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Rant: our book club fell apart over a single chapter in 1984
We got into it last month over the appendix in 1984 - half of us thought it was some kind of hopeful ending, the other half insisted it was just more propaganda. Things got so heated at Laura's house on Elm Street that two members walked out and haven't come back. How do you guys handle big disagreements like that without losing people?
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nathan_webb1mo ago
@jana_henderson52 nailed it, and your group basically proved Orwell's point by fighting over whether the appendix gives you hope or not. The whole thing is a trap designed to make you argue about interpretation instead of recognizing how thoroughly the system erased real history.
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jana_henderson521mo ago
That appendix thing is textbook Orwell. He put it there to mess with people's heads. The whole book is about how language controls thought, and then he drops this dry academic piece about Newspeak like it's a real historical language. It's not hope. It's him showing how complete the system was. If they could write an appendix about Newspeak, that means the system won. The Party controlled language so well that even after it was "gone" someone had to write a Wikipedia article about it. Your book club didn't fall apart over that chapter. It fell apart because half of you can't handle the truth that there's no happy ending.
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