He Sees You When You're Sleeping...(Metonymy)

“ ‘Does Big Brother exist?’

‘Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of the Party.’

‘Does he exist in the same way as I exist?’

‘You do not exist,’ said O’Brien.”

-p 259

I thought that I should take the opportunity presented in this passage to discuss a rather obvious utilization of metonymy in Orwell’s 1984. This case of metonymy, which uses the figure of Big Brother as equivalent with the Party and its ideals, is different from most cases, however. Normally with metonymy, the object which is being used in lieu of the original object is actually real. As this passage hints at, however, Big Brother is not, in fact, real. While O’Brien does not actually state that there is no living Big Brother, his way of automatically equating Big Brother’s existence with the existence of the Party indicates that O’Brien knows Big Brother as a person does not actually exist. Yet despite this, in many ways O’Brien is correct in saying that Big Brother exists. Big Brother is, as O’Brien says, “the embodiment of the Party;” he is the personification of the Party, the figure which all people both fear and adore. That fear and adoration is frighteningly real. Those emotions expressed toward Big Brother—toward the party—are very much real. In this sense, Big Brother is real, as the Party has caused such strong emotions toward Big Brother that he might as well be real. As the Party philosophy likes to muse, the people believe Big Brother exists; therefore, Big Brother is in their midst.

The Beast Within, Part...4?

“As thought to harmonize with the general mood, the rocket bombs had been killing larger numbers of people than usual. One fell on a crowded film theater in Stepney, burying several hundred victims among the ruins…Another bomb fell on a piece of waste ground which was used as a playground, and several dozen children were blown to pieces. There were further angry demonstrations, Goldstein was burned in effigy…and a number of shops were looted in the turmoil; then a rumor flew round that spies were directing the rocket bombs by means of wireless waves, and an old couple who were suspected of being of foreign extraction had their house set on fire and perished of suffocation.”

--p 149

As I read this passage, my immediate suspicion was that it may actually be Big Brother who coordinated these bombings on Oceania. After all, these seem like rather civilian-oriented bomb drops; if Eurasia really was bombing Oceania, one would assume that they would attempt to bomb the separate ministries, yet instead they bomb the locations which would incite civilian rage against them. This uncannily unlucky placement makes me think that Oceania may in fact be bombing their own citizens in order to maintain fear and incite rage and support for the war effort against Eurasia. Regardless of whether this is true or not, however, the theme in this passage—one discussing the extremely violent and savage measures that fear can drive people to take—remains. In this passage, people have become so fearful of bombings that they are driven to take the law into their own hands. What is so frightening about this situation is that it is an old couple—a common symbol of innocence—that is killed by arson. Fear causes men to lose most common sense; they become fueled solely by the animalistic instinct to survive at all costs.

This animalistic instinct, as well as the lengths the people took to ease their fears, reminded me of the actions of the Jack’s group of boys in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Jack whips the boys into such a frenzied fear of the Beast that they savagely murder Simon due to blind suspicion that he was the beast. They then kill Piggy simply because he opposed them. In a way, this savagery has already occurred in Oceania. People kill those whom they fear to be traitors, yet the Thought Police already are immediately killing anyone who even thinks of opposition to Big Brother. Despite the Party’s supposed sophistication, the Party in reality consists of nothing but animals.

UPDATE: On page 153, Julia expresses her own belief that Big Brother is actually responsible for the air raids. Looks like I’m not so crazy after all!

Modern Sophocles

Well, Nadine Gordimer's "Once upon a Time" has a rather grisly ending, doesn't it? Unfortunately, you can almost see the ending coming. The narrator sets up her theme in the initial story by reflecting that it was the stress and paranoia that actually kept her awake at night, not any real threat. She was stuck in "an epicenter of stress" that entrapped her within a constant state of fear and paranoia of danger. The frame story which then follows this reflection is therefore told with an ubiquitous sense of dread and doom. As the man and woman continue to build up their defenses and safety measures in order to keep danger out and, more importantly, their paranoia away, you start to get a feeling that something disastrous will result anyway, either in spite of these precautions or maybe even because of these precautions. The audience can do nothing but read on as the couple continues to add on more and more security measures, while the boy innocently is "fascinated by the device[s]" and uses them to "play with his small friends."

When the final paragraph starts, and the audience reads as the boy pretends "to be the Prince who braves the terrible thicket of thorns," the sense of dread escalates. Almost before the reader reads of the boy's fate, he can predict what likely will happen. It is this final paragraph depicting the boy's death (or at least near-death) which connects the frame story to the initial exterior story by revealing the situational irony in the boy's mutilation. Like the narrator in her bed, the man and woman had become so stricken with fear and paranoia that they ended up causing severe pain and suffering to themselves in attempts to avoid that same pain and suffering. Like Oedipus trying to prevent a prophecy from coming true, the man and woman's actions are what cause the thing which they dread the most.