r/1984

I just finished reading the novel over a week ago and it still haunts me about the ending. the story feels really slow and boring during the first half until it introduce julia. I love her character its depressing that the party ruined her at the end. The Goldstien book part was really long but it delivers its message. The last third part kinda too dark too read. The last line of the novel disturbs me does winston truly accept bb or he just "love" bb just to end his suffering?

I'm not into books but I genuinely enjoy reading this novel and it will stay with me

I think we already live in a society-triggered 1984. TikTok culture of documenting tiny micro aggressions and posting it all over social media to dox people.

1984 is always described as something evil that the government does. It came in in a trojan horse with social media itself.

I was thinking about this earlier. Would the destruction of words ever stop? Will newspeak ever be finalized?

If not, would the language eventually be so stripped down that the party can’t fix problems anymore? What happens then?

I have a theory that the witch-hunt for thought criminals will never stop, as once a generation of party members grows up speaking nothing but newspeak, they will lack the critical thinking and vocabulary necessary to defend words from accusations of facilitating thought crime. Worse, any party member who tries may themselves commit thought crime in the process, and get vaporized. Thus the party never stops destroying words, until after centuries or millennia, there is no C vocabulary left, and the state wastes away.

The only way I could think of to prevent this would be to remove thoughtcrime from the newspeak dictionary. However, this would cause its own problems because in the centuries to millennia to come, without the thought police to enforce it, the language would gradually grow and evolve, making thoughtcrime possible again.

Just my two cents, any thoughts?

Been thinking what the Ministry of Love experience might look like for people other than Winston. We know that against all odds, Parsons also ended up there

While the obvious reason for his arrest was his alleged thoughtcrime, bringing people to the Ministry serves the Party to play out their power fantasies of breaking people. But what joy could they get from someone like Parsons who was already fully on board with the Party policies, whose crime was very likely a lie fabricated by his daughter? Considering he was glad she reported him, he's likely welcoming any punishment coming his way

Perhaps they'd make him betray his family? Despite his devotion to the party, he still seems attached to his kids at least

... for the despair and horror.

> ‘They can’t get inside you,’ she had said. But they could get inside you.

The idea that a person can be so completely unmade and remade, against their will. The monstrous regime doing it.

The fear it might be done in reality. The fear it might be done to me. I am horrified. Terrified.

Any romantic notions I had around the concept of distopia have been completely and entirely replaced by a suffocating feeling of dread.

Seeing the precious bond between Wilson Winston and Julia so effectively replaced by repulsion, struck me harder than anything else.

I struggled with the excerpts from 'Goldsteins book'. I generally immerse easily into stories, and perhaps a little too well lose myself in the characters of a book. The parts about society and political structures were clear enough, but when it started on topics of the mind, the concepts of crimestop, doublethink and the like I found myself catapulted out of immersion over and over again.

Maybe cognitive dissonance was making it impossible to suspend my disbelief. I don't know.

Sorry, this is rambly. I just had to write things down as a way to clear my head, distract from the despair and sadness. It has helped clear my head a little.

Embarrasingly, halfway through reading the story I started to doubt I had actually ever read it, or in it's entirety. Almost all memories in my head filed under the label '1984' seem to have come from a different story altogether. I interrupted reading this story and looked up some of my memories, trying to explain my confusion, and it turns out most of my memories stem from 'a brave new world'. I guess a reread of that book is in order next.

edit: finished A Brave New World, turns out the memories I attributed to 1984, were neither from 1984 nor A Brave New World, but some other distopian story in a futuristic setting. I distinctly remember emotions where effectively removed from the population. And the main character entered an emotionless relationship with a highly competent girl. I remember my teenage self being baffled by how matter of factly and emotionlessly she discussed how frequently they would be intimate.

It was about how the 3 superstates came to be.

In Eurasia's segment, it was stated that Beria founded the place (something like that), but after his peers discovered that he was a pedophile (which he really was), they quickly got rid of him.

It appeared that letting a Pedo run the state was seemed too much even for an orwellian society. So how do we call what we have now?

The 1965 BBC 'Theatre 625' version of 1984 (a part of "The World of George Orwell" adapted by Nigel Kneale) was long considered lost media until a copy was found in the US Library of Congress around 2010. Despite this it is still practically impossible to find. However, three months ago a link was posted in this subreddit to a YouTube upload of the film. Apparently it had been up for 7 months by that point with just 12 views (I believe the video ID was: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBXijxOQrOk) but has since become unavailable within the past 2 months or so. Did anyone archive this rare film? Or perhaps knows where it might be circulating? Thanks!

Original post link: https://www.reddit.com/r/1984/comments/1s4us3j/theater_625_1984_rare_film/

I've just finished the book. It's.....well, "dark" won't even begin to describe it fully. But in overall, it's amazing, as it gives you a lot to think about.

One thing still confuses me though...how was O'Brian able to know precisely what Winston was thinking during his "rehabilitation" in the Ministry of Love? Not guessing, not being close, not being right in overall, but straight up KNOWING what he was thinking.

I've read the book a few times now. I haven't watched any other media about it because I'm one of those people who believe movies usually can't or don't match the book. But what makes the book so good, in your opinion? It's obviously been cemented up there with the literary greats for years now, like Tolkien and Dickens, and I'm wondering what everybody thinks is the reason for that.