“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”
This is one of many lines in Part III, Chapter 3, that area usually found in any list of famous quotations from George Orwell. The passage is almost a non-stop monologue from O’Brien who explains that “power is not a means; power is an end.”
It is a startling vision of the future and is it an accurate depiction of our present?
Both are equally frightening. We find Winston in jail in Part III, Chapter 1. He is hungry, in pain and terrified. He meets other people that he knows including one man who is fully convinced that he deserved to be caught and arrested. He even praises his daughter for turning him in. He is like the good Bolshevik who is convinced his own unorthodoxy has betrayed the revolution.
Everyone is petrified of returning to Room 101.
Winston keeps wondering if the Brotherhood will come through with a razor blade so that he might take his own life.
But when O’Brien enters his cell, Wins…
