Cliffhangers And Why They're Obnoxious

"He released Winston with a little push toward the guards. 'Room 101,' he said." -p. 356

That right there creates suspense. Earlier in the book, O'Brien's liiike, "You know what's in that room. Everyone does." That was a frustrating moment because I thought, "What about meeee, though? I don't know what's in there =|!" As it turns out, he tells us later, and then it's rats, which is dreadfully anticlimactic. (I know it's different for everybody, but still. Even the foreshadowing of that was weak.) Ah, but I digress. My point was that O'Brien finally said he was going to show us Room 101, and the reader's been wondering for a goodly many pages, now, what is in there, and then there's a section break, which is a structural technique of sorts. I don't know why authors do this. I suppose they intend for it to build suspense, but really.... We just have to turn the page. Actually, I just have to move my eyes approximately an inch-and-a-half further down the page. I did feel a little jolt of suspense, there, I guess, but I felt annoyed with myself about it afterward.

It's not like it's a new chapter of fanfiction, and you have to wait another who-knows-how-long to find out what happens next. That's called a cliffhanger, everyone, and I think they more or less died with Charles Dickens in terms of works of literary merit .

"How are you?" "Hi.... Oh, I'm sorry, did you say something that was not 'Hi'?"

My title is dedicated to Bryan Cary and also Tito's mom. Shhhh....

"O'Brien was looking down at him speculatively. More than ever he had the air of a teacher taking pains with a wayward but promising child." -p. 324 (in my bojankity version)

That's a Homeric epithet! That is, it's a "compound adjective" (wayward but promising) "used with a person or thing" (child/Winston). P.S. I keep forgetting Winston's name, which shouldn't happen after that many pages.

Homeric epithets are used for characterization purposes. Orwell may use lots of physical descriptions in his work, but he also likes to give his audience a sense of the demeanor of various characters.

Thinking about Homeric epithets makes me think about The Iliad, which makes me think about Achilles, which makes me think about hurty tendons. Ergo, Homeric epithets hurt in an entirely imaginary but nonetheless uncomfortable way.

Your mom goes to college.

Wait-- there's more!

1. "Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?" This reminded me a lot of Siddhartha because the premise of that novel was sort of that Siddhartha was, at least for a time, trying to rid himself of desire, as is the Buddhist idea of enlightenment or nirvana.

2. "Ear trumpets for listening through keyholes! My little girl brought one home the other night--tried it out on our sitting room door, and reckoned she could hear twice as much as with her hear to the hole." I do not know what precisely an "ear trumpet" is, so my mind wandered to this:

0:40 Do it. Do it do it do it. Or don't. Your call.

3. "February your grandmother!" And here I thought Napoleon Dynamite was the source of all "your mom" jokes.

4. Also, I don't feel like citing every single time this happens, but I suppose I should use one. "The old man whom he had followed was standing at the bar, having some kind of altercation with the barman, a large, stout, hook-nosed young man with enormous forearms." Orwell gives a physical description of everybody. He usually comments on their hair color and physique, but this example is sort of an exception.

Pooms, chicky.

I feel like I've made some interesting observations, but they're not so connected to each other, and I'm just going to shove them out there.

1. "It was a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard--a clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile silliness in the long thin nose near the end of which a pair of spectacles was perched. It resembled the face of a sheep, and the voice, too, had a sheeplike quality." If there were a third Dumbledore brother, that would be this Goldstein character, I think. He's got Albus' spectacles and silliness and nose and Aberforth's goatee and... livestockishness. Observe:

Photo size symmetry fail, but you get the picture.

2. "There was no reproach either in their faces or in their hearts, only the knowledge that they must die in order that he might remain alive, and that was part of the unavoidable order of things." That right there sounds a lot like the principle of double effect, about which we're learning in Morality this very week. To fit those requirements, a situation has to meet these criteria:

1. the nature of the act is itself good, or at least morally neutral;
2. the agent intends the good effect and not the bad either as a means to the good or as an end itself;
3. the good effect outweighs the bad effect in circumstances sufficiently grave to justify causing the bad effect and the agent exercises due diligence to minimize the harm.

3. "'Except--' began Winston doubtfully, and then stopped." "'The proles are not human beings,' he said carelessly." I like George Orwell's style. I really do. But Stephen King would tear it to shreds. “I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops.” -- Stephen King, On Writing

[_____________]

I would like to take this opportunity to rail against this Syme fellow. "In your heart you'd prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning. You don't grasp the beauty of the destruction of words."

He's killing me, Smalls.

But seriously, I thought this Newspeak business was going to be a trippy little vernacular that I would bring into my own everyday language. I was going to start saying stuff was doubleplusungood, right and left. Now, I'm engaging in a senseless boycott of all such phrases, just because I don't like this fictional character and what he's doing to the English language. I bet you think I'm being dramatic for entertainment purposes.

Maybe a little.

In all seriousness, though, I can't see what the point of this Newspeak--

Wait. I remembered what the point is. They're making it impossible to commit "thoughtcrime" by erasing words conducive to discontent. Yeah. "In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it." That sounds like my worst nightmare. To feel that things are not quite right but never be able to understand why because of a simple... dialect insufficiency... would drive me insane.

Paradox. (Geddit? ... Pair o' Docs? ...I'm really trying.)

"WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH."

Leaving aside for the moment the frustrating lack of punctuation in that thought, and also pleading forgiveness for the obnoxious and apparently irrevocable underline effect, I will now point out the paradoxical nature of Big Brother's three favorite slogans. It's pretty obvious.

War is the opposite of peace. They are antonymns. However, the Party would like everyone to believe that they live in a peaceful society, even though they don't, so they brainwash everyone to believe this stuff.

Likewise, freedom is the opposite of slavery. That sentence (fragment? run-on?) makes no sense, but people believe it because they no longer have evidence to the contrary.

The final "Ignorance is strength" idea is slightly less ridiculous, but only because ignorance is not the opposite of strength. Ignorance is a subset of weakness, though, and weakness is the opposite of strength. Everybody's drinking gin and beer all the time instead of water, though, and they're all (except Winston and a few others maaaybe) too gullible to understand that of course war isn't peace, and freedom isn't slavery, and ignorance isn't strength.

"Creamy" is an unacceptable adjective for paper, I think.

"The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one, furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink pencil. Actually he was not used to writing by hand." -- 1984

Part of the way in which George Orwell has set the tone for this novel was probably utterly accidental. I told someone over the weekend that I was just starting reading 1984, and he told me how eerily close to accurate it was in some respects. It's meant as a frightening possibility-- almost a satire of sorts, except it's not really funny. The tone is supposed to be sort of foreboding, and it is, more than Orwell probably expected it ever could be, because here we are in 2011, and it's easy to see how these things could happen if somebody decided it was best for us. We type at least as many words as we pen. "Big Brother" can legitimately find all of our Internet conversations and tap our phone calls as it sees fit. There are security cameras on every corner. The paranoia is setting in. Sci-Fi was a bad choice.