1984
“The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak.”
“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”
SpoilerAlert
I guess every rational thinker after reading the end of ‘1984’ falls into a pool of despondency and almost loses the vigour to read further i.e the Appendix- Principles of Newspeak which starts like this…
“Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism.”
I’ve read the book as a teenager and at that time everything felt crap to me, the concepts of ‘doublethink‘ or ‘artificial earthquakes’ didn’t really feel like dystopian but lunatic. But in the times we live the genre of the book feels contemporary yep definitely fictional but realistic fiction
I won’t talk about the book, there’s enough summaries available for it nor push it as a recommendation. It’s a masterpiece so you know.
Sometimes I feel the book is used more by institutions like Ingsoc as a ‘book of ideas’ than the Winston’s, Julia’s and Proletarians of the world for whom the book is written. The thing that has always fascinated me about the book is the ‘End’.
At first I used to believe it’s a hasty end concluded by a person suffering from TB. The author just didn’t want his thoughts to go waste as an incomplete #novel so he just wrapped it up but then he should have stood by the title, ‘The Last Man In Europe’. But then there’s the appendix which makes you believe in ‘1984‘.
Maybe just maybe the language did make the comrades of ‘Outer Party’ commit continuous ‘thoughtcrime‘ and somewhere down the line they got tired of torture, confessions, bringing everyone to Room 101. People like Parson had also committed a thoughtcrime in his sleep so maybe almost every member of Outer Party either got shot or the word of Winston came true that
‘It is impossible to found a civilization on fear and hatred and cruelty. It would never endure. It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide.’
And now the only people who remained were the proles and the Inner Party, and eventually as Winston said ‘If there was hope, it must lie in the proles’ and proletarians did get educated because of lack of comrades so eventually instead of a few nuclei of discontent who were marked down by Thought Police and eliminated, there was a swarm of discontent proles who thought and spoke ‘Oldspeak‘.
So ultimately the ruling power fell from power by the third way.
These are my thoughts….
Wonder if anything in contemporary times could happen this way. The one thing that I’m yet clueless about is the third sentence Winston wrote on the white slate.
#readingfatima
So what do you think happened at the end???
Bombay Reader 