Winston's journal

At the beginning of this book, Winston decides to keep a diary of the events that are happening at the present, and what he is feeling about everything going on. Winston is reluctant to do this, as there is a telescreen practically everywhere he goes, and that having a diary, or even having such thoughts as what he wrote in his diary will most definitely result in a death sentence, or at least 25 years of forced labour camp.

When Winston begins to write in his diary, he is unsure of even the year. He makes a guess based on how old he is, and when he was born. It is as if the Party had stopped bothering to announce the year for MANY years by now, as nobody really needed to know the date for any particular reason.

What Winston finally decide to write in his diary he wrote in a panicked rush, for fear of people finding out that he is in the possession of a diary. He wrote about the movie he saw at the movie theaters the other night; he had emphasized that all of them there were war films. what was happening in the movie was quite gruesome, what with the people being bombed and severed and cut from shells being exploded on the street. In every bloody and horrific shot, showing severed body parts, or bloody images, the audience laughed or cheered. And when a woman protested about showing this to the kids, she was taken away by the proles.

I think that the behaviour of the audience is disgusting, and in our society today, that is considered abnormal. To think that the society in 1984, can look at those types of images and not feel any particular emotion, is sickening. What's funny is, movies these days, compared to movies from a few years ago, our society may be able to look at those images and react the same way as shown in the book.