1984 by George Orwell has many literary aspects to it. The specific ones to be analyzed are the if Winston is a hero, nostalgia, symbol of paperweight, conflict of truth, and the family dynamics of 1984. Winston is not the typical hero of the story that saves the people from oppression and tyranny. However, Winston isn’t a hero. A hero is supposed to face danger and overcome it through bravery and strength. Winston does not do that, quite the opposite is shown on page 286 when in midst of having rats unleashed on him, he screams, “Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you do to her.
Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia. Not me! ” (Orwell 286). Instead of face danger and overcome it, Winston cowardly reflects the danger onto someone he once loved for self-preservation. Quite early on in the hero’s journey Winston already fails to face danger and trials by throwing Julia under the bus to save himself. However early on Winston displays the traits of a hero in the story. In the beginning he “privately rebels against the totalitarian rule” (Litcharts 1) and begins to write in a journal to show the people the future what reality is and his distaste for the Party.
His private rebellion grows as he meets a girl named Julia in the Ministry of Truth. She falls and slips him a piece of paper that states: “I love you” on it. From there, Winston’s rebellion grows as he rebels by having an affair with Julia, as both also plan the overthrow of the Party. The group to overthrow the government grows again, proving that the story will build up to the destruction of the Party when Winston and Julia meet with O’Brien. O’Brien then gives Winston the weapon to help him through his trials against the government by giving Winston Goldstein’s book to read.
Now, Winston is captured and tortured and survived with his identity still intact the first time, showing the heroic ability to hold out amidst trials using the knowledge from Goldstein’s to keep him from defeat. Unfortunately, once again in the face of trials Winston in transformed and instead of saving the people of Oceana he becomes a normal citizen and the Party still reigns. Altogether, Winston does not have the traits to be the hero of 1984. A reoccurring symbol of 1984 is the feeling of nostalgia by Winston. A feeling of wanting to know how the past really was. This feeling of nostalgia returns in the details of the nursery rhymes that Winston loves… Winston’s choice to toast to the past when he visits O’Brien. “(Porter 3). When Winston saw the wine he was to drink, he thought that it had the same essence as the paperweight and reminded him of the past.
Winston, in his thoughts said ” it belonged to the vanished, romantic past, the olden time as he liked to call it in his secret thoughts. “(Orwell). Winston asks again and again a man at a bar about the past from page 88 to 92. For instance, he asks: “Would you say, from what you can remember, that life in 1925 was better that it is now, or worse? (Orwell 92). Winston wanted to know about the past enough that he paid for a man’s drinks and risked asking people about the past. At this time, people could be arrested for talking about a past different from the one the Party published. Winston was risking being killed or imprisoned by asking the man about life before the party. He desperately wanted to know. Winston’s glass paperweight symbolized Winston’s yearning to go to the past. “what appealed to him about it was not so much its beauty as the air it seemed to possess of belonging to an age different one. ” (Orwell 95).
As Winston and Julia are caught by the Thought Police, Winston’s hopes of finding the truth about the past were being broken and symbolically the paperweight was taken “from the hearthstone and smashed it into pieces. ” (Orwell 223). The paperweight broke meaning that Winston’s pursuit of the truth is over and will only be fed lies in the Ministry of Truth. A past life is shattered and now a new, worse life in the present begins for Winston. Whenever Winston was thinking about the past while writing his journal in the beginning of the book, he glanced at the paperweight. The paperweight was also one of a kind.
It symbolized that the past could never be again. It showed that the past was better and more beautiful than anything seen or made in the present world in Oceana. Winston marveled at its ancientness and beauty. Winston struggles trying to figure out what is truth and falsehood. On litcharts it is stated that: “Winston’s habit of introspection and self-analysis is to explore the opposition between external and internal reality, and between individual and collective identity. For example, Winston knows that 2 plus 2 is 4 but as he is told by O’Brien it is 5 and is tortured if Winston disagrees.
Internally, 2 and 2 is 4, externally he claims 2 and 2 is 5; Winston then faces a conundrum of fact and reality. After the torture, Winston remembers what Julia said to him before they were caught by the Thought police that “They can’t get inside you,’ she had said. But they could get inside you. What happens to you here is forever. ‘ O’Brien had said. ” (Orwell 290). Through the torturing from O’Brien, Winston is told that what he believes to be facts are lies, but Winston knows the facts are facts. However, after O’Brien is done with Winston he believes that 2 and 2 are 5 because the Party says so, not 4.
Winston couldn’t disseminate at that point if his memory was right or if it was wrong and that O’Brien was right. Winston’s id ego and super-ego impact his family dynamics. As Winston gets to know O’Brien, he thinks of O’Brien as a fatherly figure, as Winston’s own father left early on in his life. Winston looks to O’Brien for guidance and knowledge from page to 168 through178 as O’Brien beings to tell Winston and Julia about the Brotherhood.
Winston’s id wants to foolishly meet O’Brien and hope he can be Winston’s father figure, but his super-ego is autious about doing something as foolish as possibly exposing himself to the Thought Police. ‘Winston desires even a punitive intimacy with this figure, because a bad object is better than no object”(Porter 4). This shows that O’Brien is not a good father figure, but that is all Winston has to work with. O’Brien does lead Winston astray and tortures Winston for opposing views to the Party. Not much of a father there. “Winston also found in Julia a wife figure. Since Winston and his actual wife hadn’t met in years since failing to have a child.
Winston then needed to fill that gap in his unconscious needs and found the solution in Julia. Winston’s “pre-Oedipal harmony of impulse and the ego is represented by the little room that Winton and Julia rent in the proles’ quarter. They can retreat from responsibility to bed, and be loved. ” (Porter 4). As Winston and Julia love each other, they want to live together because that’s what you do with loved ones; you live with them. The room was also a place where they can be themselves and have no Big Brother watching their every move and thought.
From this quote, it is shown that the superego and id are formed together in the ego. Winston’s desire to be safe and his desire to be with Julia mesh at the pass that is the room they can stay in alone. A theme of 1984 is that whomever controls the present, controls what the past is. Winston’s job in the Ministry of Truth is to rewrite newspapers and publications. He rewrites them if the predicted something wrong or said something wrong so the Party is shown to always be right. This is shown in “Individual and Society” where the author states that “The Party controls everything.
They control the past: The Ministry of Truth erases and rewrites history at will. Citizens are forbidden to keep any a mementos or records of the past. ” (McLaughlin 1). If the people are not allowed to keep records of history, who then, can challenge the changed history? No one can because no soul but the party has proof of what happened and what is fake. Whatever history the Party wants to make, for instance, the Party claims there was nothing and nobody before them. However, this is false but because there are no records to contradict it, the people must accept it.
Another part of the book Winston is rewriting a person’s story because “Withers, however, was already and unperson. He did not exist. Winston decided that it would not be enough to simply reverse the tendency of Big Brother’s speech. ” (Orwell 46). The Party had the power to make people what they call “unpersons” where a person is killed by the Party so the person is then removed from any record so it would be as if said person never existed. Winston also has the ability to change history to how he deems it fit. What he writes is then put into official Party history and will be as if nothing different ever was created.
The truth being covered is also shown on page 75 where Winston talks about how the truth always gets covered up: “Everything was faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie was truth. ” (Orwell 75). Even the person who does the erasing is also forgotten. The truth will always fade away into a lie that is made concrete in history. The lie then is the only evidence and becomes truth and history changes again. The only truths that live through the Party are predictions and speeches that were correct (and corrupt) from the beginning. These elements and devices impact the message and experience of reading of 1984.
