Beth Decker                                    Back to Showcase

AP Literature and Composition

Book Report (Letter)

Mr. Steen

Period 3

1984

by: George Orwell

Dear Julia,

         Under the spreading chestnut tree

         I sold you and you sold me...

         I heard a voice singing it today. A human voice singing - words so distant and strange, yet so sweet and familiar. Do you remember the Prole woman singing? I do. It's almost as if I remember you and me when we were us, and when I begin to almost feel something I hear her voice, free and innocent and hopeful. What happened, Julia? What happened to us - to you - to me? I'm frozen, as this world is in the altered past. I'm dead inside.

         I keep having this recurring dream like the ones I used to have of my mother and my sister. Do you remember it - my mother and sister, the family that I only vaguely remember standing aboard a sinking ship, staring at me with hopeful, pleading eyes, willing to do anything for me, even sacrifice their own lives? This dream is the same in a way, but O'Brien is standing as my mother, glaring ominously down at me from behind his cold yet comforting spectacles, and you - you are in my sister's place. And behind it all is Big Brother's cruel, omnipresent smile, hidden beneath his dark mustache. And all I can hear is the jarring Party music, and all I can see is gray, and all I can smell and taste is Victory Gin, and all I can feel is numbness.

         And then I wake up. The telescreen screaming an ear-splitting whistle, exactly seven-fifteen - the coughing, the itching of the varicose ulcer, the smell of boiled cabbage and old rag mats, the life that has been created for me. And I climb out of bed, noticing nothing, attentive only to the tasks of the morning and the ritualistic Physical Jerks. And as they scream and yell at me to bend lower, and as I push out all of the traces of tragedy I possess within me as I go lower and lower, some part of me just can't take it, and I try to push it back - I try - but I can't help but to think about other times - the future, and the past. And a voice in my head whispers "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four." I thought I had won. They told me I had. They said that I had won the victory over myself. And I had. We both had. That was obvious enough, wasn't it Julia? But I feel it coming back. Slowly, like clouds building up in the sky before a storm, but manifesting itself within me nonetheless. I'm sick, Julia, and I'm wrong. I have to be wrong. They told me so. And the Party is always right. The Party is truth. The Party is everything. TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE. WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STREGTH...

         Do you remember the day it happened? How long has it been now? A couple of weeks, a few months, a year or more? Does anyone really know? Does anyone care? I don't know. I really don't know much of anything anymore. To tell you the truth - if there is such a thing as truth - I'm not sure that I ever knew much of anything. My whole life had seemed to coalesce, building and building until the apex which was that night. O'Brien and the Brotherhood, our secret plans with them to sacrifice anything other than our love for each other in the attempt to overthrow the Party, our illegal room above Mr. Charrington's junk shop, the Prole woman who rose every morning and slaughtered the adversity she faced with her song, our love, our world embodied within the glass paperweight - the unalterable past - do you remember it all, Julia? It seemed as if life almost had meaning. I had even started to believe that we weren't just living skeletons after all. But we were. And we are. They'll find this letter - some proof of it, anyway - guaranteed - and who knows what will happen this time. It won't just be weeks or months, or who knows how long of torture and the infinite threat contained within Room 101 this time. It will be the real thing. We are the dead. O'Brien said that there are no martyrdoms. He said that martyrs make any confession, true or untrue, to try to save themselves. But there are no martyrs here are there Julia? All of the confessions here are true. We will be eradicated - we will be the dead - we are the dead. We will be annihilated, as O'Brien told me, in the past as well as the future. We will never have, and will never exist. We have already ceased to exist. We are merely shells of people. That's what they want us to be. They won't let us save ourselves. They have destroyed our minds and souls, and they will destroy our bodies.

         Fear is the most enigmatic of human emotions. I never realized the infallible impact that can be achieved when a person is presented face-to-face with his or her greatest fear and there is nothing that he or she can do about it. Neither of us did. But we do now, don't we Julia? They took the one thing from us that we swore they could never take away - our love for each other. And where are we now, Julia? What are we now? Useless, knowledgeless drones in the hate machine of the Party. We tried to fight back and now we serve them. We are them.

         When I was in the Ministry of Love, O'Brien told me that the vision of the future of Oceania (as well as Eastasia and Eurasia) was a boot stamping on a human face - forever. I feel the boot beginning to stamp upon me - upon us, upon the entire world. And I don't like it. I loved Big Brother. Even when I picked up this book to scribble down these few words to you I loved Big Brother. And I guess I still do. I love O'Brien. But I feel the pressure building behind the foot on my face and we need to find a way out. As Goldstein told us in his book - if Goldstein ever even existed - there is hope, no matter how distant in the future it is contained. We messed up bad in the past. We took the events in human history that we thought needed to be forgotten and we changed them. Working in the Ministry of Truth, I know that as well as anyone. And in the process of altering the past and changing the events of human history we have become inhuman. We thrive in a world of hate and deceit, Julia, and as O'Brien made very clear to both of us, there is no room for love in this world.

         I miss you though. It's an odd feeling, really. I missed my mother before, when she was prevalent in my dreams. But I miss you more than I could have ever missed my mother. Sitting next to you on the park bench the other day - even for the brief time that we were there - I felt something before the awkwardness that obscured it. It's good to write to you. I feel a drive inside of me, almost like a need to talk to someone about it all, and you are the only other person who even remotely understands. Although I'm sure I'll die for writing this, the action is just as unorthodox and deceitful as the thought to the Party.

         You can always find me at the Chestnut Tree Cafe during my "free time." I'm usually playing chess. But I've noticed an odd thing, Julia. No matter how much I strategize or how much I try and struggle for it not to happen, the white pieces always win. The Party always wins...

                                                                      Winston Smith