Utopias and Dystopias Blog

 I'm sure many of you saw Winston's betrayal of Julia coming several chapters ago. After seeing Winston semi-successfully resisting the Ministry, I realized that this book was, in fact, a dystopia and not even Winston could escape. We finally find out what's in Room 101, and I believe it's at this point that Winston fully succumbs to the Ministry. He has lost his humanity, bought into the lies of the Ministry, and proved the effectiveness of the Ministry's methods. While the scene with the rats is quite intimidating (and seemingly effective), I couldn't help but think of it as sort of a letdown. All the tension with Room 101 has been building in the past few chapters, yet its bark three chapters ago seemed scarier than its bite in chapter five. Why would Orwell choose a physical manifestation of yet another torture instead of something even scarier? Granted I can't think of anything better, but I still feel like it's an anticlimax. I guess we'll have...

 Many of you may be unfamiliar with the Milgram experiment, so I'll summarize. In the early 70s, professor Stanley Milgram at Yale conducted a series of psychological experiments measuring the complicity of participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to do actions that were against the participant's conscience. While I can't explain the entire experiment, the majority of participants fully obeyed instructions despite the pain and suffering they caused.  I'm confident that the ministry used this susceptibility of the human psyche to carry out their agenda. Even though we have been following Winston for the entire book, I can't help but be disturbed by O'brien's manipulation of Winston throughout his torture. With the Milgram experiment in mind, the thing that disturbs me more is that anyone could be in O'brien's position conducting torture and bending others to their will.