witchcraft
it's too painful to live but I'm too afraid to die
- Nov 27, 2024
- 118
It doesn't help that I'm trying to take a steroid my doctor prescribed me to see if it'll help resolve this back pain; it's unfortunately making me quite anxious. Talk about the worst possible time to read this book. Thankfully the medication doesn't have a super long half-life, so I'll be fine by tomorrow, just won't take any more of it.
Anyway, I just needed to vent about this damn book. If you care at all about SPOILERS for 1984 by George Orwell, I highly suggest you stop reading here, sorry.
If you know of an anime, a book, or something that might lift my spirits after this experience, please share lol.
....
I hate the ending, not because it's poorly written but because of how genuinely depressing it is. I identified with Winston for pretty much the entire story up until he's finally cracked. I wanted him to succeed. I wanted him to somehow reunite with Julia when they were still mostly themselves; that perhaps there might be a way to live as something approximating a real human under Big Brother's nose, even though they can't actually overthrow the government. At heart, I'm a hopeless romantic, so this was like getting a free kick in the nuts with my punch to the gut.
I hate O'Brien. I hate Big Brother. But the book does a really great job of demonstrating that there is no reasoning with an actual full-blown lunatic, a true madman who has their hand on the dial and can torture you at any moment. In other words, a madman with nigh complete power. O'Brien might as well be Big Brother himself. He wrote the book by "Goldstein" after all, nothing more than a great big psyop. I suppose the silverlining here is that we would still consider this entrapment in the real world. So we're not there yet.
Thankfully, I guess, it is heavily implied albeit not overtly stated that Big Brother and Ingsoc are overthrown in the book's appendix. The dystopia is spoken of in the past-tense. So it's a very sad ending for Winston in the story-proper, but beyond that we are given some context that he was ultimately right: somehow, that son-of-a-bitch O'Brien, Big Brother, the whole damn thing failed.
I think that given who George Orwell was, what he had seen and personally experienced, and how he was quite literally dying while writing this book, the fact that there is any degree of optimism is surprising and certainly appreciated by this reader.
Even so, 1984 is not only depressing but a bit terrifying. Not just because I do see some parallels to the real-world (I thought about listing them but that would be unnecessary, anyone who has read this book likely already knows). I also just realized: where did Winston first get the thought "we will meet in the place where there is no darkness." O'Brien recognizes this line as if he had coined it himself, literally setting-up Winston to say it when they meet. Or perhaps it's something that the Thought Police use in their subliminal messaging through the telescreens or whatever.
This is a book that I will never read again because I will never have to. It'll stay with me, like any excellent work of art, for life. I am referring to the lessons or intellectual takeaways than my current emotional state—the sinister thing about anxiety is that it likes to make you anxious about being anxious and worry that it'll never pass. Speaking just for myself of course. Anyway, this was not a great book for me to read, being prone to both anxiety and depression, generally neurotic. But I understand and appreciate why it is considered an important classic, even timeless in many ways.
The silverlining, the unstated message that I think is buried by the very dark ending for Winston and Julia, is that such a system will inevitably collapse. It is foreshadowed when Winston, paraphrasing, basically tells O'Brien that he does not know how, he cannot convincingly articulate why, but Big Brother will one day be no more. If I had to speculate, a governing system, a society predicated on a collective solipsism cannot stand. It will fail because it ignores the outside world. A foundation built on sand is not somehow magically made strong by absolutely deluding itself into actually believing that, no, I am not on sand.
Do we actually know for certain that the outside world is as O'Brien describes it, or described in Oceania's "news"? We don't. We can't. The plot is so completely lost, no pun intended, that O'Brien even says that if he says he can levitate, and can more or less force Winston to genuinely agree, that O'Brien will have levitated. There is no means of proving whether something happened or not because that relies on an external scientific method of validation, some kind of objective or meta-subjective(?) reality that can be appealed to. Not trying to sound smarter than I am here... All I'm saying is that anything or nothing can be "real" in this fictional scenario, because anything can go from being "real" to being "not real" on a whim. It's plain madness.
In addition, if the Thought Police like O'Brien are the ones behind Goldstein and the book, then they are also the ones behind propagating the idea of a Brotherhood, a rebellion, a figure like Goldstein who might inspire others like Winston. While this seems to be with the intention of eradicating anyone so much as susceptible to going against Big Brother, I think it makes the Thought Police / Big Brother a danger to itself. The paranoia that it breeds, not unlike Stalin's purges, is likely at least part of its own undoing.
