Despair vs. Hope in 1984
By Jorgie Ingram
Thesis
"She did not understand that there was no such thing as happiness, that the only victory lay in the far future, long after you were dead, that from the moment of declaring war on the party it was better to think of yourself as a corpse."
"Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime is death." pg. 27
"Today there were fear, hatred and pain, but no dignity of emotion, or deep or complex sorrows." pg. 29
"If there is hope, wrote Winston, it lies in the proles." pg. 72
"At the sight of the words I love you, the desire to stay alive welled up inside him, and the taking of minor risks suddenly seemed stupid." pg. 110
"It's the only thing they can't do. They can make you say anything, but they can't make you believe it. They can't get inside you." pg. 167
Star Rating
This book is about a dictatorship, and finding hope through a world of despair. It shows that even if there are a million bad things going on in the world, or in your life, there is still hope. I think that is a really good message to give the reader.
This book not only is convincing in how the government and civilization is run, but it also develops the characters and has many interesting aspects to it. There were very few grammatical errors, and if there were any, they didn't take away from the story at all.
I really liked the plot line and idea of the story, and I thought George Orwell's writing style was good. I thought George wrote this well and made it very interesting. The book was slow at parts, and a little hard to get into at the beginning, but overall it was a great book.