Giselle Mena

Commentary #4
AP English
November 30, 2015
Uncalled, a memory floated into his mind. He saw a candle-lit room with a vast white
counterpaned bed, and himself, a boy of nine or ten, sitting on the floor, shaking a dice-box, and
laughing excitedly. His mother was sitting opposite him and also laughing.
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He pushed the picture out of his mind. It was a false memory. He was troubled by false
memories occasionally. They did not matter so long as one knew them for what they were.
Some things had happened, others had not happened (Orwell 295-296).
Winston was a man who was completely against the Party and tried to weaken it, but
after he was caught rebelling against the Party with Julia, everything becomes different. The
torture that he received in the Ministry of Love by OBrien, like reminding him of the moment of
panic that occurred in his dreams, and almost placing the cage with rats, made it difficult for
Winston to rebel. He was eventually brainwashed and needed to become loyal to the Party. One
of the main things that the Party controlled over the people is their past and memory. When
Orwell had written the Partys slogan, Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls
the present controls the past (248), his diction was implying that the past is important because
it connect to a person's future or it could justify for their actions later on in their life. This is
important because when Orwell writes this specific passage of Winston remembering the
memory with his mother, he begins to think it is a false memory, since its what the Party has
made him think after his imprisonment in the Ministry of Love. When Orwell chooses the word
false, it makes the rest of the sentence and passage powerful because it shows that WInston
no longer believes in the truth. The tone of the rest of this passage that Orwell creates is
hopeless because the Party is unable to be defeated now.Furthermore, one can infer that
Winston was completely brainwashed because he pushed the picture out of his mind (Orwell
296) forcing that memory out almost like it didnt exist to him. Therefore, it can be inferred that

the Party ruins peoples joyful memories and past, to fill them with misery so they could become
loyal and work towards the Party to make them happy once again.
The Partys slogan can connect to the real world because everything that has been done
in the past will affect what will happen in the future. For instance, the Party has been completely
been lying to its people; the the Ministry of Truth has been controlling, changing and creating
stories or articles of the past to make it relate to what is now the present or future. As a result, it
makes people follow the Party and obey them because people prefer to agree with what the
government says because it's less chaos in society and resolves problems quicker. In
comparison to the real world, we could possibly be living in a world like Oceania today because
the government may have power to change or manipulate the past or history, and we the
people, have let the government say what they want to say, which has caused them to have
gained so much power to control our lives today.