Monday, March 24, 2008

1984: pg 237-257

Imagine being trapped in a moment knowing that it could lead to nothing good. How would you feel? What would you do? Each individual would react differently when faced with a fatal moment. As Winston sits in a cell alone in the Ministry of Love, many people come and get taken away and each person takes in the situation with different thoughts and emotions.

Some people that Winston comes across in the cell, he wasn’t surprised to see and some he would never have expected to see in the Ministry of Love. The first person that comes in is Ampleforth, a poet and thinking man. He accepts his fate and knows that no man can avoid it. He realizes that it doesn’t matter what crime you’ve committed because “there is only one offence…” if you’ve committed one you’ve committed them all. Winston wasn’t surprised to see Ampleforth because being a man who could think for himself it would be natural for the party to be concerned. The next person that Winston sees in the cell is someone that Winston was sure would never be captured, Tom Parsons. Parsons believed that he had committed a crime even though he hadn’t really. Even though the party had imprisoned him he could not see any way that the party could be wrong. Unlike Ampleforth, Parsons believed that the party was right in imprisoning him. Ampleforth accepted that the party believed he had committed a crime but it didn’t really make sense to him.

Although this is a society where everyone is encouraged to be and think the same, each person still reacts to different situations differently. Both Winston and Ampleforth know that they will be tortured and maybe even die, but they both react differently and have different thoughts towards the party and to the situation they have been put in.

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