Blog #5: Pages 220-End

I can not believe the ending to this book. I’m actually pretty perturbed. So O’Brien continued to interrogate and torture Winston, but for some reason Winston continually thought of him as some sort of God who was so amazing and could be looked up to. Even when he had lost 25 kilograms from starvation and was looking at himself in the mirror, he still admired O’Brien. He began to be put through sessions of ‘therapy’ almost by O’Brien where he would be tortured into thinking like doublethink. At one point he actually thought that 2 plus 2 was five because that is how the party felt. Eventually, they took him into room 101 which is supposed to put you through your worst nightmare. For Winston that was having rats eat his face. The turning point though was when they were so close to him he felt he would pass out, he told O’Brien to do it to Julia instead. That was when the ministry knew they had broken him and he could be released. He went on to live his life with money, a job, a lot of alcohol, and lost memories, eventually leading up to him truly loving big brother. I can’t think of a text to text reference for this last section because it is so messed up. I don’t think I have ever read a book that has made me feel this weird about the potential of human beings and how they can completely change others. This text is definitely a classic because it not only was written forever ago, but has ideas in it that have persisted into future literature and literary references. Big Brother is mentioned quite often, but not only that - futuristic totalitarian societies are very prevalent in stories now a days. I think at the time 1984 was definitely one of the first books to create a futuristic fictional society like this and it was so crazy at the time, but now people think about these possibilities every day. A person to text reference though is impossible in this section. I think that the thing that really bugged me about it was by the end of the book, when Winston was taken away from the Ministry of Love he began to have memories of the past, but he told himself that they were unreal and he had made them up, and he truly believed it. He became the exact person he had not wanted to become, a true follower of the party, an un intelligent human being - no longer a man - who believed what he was told, a believer of Big Brother.