ENGLISH LITERATURE II NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR

JUAN MANUEL BARRA GUTIÉRREZ

ENGLISH LITERATURE II

NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR

Today we are going to hear about George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, an novel about life in a dictatorship as lived by Winston Smith, an intellectual worker at the Ministry of Truth, and his degradation in the totalitarian government of Oceania, the state in which he lives in the year that he presumes is 1984.

I will be talking to you about one important aspect along the novel, which is the diary in which Winston, the protagonist of the novel, writes the feelings and sensations, he feels everyday, and describes his dreams.

The first entry in Winston’s diary is a record of irresistible excitement and, at the same time, of his resistance, as the hidden memory gradually comes to the surface. What he is trying to describe is a scene from a war film he had just seen, in which a Jewish mother holds a child in her arms. We can find this example on page 10, when he says:

“…little boy screaming with fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting her arms around him and comforting him although she was blue with fright herself…then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in among them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood”.

The entry is interrupted because at this point Winston is still torn between the Party’s attitude, inhuman attitude to personal love and loyalty and an emotional reaction he cannot yet articulate.

The interrupted scene will be complete itself in Winston’s mind. It is quite obvious that it was the protecting gesture of the mother’s arm in the film which causes Winston’s excited reaction, and which now works its way further in the dreams, in the form of a nightmare.

The only moment in which Winston can be free is when he is dreaming. In that moment he is not controlled by the telescreen and by the Party. It is in that moment when he feels happiness because he remembers his past life and, what is more important, he remembers his family.

We can see an example of that on page 31, when Winston is dreaming of his mother:

“At this moment his mother was sitting in some place deep down beneath him with his young sister in her arms. He did not remember his sister at all, except as a tiny, feeble baby, always silent, with large, watchful eyes…He was out in the light and air while they were being sucked down to death, and they were down there because he was up here. He knew it, and he could see the knowledge in their faces… the knowledge that they must die in order that he might remain alive, and this was part of the unavoidable order of things”.

As the dreaming probes deeper into the submerged memory of the past, Winston comes to understand something about his guilt, and about the emotional and moral significance

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