The other part, as I already mentioned, is that it is completely out-of-touch with reality. At a certain point nobody knows if the war is being won or lost. All of the depressing "facts" in the book O'Brien wrote are not beyond questioning because, ironically, nothing can actually be said with certainty to be true or false. The reader, nor a single character in the story, can say whether the parades of war prisoners are actual war prisoners. Likewise, any depressing conclusions reached by Winston (even before his torture and transformation) are made inherently suspect by the fact that Winston can only barely imagine anything other than his life living in abject tyranny. Of course Winston's dreams are going to be, uh, naive dreams, when he's not busy feeling utterly hopeless.
Furthermore, it is dubious at best that Oceania is winning the war, or that (as O'Brien would have it) the war is just a silly, meaningless, almost make-believe game. Some kind of mutually agreed upon show with the other major countries. I would even say it is absurd to think that perpetual war is how to deal with the issue of abundance. And the fact that bombs dropping on Oceania cities are shown, heard, or otherwise repeatedly mentioned throughout the story, this seems to contradict the statements made by O'Brien / "Goldstein" that the war is just some thing that's taking place in faraway unimportant places, like the middle of an empty desert or somewhere at the North Pole.
In other words, upon reflection, I am starting to realize just how full of shit O'Brien is. It's just that Orwell makes it our job, the reader's job, because Winston isn't nor has ever been in a position to unravel these lies.
While I believe Orwell wrote this with Russia in mind, and perhaps to a lesser extent China, it seems to me that this has far, far more in common with what we know about North Korea. You have an even more overt Big Brother figure, and Oceania's portrayal of the rest of the world is very much akin to how North Korea portrays much of the rest of the world. I do not wish to go further into this because politics can rub people the wrong way. That's not my intention. So I will simply leave it there, I do not wish to start an argument or spark debate with anyone or between others, thank you. If anything, the more important point is for us to reflect on where we live right now, and our own lives.
It is sad to see the shells that both Winston and Julia become. They are reunited, but as shadows of their former selves. They might as well not even be the same people anymore, like embodiments of Ships of Theseus. It is sad that Julia was wrong about how there are parts inside of you that Big Brother cannot reach. It is sad to watch her rebellious spirit become utterly defeated and her beauty deliberately destroyed.
Anyway, I just needed to haphazardly share my thoughts. It helps alleviate my anxiety somewhat—in the midst of my venting I realized that perhaps there is a little bit more hope that is initially overshadowed by the awful ending. I hope that maybe one or two other people here have read the book and can relate to this. Unfortunately, on the flip-side it has only given me another good reason why my anxieties about the real world are generally well-founded. Big Brother, Ingsoc, a society where there is no truth, no concept of what's really real, and now we have AI which is progressing to a point where people can't tell what's real anymore.
Anyway, I just needed to vent about this damn book. If you care at all about SPOILERS for 1984 by George Orwell, I highly suggest you stop reading here, sorry.
If you know of an anime, a book, or something that might lift my spirits after this experience, please share lol.
....
I hate the ending, not because it's poorly written but because of how genuinely depressing it is. I identified with Winston for pretty much the entire story up until he's finally cracked. I wanted him to succeed. I wanted him to somehow reunite with Julia when they were still mostly themselves; that perhaps there might be a way to live as something approximating a real human under Big Brother's nose, even though they can't actually overthrow the government. At heart, I'm a hopeless romantic, so this was like getting a free kick in the nuts with my punch to the gut.
I hate O'Brien. I hate Big Brother. But the book does a really great job of demonstrating that there is no reasoning with an actual full-blown lunatic, a true madman who has their hand on the dial and can torture you at any moment. In other words, a madman with nigh complete power. O'Brien might as well be Big Brother himself. He wrote the book by "Goldstein" after all, nothing more than a great big psyop. I suppose the silverlining here is that we would still consider this entrapment in the real world. So we're not there yet.
Thankfully, I guess, it is heavily implied albeit not overtly stated that Big Brother and Ingsoc are overthrown in the book's appendix. The dystopia is spoken of in the past-tense. So it's a very sad ending for Winston in the story-proper, but beyond that we are given some context that he was ultimately right: somehow, that son-of-a-bitch O'Brien, Big Brother, the whole damn thing failed.
I think that given who George Orwell was, what he had seen and personally experienced, and how he was quite literally dying while writing this book, the fact that there is any degree of optimism is surprising and certainly appreciated by this reader.
Even so, 1984 is not only depressing but a bit terrifying. Not just because I do see some parallels to the real-world (I thought about listing them but that would be unnecessary, anyone who has read this book likely already knows). I also just realized: where did Winston first get the thought "we will meet in the place where there is no darkness." O'Brien recognizes this line as if he had coined it himself, literally setting-up Winston to say it when they meet. Or perhaps it's something that the Thought Police use in their subliminal messaging through the telescreens or whatever.
