1984
1984
What textual details show that Winston is curious about the past and may even yearn for it?
What textual details show that Winston is curious about the past and may even yearn for it?
Winston yearns for the pain of the past: time before the party. Winston is aware of how desturbing a boy he was. He remembers sacrifice and unconditional love of his mother and he feels the pangs of regret and sadness. Still, this was a time when such feelings still existed. It was a time when the party had not reduced existence to merely party rhetoric.
And yet to the people of only two generations ago this would not have seemed all-important, because they were not attempting to alter history. They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself. Proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition. They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another. ch 2