All this is too big to be overlooked, too continuous, too nagging. On Jura, in the last part of his life, Orwell took his usual lively interest in the local rodent population. A buzzard, seen from afar, appeared to be carrying a rat in its claws. Orwell wondered at the ease with which rats allowed themselves to be caught.
At almost exactly this time he would have been working away at Nineteen Eighty-Four, perhaps even writing the following exchange between Winston and Julia:.
Some parts of London are swarming with them. Did you know they attack children? Yes they do. Taylor was born in Norwich in He is also well-known as a critic and reviewer, and is the author of A Vain Conceit: British Fiction in the s, After the War: The Novel and England since and an acclaimed biography, Thackeray. He is married with three children and lives in Norwich.
Reproduced from Orwell: The Life , by kind permission of the author. We use cookies. By browsing our site you agree to our use of cookies. Rats in Winston's life are really his greatest phobia, they for one thing might have eaten his mother and his sister, but also even if you possibly might like rats very much, you possibly might not very much want them very hungry eating up on your face, I think if I was in Winston's place, I think I should have tried first to eat up their beeks, but then if that was impossible for me I should have screemed out from fear, I think I like rats, but I really am not all that sure cause, it is known for example that some kinds of rats might easily attack human beings, and it is also known that rats cary a lot of microbes, bacterias and viruses with them!
I might be a couple years late but hear are my thoughts on why Winston's mother and sister dissapeared and why it relates to being scared of rats. To start of i noticed online that if i ask the simple question "what happened to his family" it comes of as pretty vaugue repsonse which are based of assumptions instead of pure facts which i am not use to, this should also apply to me as well since the current time i am writing this is my senior year of highschool and I'm in AP english 4 so im not a schloar of the art or anything but i feel like i have a very reasonable arguement.
But i believe that the reason Winston's family had disappeared is becasue Winston himself most likely told the thought police of a crime his mother had commited. Now i realize that this is a stretch but if i recall in the book it was said that the children were seen as a extension of the thought police which is why it was allowed since it would bring about new party members.
With this in mind, and I could be wrong but is'nt possible that Winston just told the police as a kid that his mother had done something illegal possibly pertaining to the chocolate if it is illegal in that time period to posses and not remember it since it was a psychlogically damaging period of his life which he then went under Repression as a defense mechanism to cope with it which is when a person refuses to consciously remember a threatening or unacceptable event, instead pushing those events into the unconscious mind.
With this being said this theroy might have some flaws and can proably easily be busted but i would like it if someone would respond who is more knowledgeable about the book than i and i agree or disagree with my findings.
Remember me. Forgot your password? He stopped, but did not come back. His mother's anxious eyes were fixed on his face. Even now he was thinking about the thing, he did not know what it was that was on the point of happening. His sister, conscious of having been robbed of something, had set up a feeble wail. His mother drew her arm round the child and pressed its face against her breast. Something in the gesture told him that his sister was dying.
He turned and fled down the stairs, with the chocolate growing sticky in his hand. He never saw his mother again. After he had devoured the chocolate he felt somewhat ashamed of himself and hung about in the streets for several hours, until hunger drove him home. When he came back his mother had disappeared. But you have to get in earlier than that, because — Hi! Get out, you filthy brute! She suddenly twisted herself over in the bed, seized a shoe from the floor, and sent it hurtling into the corner with a boyish jerk of her arm, exactly as he had seen her fling the dictionary at Goldstein, that morning during the Two Minutes Hate.
I saw him stick his beastly nose out of the wainscoting. There's a hole down there. I gave him a good fright, anyway. Some parts of London are swarming with them. Did you know they attack children? Yes, they do. In some of these streets a woman daren't leave a baby alone for two minutes. It's the great huge brown ones that do it. She pressed herself against him and wound her limbs round him, as though to reassure him with the warmth of her body. He did not reopen his eyes immediately.
For several moments he had had the feeling of being back in a nightmare which had recurred from time to time throughout his life.
It was always very much the same. He was standing in front of a wall of darkness, and on the other side of it there was something unendurable, something too dreadful to be faced. In the dream his deepest feeling was always one of self-deception, because he did in fact know what was behind the wall of darkness. With a deadly effort, like wrenching a piece out of his own brain, he could even have dragged the thing into the open. He always woke up without discovering what it was: but somehow it was connected with what Julia had been saying when he cut her short.
You are aware of that. You will have heard of the things that happen in the poor quarters of this town. In some streets a woman dare not leave her baby alone in the house, even for five minutes. The rats are certain to attack it. Within quite a small time they will strip it to the bones. They also attack sick or dying people.
They show astonishing intelligence in knowing when a human being is helpless. And then there is the final terrible betrayal of Julia, the only person he could usefully interpose between himself and the rats. Do it to Julia! Not me! I don't care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones.
Nothing is left untouched by the Rat. Pliny tells us VIII, lvii that the Romans drew prresages from rats and to see a white rat foreboded good fortune. Clothing or equipment gnawed by rats presaged ill fortune. It was an old superstition among ailsors that rats deserted a ship before she set out on a voyage that was to end in her loss.
Similarly rats were said to leave a falling house. Rats are also common laboratory animals--pawns in an experiment not unlike the social "experiment" of Rats represent depravity more so than snakes and spiders. The proles live in conditions more likened to those in which rats are associated with. Winston believed that the proles were the only hope left, quote "If there is hope, it lies with the proles". The rats in room turn on him, forced upon him by the all-encompassing Party, and Winston's resolve crumbles as he realizes that The Party has set him up with false hope simply so that The Party could destroy and change his mind.
But Orwell did well to lay emphasis on what the rats were capable of doing even among the proles:. He was still strapped in the chair, but he had fallen through the floor, through the walls of the building, through the earth, through the oceans, through the atmosphere, into outer space, into the gulfs between the stars—always away, away, away from the rats. He was light years distant,. Social contract theory is based on the idea that in exchange for giving up some liberties, the state, or collective group provides some benefits, such as protection from violence, to the individual.
One may rebel against society's paradigm, but frequently they will find something that makes them reintegrate and sacrifice their liberties for the benefits provided by the state.
It is not the fact that they are rats that is important. It is the fact that everyone has something that gets to them. For almost anyone there is something they fear enough that they will abandon their nonconfoming values, some liberties, and submit to the state, ruling class, societal paradigm, etc.
In the end one loves big brother. There are lots of people who don't like the idea selling someone else the best 8 hours of their day so that the employer can make more money off their time.
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