*Nineteen Eighty Four related post*
Let's be clear about this. Although the narrator suggests that Winston feels some sympathy for these three bastards, as they sit in the Chestnut Tree Cafe with broken noses, and the sympathy is even more blatant in the 1984 film; the fact is, they deserved what they got.
They were tried in about 1965 and finally executed in around 1968. They had clearly then survived "the great purges of the fifties and sixties" - in the main - and had maintained their high places in the Party, hence the famous photo that did not exist of the three of them "at some Party function in New York" taken in 1965.
In other words, they were complicit, from the beginning, in the distant drumming of machine gun fire, the purges, the adoption of Newspeak, the programme of pure power that motivated the entire Revolution, and that was, as O Brien put it, refining itself all the time.
It just refined itself on their asses. They deserved everything they got.
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1 comment:
That's pretty good. In the book there isn't much sympathy for them. Their appearance at the Chestnut Tree was part of the dance. You get tortured, forced to confess and recant publicly, then you are briefly paraded in public to show that you are still alive before the bullet in the back of the skull. Winston sees it all coming at the end.
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