences after receiving the synaptic information is what you know extra. This extra can be infinite and thus can be infinitely adjusted to you. And you are what you want to perceive. It’s up to you.
For this reason, I see O’Brien as a hallucination of Winston’s self. He is Winston because, just like any other being under the idea presented by O’Brien of solipsism, everything is a manifestation out of mind. He is almost omniscient by knowing everything Winston is thinking. There is no evidence that O’Brien is physically there. He seems there, but it could perfectly be Winston’s manifestation of failure acting in a scenario of desperation. He’s frantic, hysterical, in pain; everything went to chaos from day to night – which he doesn’t even know what it is anymore. There is the possibility of assuming that, and that’s what I believe.
Moreover, the reality Winston is living is nothing but the reproduction of what we craved for the whole time. If he succeeded with the Brotherhood, he could &ndash
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Daniel Pinho
4/11/2013 10:36:25 am
– regarding the questions he answered – be doing the same thing that is being done to him right now; being thus another reason that proves my point of O’Brien being Winston himself or that “you can’t fight fire back with more fire”.
The description of the chinless man when he knew that he was going to be directed to the Room 101 was the following: “The man’s face, already very pale, turned a colour Winston would not have believed possible. It was definitely, unmistakably, a shade of green. (Orwell 294). Winston chose the shade of his green – from the infinite shades there possible -- and now he is living the consequence of that choice.
Torture is the means through which the human mind is controlled in Nineteen Eighty-Four. We see it, more evidently than ever, in the chapters of part Three. Winston’s extensive mental and physical torture reveals the lengths to which the authoritarian State will go to dominate the minds of the population.
The reason why Winston bends over and betrays his ideals is first mentioned when he realizes that “of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes” (Orwell 239). Throughout the whole process of mental isolation, forced confession, electrical and physical punishment, and rehabilitation he is threatened with the possibility of experiencing pain. It is that possibility that drives him over the edge and breaks him.
These chapters make me think about the torture and misery of our own world. How is Guantanamo Bay different from the Ministry of Love? In both, individuals are tortured to no end, based on mere suspicions and without any sort of due process. It is appalling that we still see marks of authoritarianism in our society, which claims to give freedom and opportunity to all people. Orwell’s description of the use of torture to exert control is a powerful advice of what may follow if we keep threading this path.
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Marina Oliveira
4/21/2013 01:01:28 am
"Power is power over human beings"
"It was a sound-track of the conversation he had had with O'Brien, on the night when he had enrolled himself in the Brotherhood. He heard himself promising to lie, to steal, to forge, to murder, to encourage drug-taking and prostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases, to throw vitriol in a child's face" (Orwell 270).
In this quote O'Brien shows how Winston is not morally superior to the Party. Even though this was a technique to break him, it demonstrates how any type of revolution is not morally supported. These chapters also show that what fuels the immoral revolutions is the control kept over human mind, which is stated by O'Brien, "We control matter because we control the mind" (Orwell 265). As it is also highlighted by O'Brien that "every human being is doomed to dies, which is the greatest of all failures" (Orwell 264), it shows how human weakness lies in death, and if anyone has the power to control that they have the power over their matter. Despite all the pressure maintained in Winston it surprised me that he still said that "to die hating them, that was freedom" (Orwell 281). Though I question, when you die, no matter what you believe in, in a world where memory is erased and the truth altered, wouldn't it be in vain? As Winston enters room 101 I don't believe he will be killed, since in my opinion the Party's ultimate goal is to crack his ideals and corrupt his mind.
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