Dismantle My Bed

Call it depressing. Call it apocalyptic. Call it completely off base, because 1984 has come and gone, and Big Brother hasn’t taken over quite yet.

I would even call George Orwell’s most widely regarded novel slow to get going and overly wordy in parts, and yet… I love the hell out of it.

Decades past the titular year, 1984 no longer seems terribly unlikely. In some of its doomsday scenarios, it is dead on, and, in others, the real life counterparts of those things so avidly warned against in the novel are close at hand. It no longer reads so much like science fiction or rhetoric, as possibility and forewarning.

As for the novel itself, once the novel picks up, which I believe comes at the beginning of Part Two, it becomes infinitely more readable. Until Julia comes into the picture, Winston is slightly hard to identify with, not surprising since he is living in a time and a world where humanity isn’t exactly acceptable. Once Winston becomes human, though, he remains as such, which makes the end all the more intense and heartbreaking.

Since the first time I read the novel in high school, I have never let go the agony of the fear and submission.