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Rereading Nineteen Eighty Four – Part III Chap 2 (13)

O’Brien explains to Winston;

” We do not make mistakes… All the confessions that are uttered here are true. We make them true. And above all we do not allow the dead to rise up against us.”

He tells Winston:

” You must stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you, Winston. Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted … out… of history… Nothing will remain of you, not a name in a register, not a memory in a living brain. You will be annihilated in the past as well as in the future. You will never have existed.’

And Winston wonders; Then why bother to torture me?  

O’Brien acts as as though Winston had uttered the thought aloud. His large ugly face came nearer, with the eyes a little narrowed.

‘You are thinking,’ he said, ‘that since we intend to destroy you utterly, so that nothing that you say or do can make the smallest difference — in that case, why do we go to the trouble of interrogating you first? That is what you were thinking, was it not?’

‘Yes,’ said Winston.

O’Brien explains;  ‘You are a flaw in the pattern, Winston. You are a stain that must be wiped out.  We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will… “

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Written by jaylar

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