What's LOOOOOOVE got to do, got to do with it Babe.

So I haven't posted about 1984 because this is kind of a rough text for me. This is my second time reading it and it does the same stomach upsetting that Frankenstein did for me. Which on an external level I can appreciate but on a deeper level makes me feel like a child.

You know how when you were a kid you would get mad. I mean like super mad because the world had wronged you so intensely that the only thing you could do was rage within yourself? And when your parents asked you what was wrong and you told them but they didn't understand and you wanted to shake meaning into them. This is the phenomenon of 1984 for me. I read that book and my hands shake and heat rises up behind my eyeballs making me tear up but not cry.

It is really freaking weird.

To start out with, I am not a huge fan for Winston as a character and I think that's why it works. I find myself repelled by Winston because he lacks the fire I usually associate with a protagonist. Winston is spineless but he needs to be in order to survive in this world. With eyes and ears everywhere there is that lack of the stand tall and proud and glare down your foe brass that I like to read. I want a protagonist that I can put my faith in and Winston is not really that character. That's where the gold is, he is the only character I am going to get out of this book. In this desolate, crap world the only kind of "hero" is Winston. I can't turn to the spunky side kick or funny cameo because every character is a sullied being that I don't want to associate myself with.

Winston works at a pointless job, In a shabby house, no friends, and is the only ray of damn sunshine you get in this story. When he feels emotion it is amplified by 1000 because his surroundings and even his past stories are devoid of any feeling. I had to stop reading at one point because he was admitting to Julia that he wanted to rape and then kill her and I as the reader, while disturbed, was secretly glad. I was so desperate for any semblance of emotion that his bestial response to Julia was taken as a positive even though it is as negative as you can get.

The fist to the gut of this book is the tension throughout. The false hope that its possible for Winston to win. For him to conquer Big Brother and live and be happy. The reader just wants there. To be a semblance that the lives in this book are worth something. The fact that the reader experiences this all on their own is cruel. The novel continually tells us that Winston knows he's going to get caught. He tells us this constantly, after sex,"alone" in his house , and lunch at work he just reminds himself. It might have just been this reader but I totally ignored Winston the first time I read this. I was totally thinking that something good could happen. Boy was I WRONG!

 We all know I'm a weepy person but this book makes me full out sob. I shake and my breath hitches and it is Ugly with a capital U. I cry this way because the breaking of a human "spirit" is literally the worst thing you can show me. The third part of this book shows me just how much spirit Winston had in the first two parts because they destroy it in the third. They break his body, they make him watch other human beings break, they shove his biggest fear in his face, and then they destroy Winston. They destroy his mind and every aspect of the character that the reader grew to know and they stretch that mother out.

 Asking one love his enemy, but not the Christiany sort of love, is sick. I think this is the bit of the over that I don't quite understand. I totally just read Raymond Carver's "What we talk about when we talk about love." And this form of love was not explained in the short story. I don't know how Winston's changed perspective of Big Brother. I think that it's just that you can't know what it's like to 'love' Big Brother until you do.