Don Incognito's Reviews > 1984

Am I the only reader who does believes 1984 should be read as a horror story, a nightmare, rather than as a sociopolitical prophecy to be taken at face value?

That would explain some aspects of the story: the mystery of the Party; the lack of depth to O'Brien; the absurd level of effort the Party puts into oppression; the invisibility of the "proles"; the mystery, distance and lack of substance to the war--the possibility that there is no war.

It would also serve to explain George Orwell's odd concept of human nature as relates to rulers. There is a reason no ruler or ruling party in thousands of years of history has put this much effort into eradicating individual thought: they don't care that much, not even the ones who use secret police. Basically, the Party represents man as Satan.

The novel is as much about Orwell's belief in human weakness and inadequacy. There's nothing to admire in Winston Smith. He's supposed to be ultimately pathetic. There's no depth to his affair with Julia, who is said to have have had affairs before. He does not believe in anything greater than himself: we know that because O'Brien asks Winston if he believes in God and Winston says no. I have no idea why such a man thought to join the (possibly non-existent) Brotherhood, except I seem to remember that O’Brien (posing as a Brotherhood agent) dangled the promise of resistance like bait, knowing Winston was gullible enough to bite. It serves partly to expose his character, in that he agrees without hesitation to do horrible things for the Brotherhood. (O'Brien uses a recording of this later to show Winston he cannot claim moral superiority.) Arguably, at no point does Winston actually try to resist O'Brien's psychological torture; and finally he's not strong enough to do the one thing that would dignify him and defeat O'Brien: choose his death by letting the rats eat him.

Finally, I noticed that Orwell had exactly the same view of the world as his contemporary and fellow writer William Golding, and even a relatively similar background and body of experiences. They were philosophical soulmates, really. It figures that while having completely unrelated and dissimilar plots, 1984 and Lord of the Flies share a great many elements: the same tone; the same view of man; a totalitarian government (in Lord of the Flies, it is Jack's brutal hunter tribe, which represents Communism); violence (though more in Lord of the Flies); and the triumph of evil.

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Review #2 - 10/29/2021

Being a Christian allows for a different perspective on 1984 that Orwell wasn't capable of. An ability to study it with detachment, due to our being in the world but not of it. The first thing one can notice from the Christian perspective is that it's is inherently an unbeliever's nightmare. Winston Smith versus Big Brother--a war between two unbelievers. One passionately declaiming in favor of the "boot stamping on a human face, forever" versus one who says simply "no" when asked whether he believes in God. Not our fight.

With the discernment I've been given, I eventually realized that given O'Brien's view of truth (that is, the Party's view), O'Brien and anything he says are not necessarily true, not necessarily what they seem. O'Brien claims on behalf of the Party that the Party controls truth, therefore truth is whatever the Party finds useful at any moment. Since a Christian knows that there is external truth and therefore that O'Brien's claim is false, all we have to do is take O'Brien's claim and apply it to O'Brien himself. Winston Smith himself never really tries that against O'Brien, because his limited powers of reasoning have been exhausted by O'Brien's torture. O'Brien taunts Winston that he has a poor grasp of metaphysics; but logical reasoning would have been more helpful than metaphysics here anyway.

O'Brien claims to be a member of the Inner Party and privy to various secrets; I am now skeptical of that. He apparently lives in a luxurious flat in the Party's exclusive neighborhood--but if he does, so what? All that means is the Party told him to live there, not that O'Brien is what he claims to be. O'Brien claims to have personally written at least some of the fake Emmanuel Goldstein book used to trap Winston and Julia. Who knows whether that's true in the slightest? Or his claim that the traitorous ex-Party apparatchiks Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford--whom Winston had seen in a photo he had once worked on--are dead, executed by the Party; and that he, O'Brien, personally helped interrogate them. How can one have any idea that Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford ever existed, much less died? Or, if they existed, that O'Brien ever actually met them?

Having made these conclusions, I made my own conjecture on who O'Brien actually is. I suspect that he's actually just a Party interrogator, and that everything he claims to be is only part of an act designed to lure thoughtcriminals and later, once they're arrested, to intimidate and break them. Indulge my Deep Space Nine reference: O'Brien is not Enabran Tain, he's Elim Garak posing as Enabran Tain. One of the reasons I suspect this is because it never made much sense to me that a high-ranking Inner Party member would interrogate a minor Party clerk like Winston who poses no practical threat. Would such a man not be too busy for that? Recall how very busy O'Brien appears to be when Winston and Julia visit his flat. Busy with paperwork that seemed to involve making and communicating decisions--O'Brien declared something "doubleplus ridiculous verging crimethink." (I keep finding that phrase amusing.) I believe the paperwork, and O'Brien's busyness, and the butler Martin and all other aspects, are part of an elaborate, staged set designed to convince thoughtcriminals like Smith that O'Brien is indeed an Inner Party member. So is O'Brien's quiet, grim demeanor during this scene. He's on the surface playing the part of a secret Brotherhood member recruiting people, but I'm suggesting that he is an actor playing a double role: an interrogator impersonating an Inner Party member in order to more effectively impersonate a Brotherhood member. And, again, moving on to the Ministry of Love torture scenes: I find it uncertain at best that O'Brien actually wrote the Goldstein book.

The final reason I'm skeptical of O'Brien's final claimed identity is an understanding of which people in a dictatorship's chain of authority tend to behave like O'Brien--fanatically. It's the enforcers more than the leaders; and that's the role O'Brien seems to be more clearly in, an enforcer. The leaders are just as often men like Mustapha Mond, the local ruler in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Mond is a rather liberal sort of authority settled on his government's rule and his position therein, but not fanatically devoted to it. Nothing like O'Brien--who insists on Smith's complete destruction and who claims to worship the "boot stamping on a human face, forever."