{"id":1393722,"date":"2016-10-07T10:00:58","date_gmt":"2016-10-07T14:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/community.sparknotes.com\/?p=1393722"},"modified":"2022-04-14T12:34:47","modified_gmt":"2022-04-14T16:34:47","slug":"blogging-1984-ix-part-2-chapter-10-oh-no","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"\/blog\/blogging-1984-ix-part-2-chapter-10-oh-no\/","title":{"rendered":"Blogging 1984: IX (Part 2, Chapter 10, OH NO)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Previously in Blogging 1984<\/a>, Winston and Julia dove into Goldstein’s manifesto, and I \u00a0would rather date a poli-sci student than go through \u00a0that again.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Winston wakes in the bed in Mr. Charrington’s shop after a long post-Goldstein nap to hear the washer woman keeping on with her charming cockney songs in the courtyard, just hanging out laundry and singing 24\/7. Although the clock says it is 8:30 p.m., the light outside is funny; the sky looks \u00a0washed, \u201cso fresh and pale was the blue between the chimney pots.\u201d It’s cold. I’m sure everything is just fine, though. Everything we know about \u00a0clocks<\/a> \u00a0and 1984 and unseasonal chills suggests it’s just fiiiiine\u2014\u201cIt was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Looking down upon the singing prole, her \u201cthick arms reaching up for the line,\u201d Winston notes \u201cher powerful mare-like buttocks\u201d and it strikes him \u201cfor the first time that she was beautiful.\u201d Incidentally, the washer woman and her powerful mare-like buttocks would like to be excluded from this narrative, one that she never asked to be a part of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Julia notices that the stove is out of oil\u2014funny, she was sure there had been enough. Winston isn’t \u00a0bovvered, and ruminates a little longer on the sky:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 people\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same\u2014people who had never learned to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world. If there was hope, it lay in the proles. Without having read to the end of the book<\/em>, he knew that that must be Goldstein’s final message.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Look, that probably is the gist of it, and far be it for a website designed to help you understand a novel intimately in minimal time to tell you to just DO THE READING, but maybe Winston could have had a flick through to the end of the book in amongst all the naked coffee drinking to find out for sure?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Winston is still thinking about the washer woman:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cin the villages of the endless Russian plain, in the bazaars of China and Japan\u2014everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable figure, made monstrous by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death and still singing.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

What a beautiful sentiment, other than the harsh #mombod vibes. Did Bono write that? Michael Jackson? Ghandi? It’s beautiful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Coolly, casually, Winston says to Julia, \u201cWe are the dead.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201d \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcWe are the dead,’ echoed Julia dutifully.<\/p>

\u00e2\u20ac\u02dcYou are the dead,’ said an iron voice behind them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

There is a telescreen hidden behind the flimsy picture on the wall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In short order, Winston and Julia are instructed by the voice to stand back to back, and there are the sounds of boots trampling the yard, and something being dragged across the stones; related, \u201cThe woman’s singing had stopped abruptly.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The iron voice sings part of a folk song like a demented clown, and then a ladder crashes through the wall, followed by an influx of truncheon-wielding Thought Police. Someone picks up the glass paperweight and smashes it:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fragment of coral, a tiny crinkle of pink like a sugar rosebud from a cake, rolled across the mat. How small, thought Winston, how small it always was!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u00a0 RIP glass paperweight metaphor 1984-1984 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the soldiers punches Julia, then hoists her onto his shoulder and carries her out, and \u201cthat was the last he saw of her.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The biggest surprise is yet to come, as Mr. Charrington enters the room\u2014or, to be more correct, the undisguised face of the \u00a0man who had \u00a0pretended<\/em> \u00a0to be the old Mr. Charrington, but is in fact about \u00a035, without wrinkles, and with black hair. My general feeling is of queasiness, not unlike the moment in \u00a0Labyrinth<\/em> \u00a0when Sarah realizes she has been hanging out in a \u00a0fake bedroom \u00a0in a monumental pile of garbage. What level of deceit went into creating a fake antique store and populating it with pleasing literary motifs, \u00a0waiting patiently for a plebe to purchase a diary, and slowly awaken, then carry on lovers’ trysts \u00a0multiple times<\/em> \u00a0in the upstairs bed over a period of \u00a0months<\/em>, only \u00a0to blow the \u00a0cover by busting through the wall? It just seems so elaborate, in terms of startup costs. Can Mr. Charrington reuse the antique shop to trap another Inner Party rebel? I don’t know! I mean he’s one paperweight down after all this and don’t even ask me about the state of the wainscoting after the ladder incident.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If I am to take a lesson from the events of the past few chapters, it’s that learning the Ultimate Truth almost never pans out. Consider:<\/p>\n\n\n\n