Saturday, September 3, 2011

1984 8

"Shall I tell you why we have brought you here? To cure you! To make you sane! Will you understand, Winston, that no one whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands uncured? We are not interested in those stupid crimes that you have committed. The Party is not interested in the over act: the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them." (253)

Up until this point, the reader had more of a violent image of the Ministry of Love and everything that goes on there. Orwell, however, uses this short piece of dialogue from O'Brien to show that it's really mostly psychological harm. They just contradict everything that the "patient" says and believes in, so that they no longer have any memory or reality to grasp, and they're forced to completely succumb to whatever O'Brien says. From the outside perspective, citizens are made to believe that people who commit crimes are immediately killed, but in reality they are taken to the Ministry of Love and psychologically tortured until they become "sane".

1 comment:

  1. drop that first person? I like your language in "Orwell, however, uses this short piece of dialogue from O'Brien to show that it's really mostly psychological harm." as it gets to the core of analysis

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