This is a book that I will never read again because I will never have to. It'll stay with me, like any excellent work of art, for life. I am referring to the lessons or intellectual takeaways than my current emotional state—the sinister thing about anxiety is that it likes to make you anxious about being anxious and worry that it'll never pass. Speaking just for myself of course. Anyway, this was not a great book for me to read, being prone to both anxiety and depression, generally neurotic. But I understand and appreciate why it is considered an important classic, even timeless in many ways.
The silverlining, the unstated message that I think is buried by the very dark ending for Winston and Julia, is that such a system will inevitably collapse. It is foreshadowed when Winston, paraphrasing, basically tells O'Brien that he does not know how, he cannot convincingly articulate why, but Big Brother will one day be no more. If I had to speculate, a governing system, a society predicated on a collective solipsism cannot stand. It will fail because it ignores the outside world. A foundation built on sand is not somehow magically made strong by absolutely deluding itself into actually believing that, no, I am not on sand.
Do we actually know for certain that the outside world is as O'Brien describes it, or described in Oceania's "news"? We don't. We can't. The plot is so completely lost, no pun intended, that O'Brien even says that if he says he can levitate, and can more or less force Winston to genuinely agree, that O'Brien will have levitated. There is no means of proving whether something happened or not because that relies on an external scientific method of validation, some kind of objective or meta-subjective(?) reality that can be appealed to. Not trying to sound smarter than I am here... All I'm saying is that anything or nothing can be "real" in this fictional scenario, because anything can go from being "real" to being "not real" on a whim. It's plain madness.
In addition, if the Thought Police like O'Brien are the ones behind Goldstein and the book, then they are also the ones behind propagating the idea of a Brotherhood, a rebellion, a figure like Goldstein who might inspire others like Winston. While this seems to be with the intention of eradicating anyone so much as susceptible to going against Big Brother, I think it makes the Thought Police / Big Brother a danger to itself. The paranoia that it breeds, not unlike Stalin's purges, is likely at least part of its own undoing.
The other part, as I already mentioned, is that it is completely out-of-touch with reality. At a certain point nobody knows if the war is being won or lost. All of the depressing "facts" in the book O'Brien wrote are not beyond questioning because, ironically, nothing can actually be said with certainty to be true or false. The reader, nor a single character in the story, can say whether the parades of war prisoners are actual war prisoners. Likewise, any depressing conclusions reached by Winston (even before his torture and transformation) are made inherently suspect by the fact that Winston can only barely imagine anything other than his life living in abject tyranny. Of course Winston's dreams are going to be, uh, naive dreams, when he's not busy feeling utterly hopeless.
Furthermore, it is dubious at best that Oceania is winning the war, or that (as O'Brien would have it) the war is just a silly, meaningless, almost make-believe game. Some kind of mutually agreed upon show with the other major countries. I would even say it is absurd to think that perpetual war is how to deal with the issue of abundance. And the fact that bombs dropping on Oceania cities are shown, heard, or otherwise repeatedly mentioned throughout the story, this seems to contradict the statements made by O'Brien / "Goldstein" that the war is just some thing that's taking place in faraway unimportant places, like the middle of an empty desert or somewhere at the North Pole.
In other words, upon reflection, I am starting to realize just how full of shit O'Brien is. It's just that Orwell makes it our job, the reader's job, because Winston isn't nor has ever been in a position to unravel these lies.
While I believe Orwell wrote this with Russia in mind, and perhaps to a lesser extent China, it seems to me that this has far, far more in common with what we know about North Korea. You have an even more overt Big Brother figure, and Oceania's portrayal of the rest of the world is very much akin to how North Korea portrays much of the rest of the world. I do not wish to go further into this because politics can rub people the wrong way. That's not my intention. So I will simply leave it there, I do not wish to start an argument or spark debate with anyone or between others, thank you. If anything, the more important point is for us to reflect on where we live right now, and our own lives.
It is sad to see the shells that both Winston and Julia become. They are reunited, but as shadows of their former selves. They might as well not even be the same people anymore, like embodiments of Ships of Theseus. It is sad that Julia was wrong about how there are parts inside of you that Big Brother cannot reach. It is sad to watch her rebellious spirit become utterly defeated and her beauty deliberately destroyed.
Anyway, I just needed to haphazardly share my thoughts. It helps alleviate my anxiety somewhat—in the midst of my venting I realized that perhaps there is a little bit more hope that is initially overshadowed by the awful ending. I hope that maybe one or two other people here have read the book and can relate to this. Unfortunately, on the flip-side it has only given me another good reason why my anxieties about the real world are generally well-founded. Big Brother, Ingsoc, a society where there is no truth, no concept of what's really real, and now we have AI which is progressing to a point where people can't tell what's real anymore.
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