Rebel Of The Party example essay topic

841 words
There are many characters in the novel 1984. These characters all rebel in separate and distinctive ways from each other. In George Owell's not so sanguine vision of the year 1984 from his standpoint in 1949, he tells of a dreary future of what the world was becoming. In this future, no one has the right to anything, including free speech, freedom of press or even freedom of thought. Even the details like the history of the known world are changed by a corrupt and ever growing political party, which is managed and run by un-emotional and odious officials. From Julia, who rebels by purely simple, sexual acts, to Winston, who dreams to overthrow the party; all the characters have their own personal way of dealing with the oppression.

One example of rebelling against the party is that of Julia's sexual escapades. She plots and plans to have sex with many of the different party members in order to find release in her otherwise boring lifestyle and by doing so she increases the amount of mass personal rebellion within the party's regiment. After Winston and Julia are done having sex in the woods for the first time, he asks her how many other men has she done this with. She told him that she had done it with "scores" of other men and Winston is delighted to hear the good news.

He feels that the more men she has had sexual encounters with makes the party weaker because those men don't really feel committed to their party. Julia does not dream of rebellion against their oppressors as Winston does. However, she accepts her role in society and goes about life enjoying herself when she can. Syme can also be marked as a rebel of the party. Although we have very little actual contact with him in the book, Winston thinks that Syme is too smart to have the party favor him for long. This is probably the reason that Syme disappears later on.

He was working on a new Newspeak dictionary for the party but may have fell out of favor because of his intelligence. Syme is a rebel because of his brain. He refuses to go along with everyone else and bring himself down to the I.Q. of the masses, so he, in turn, gets himself killed by the party. This is an important note because Syme does not actually hate the party or even dislike the party. He is simply an educated individual who was deemed to intelligent for his own good by the corrupted politicians, so they eliminated what they felt was a threat. Finally, the biggest known enemy of the cruel party and main character of our book is Winston.

He begins to write in a diary and then realizes that he has sealed his own fate by committing "thought crime". Therefore, knowing that he is doomed, he does not repudiate what he knows will happen to him, so he begins his all-out rebellious acts of writing anti-party ideas in his diary, thinking anti-party thoughts and also begins his sexual encounters with Julia. The room that he rents to complete these acts with Julia has a hidden tele screen and eventually is the reason for their capture. Winston wonders about the past and thinks of what it might have been like. He knows that whatever he has learned from the party was all convoluted from the truth. He imagines it wasn't a lot like what he has experienced in his lifetime, and believes that there was actually a time in the history of the human race that people weren't slaves of any political party or forced to think, feel, or act any particular way.

All in all, I think that the human spirit is crushed upon the completion of this novel and all emotion is supposedly drained out of this "negative Utopia". By the end of the story, all the characters have either died or been tortured into altering their minds to think the way of the party; which leads to a very vapid existence by the people of Oceania. Anyone too intelligent is considered a threat by the party and anyone that even does the slightest non-party act or displays an act of human emotion is considered to be a rebel and must either die or be sent to mind-altering torture sessions. The idea behind the torturing is that whomever the tortured person tells the information that they have to becomes loved by the subject because they "make the pain stop". Winston also points out in the novel that physical pain is the greatest pain of all and the party uses it to their great advantage. George Orwell did a fantastic job in putting his nightmare about what the world was headed towards into words as a warning for us all to read..