Grace Analyzing Utopian and Dystopian Novels

Part 2 was surprising, but at the same time, I think we should have expected some sort of betrayal coming. I don't know if it's just me, but I felt very anxious every time Julia and Winston met up. The suspense and tension building throughout this book had to have a big reveal exploding. Did you guys see this coming? What about O'Brien's involvement behind all of this? These 2 chapters in Part 3 are really mentally and physically draining to read. Here, we see the full extent of torture and abuse that the Party is capable of. There are people who beg to be killed rather than taken into specific rooms. I thought it was also horrifying how a daughter reported her father of thoughtcrime while he was asleep?? This just goes to show how the horror of the Party is truly impossible to escape from -- exactly why Julia and Winston couldn't keep their secrets for long either. Although I was slightly surprised that Winston and Julia were caught, I had no ...

Although it seems bizarre when a hoard of people yell appalling words at a screen, I don't think it's such a foreign concept today. I used to think the people in the party were so crazy but now, I'm not so sure if we're all that different from them. Hate Week in "1984" as well as the routine 2-Minutes-Hate seemed weird. But, I started to think that there were actually many instances throughout history when large crowds gathered together -- in person as well as online -- to spread massive hate and sometimes misleading information to target another race, religion, gender, and culture. Personally, the concept of Hate Week seemed somewhat similar to a Trump rally and other "hate" rallies I've seen.  This  video shows the 2 minute hate in the movie version of 1984.   This video shows clips of how Trump supporters often express their views in very  verbal and provocative ways. Not only in ...

Overtime, Winston glimpses more of the life that Proles live in and despite the prejudice against them, he finds himself wanting to know more about this different world. When Winston woke up from his dream about his mother and sister,his flashbacks gave him an insight of real familial love as well as a taste of humanity. I believe this was when Winston reached an epiphany that the Proles have something he can’t have while working under the Party. He slowly realizes how his mother had cared so much for him and his sister and how she had sacrificed her greed in order to support him and his sister. A quote from the passage also shows how he recognizes this universal “motherly love” when he walked down the streets of the Proles, “gesture of the arm made by his mother, and made again thirty years later by the Jewish woman he had seen on the news film, trying to shelter the small boy from the bullets, before the helicopter blew them both to pieces.” ...

In Brave New World, we see people pressured and conditioned into being very open about their sexuality and erotic behaviors. Monogamy is looked down upon and one is viewed unfavorably if they stick to a sexual partner (how people looked at Lenina). I thought it was really interesting how in 1984, the opposite idea spread throughout the party and its followers. Winston’s thoughts about desiring sex was seen as rebellious and something that no one in the party thought about (although there were people who had secret encounters with prole prostitutes). What do you guys think about the drastic differences in how each book portrays sexuality and promiscuity? Does the society in brave new world model our current societal views on sex? Or is our culture more similar to 1984? I think that in the US -- especially in the current younger generation --, the concept of dating and sex is not as “improper” as before. We often see this modelled in social media, tv shows...

While starting 1984, I noticed an interesting difference between Brave New World and this book. In Brave New World, it was known to readers that people were "manufactured" and designed in a specific way that forced an individual to follow a certain path. For example, some people were born as alphas while others were born as gammas or deltas. As people were born into this world they were instantly met with expectations, designated jobs, etc. It was interesting to me that Winston wasn’t born into a specific role in society and that no one was really “above” someone else or inferior to others (except for the proles). Despite how brave new world’s environment and 1984 differed, both stories have people pushing strong beliefs onto everybody else. If you were to be a character in this story, would you rather be in brave new world (where you are manufactured and designed to live a certain life) or be in 1984 (where you are heavily conditioned to live a certain ...