On The Precipice

In my opinion, Winston keeps acting irrational and I don’t know how the Thought Police haven’t caught him yet. Buying the diary was risky. Now he’s writing in the diary. He skipped his activity with the Community Center for the second time in a few weeks. In a world where everything is monitored, I am having a tough time believing that they haven’t noticed his suspicious attitude. Maybe they have and things are about to escalate.

I found Winston’s walk through the proles’ neighborhood a bit long and boring at first. You just gave a decent description of the proles and now we are seeing their neighborhood again, and nothing about the beginning impressed me. In fact, I was about to take a break from reading when Winston’s eye caught that of an older man - somebody around the age of 80, heading into a pub. (Again, you keep mentioning that all of these irrational moves that he makes is punishable by death. I’m beginning to wonder if I should have been tallying these up.)

I found the brief conversation of Winston and the older man really intriguing. I was rooting for him to find out more information about life before the Revolution. It made since that the guy didn’t have much information to give, since the Thought Police would have already killed him if he were capable of delivering valuable information.

If it were so easy for Winston to leave his side of town and enter into the prones’ neighborhood, which is a place without telescreens, wouldn’t the place be more censored? It seems that all a person from the Party has to do if he wants to commit a crime without Big Brother seeing from the telescreen is go into this neighborhood where there are no telescreens. Sure, most people wouldn’t do it because entering this area is punishable in itself. But if a person wants to commit some kind of crime than he must not be loyal to the Party anyways. It seems to be an easy way for rebellious types to commit crimes with only a minor chance of getting caught, and this doesn’t feel like something that Big Brother would let slip.

And another Party member is seen in the neighborhood. Winston in spotted by the brunette girl that he works with. (Yes, the one whose throat he wanted to cut during climax.) Although he is convinced that she is spying on him, I think that she is actually on his side. Maybe she’s a better actor than he is.  

All in all, this felt like a slow episode for me. Slow episodes don’t always mean disappointment. I very much enjoyed the characters that Winston came into contact with.

Winston is playing with fire and it feels like he is on the precipice of complete mental agony.