lizbee | (Reply)

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Yeah. If you're starting the story with people broken, and then, give no sense that healing is possible, then what's the point of making me sit through this story?

The required reading of 1984 is going on 40 years ago, for me, and I've deliberately put as much of it as I could out of my head. But I recently came across an analysis of the book aimed at high school students that pointed out that since there's a glossary at the end of the book, explaining Winston's vocabulary, and that this glossary was written in the future. So therefore, the regime that Winston was living under must have been defeated. Therefore, the book is actually happy.

But since Orwell never showed us how civilization moved past that, that doesn't give the reader anything to hang their hope on, so to speak. There's no scaffolding or even architect's drawings to support that idea.