lizbee | (Reply)

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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.

He does, actually, but it's kinda... buried and implied in the appendix.

Basically, because Newspeak fails to "take" and replace English (ref. the subplot about the "revised dictionary" in the book), historical literature is still available, and thus the Party's mission to basically reshape the populace's psyche into unthinking compliance never comes to pass. So the "hope to hang one's hat on" is a refusal to reduce the world to simplistic black-and-white terms, a refusal to abandon constructs like love and family, a refusal to abandon art and literature and history, and so on.

It's also worth remembering there were apparently two different editions of 1984 with two different endings in circulation in Orwell's lifetime; one in which Winston is "broken" and one in which he isn't. Its unknown which printing is the "correct" one---the more depressing ending is the most common in circulation now, but notably not the version that, for example, the film was based on---but Orwell did make statements to the effect he'd intended the book to have a less bleak ending that most people took it to have. It's also worth remembering that Winston himself is a member of the Party, and so is pretty much everyone he interacts with, an thus is an unreliable narrator. There are plenty of hints throughout the book that Party ideology is not particularly prevalent or accepted among the proles, for example, thus leading to an eventual revolution and overthrow of Ingsoc.

(Sorry to tl;dr, but I have Strong Opinions on this book and how I think it's done very dirty by forcing schoolkids to read it... Ditto Lord of the Flies, for that matter. D:)