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Winston's Fate

On the surface Winston seems like an ideal party member, he does his job and does it well and does not ask questions. However when he is alone all he does is question the party and big brother and even dares to write in a journal, something that is strictly forbidden. When he is alone, Winston shows all of the signs of an enemy of the party. At this point in the novel Winston's eventual death seems inevitable. He is everything that the party is against, however he has kept it all hidden thus far. He is far too smart for his own good, he knows too much about the party and what it has done. If he slips up, which it seems like he might, the party would have absolutely no problem killing him and making it appear as if he never existed, just like they have so many times in the past with others who they viewed as threats. Anyone who can think for themselves and does not take everything the party says to be true is an immediate threat. The party thrives on having absolutely control, and right now Winston secretly poses a threat to that control. If any of his thoughts or secret illegal activities were to get out he would be vaporized by the party.

At the end of chapter 8 it seems as though Winston's death may be approaching sooner rather than later. The dark-haired girl has been following him and Winston fears that she knows something that could lead to his downfall. In an earlier chapter Winston mentions that sleep talking is something fears him because it cannot be controlled. After reading this I predicted that it could be some sort of foreshadowing and perhaps Winston will actually reveal his uncertainties through sleep talking which will ultimately lead to his demise. Another possibility is that Winston will kill himself for fear of being discovered, this is something he began contemplating at the end of chapter 8. No matter which way look at it, it seems as though the only fate that Winston has in the novel is to arrive at an unfortunate death, for the sole fact of being too smart and curious for his own good. The party thrives on destroying people like Winston before they have a chance to destroy the party.

The Ministry of Truth

The Ministry of Truth is where the protagonist of the novel 1984, Winston works. The name of the ministry is ironic because the whole purpose of the ministry itself is to hide the truth from the people in the society. The Ministries role is to go back to old documents and alter information and history essentially to match the claims and actions of Big Brother and the Party. This is done so that no one is able to question the actions of the Party, there is no concrete evidence in order to make a claim against what they say is truth, so therefore the Party's truth is the only possible truth and the people just come to accept it because there is nothing they can do about it. In chapter four we are given an example of what the ministry of truth does exactly. Winston goes to work and is tasked with altering a speech made in the previous year which referred to Comrade Withers. Withers used to be an official of the party but has since been vaporized because he was seen as an enemy of the Party, therefore there must not be any record that praises him as a loyal member. Winston replaces Comrade Withers with a made up person, Comrade Oglivy. Comrade Withers is then referred to as a "unperson" since he no longer exists. 

The Ministry of Truth is deceitful and cunning. It creates lies so that people will not be able to start controversy and start an uprising against Big Brother and the Party. It is act of complete control and takes away basic human rights. This is critiquing Orwell's society by truly showing the dystopian essence of it. It reveals how powerful the Party and Big Brother are and how they do not allow anyone basic rights even as small as the truth. The ministry of truth is just another way for the party to gain power and control yet another aspect of its citizens lives, leaving them to be blind. In the end no one can really remember the originally truth since so many lies have built up over the years and therefore they just accept the Party's truth as reality and learn not to question it. 

It is also critiquing our society, it is showing how corrupt society is and how generally we focus on what we did right and tend to overlook what we did wrong. In our society if we are to succeed once we will often ignore the multiple failures that we went through getting up to that point, only focusing on where we were in the end, and when we look back we will remember that we succeeded because that is what our society has taught us. When we look back on history we tend to remember our victories over all of the bad things that happened because we have been thought to remember the good and push out the bad. The Ministry of Truth is kind of like that, it continues to go back and change history, rewriting its mistakes so that it always appears to be correct. It attempts to create a perfect world by essentially erasing its failures. 

Explication of "Weighing the Dog"

This chapter in sound and sense talked about allegories and symbolism. The poem Weighing the Dog, by Billy Collins, uses both symbolism and allegory in a unique and interesting way. First off, the title itself is an allegory, it refers to both literally weighing the dog, as well as weighing the dogs importance in the speakers life.  Although it is the title this relationship is not clear until later in the poem. The speaker begins by telling readers his tactic for weighing the dog: "I hold him in my arms [...] / balancing our weight on the shaky blue scale" (Collins 2-3). Collins describes this in great detail, including everything down to the color of the scale. This shows how important this task is to the speaker and hints to the readers that it may be more than just weighing the dog in a literal sense.

The speaker then goes on to continue to describe his weighing of the dog: "I subtract my weight / from our total to find out the remainder that is his" (7-8). However this gives an even larger hint to the bigger image and how weighing the dog is actually a symbolic task. He comes to realize that he and the dog are combined because they have shared so many experiences and years together, he says that "I never figured out what you amounted to / until I subtracted myself from our combination" (11-12). This returns to the allegory because the speaker could be referring to one of two things, either he did not know the dogs weight until he subtracted his own or, he did not know how important the dog was to his identity until he separated the two.

The speaker comes to realize that him holding the dog in his arms while weighing him is symbolic of all of the times that his dog helped him through. He realizes that he used to be closer to his dog and more recently has become ungrateful and taken his dog for granted, in the last line of the poem the speaker says that he and the dog are lost without each other and are no longer alike. The speaker weighing the dog is symbolic to a person not knowing who they truly are until they are alone.

Explication of Introduction to Poetry

In the poem "Introduction to Poetry", by Billy Collins the speaker compares a poem to many other things through metaphors a similes and also uses strong imagery. First a poem is compared to a color slide using a simile, then t is compared to a hive. The speaker compares a poem to a dark room or a maze because he wants the reader of the poem to analyze the poem and look for different possibilities of what it could possibly mean. He wants the reader to "feel the walls for a light switch" (8) in other words, not look to be given an answer but rather come up with one on his own find a meaning of his own for the poem. The speaker wants every reader to take his or her own ideas and meanings away from each poem they read. The messages of poems are not the same for everybody that is why each person must "feel" their way through each poem as if in a lightless room.

Next a poem is compared to the surface of the ocean. This is a great comparison because the ocean is known for being deep and endless as are the possibilities of what a reader can do with a poem. A reader can look at a poem from the surface level or dig deeper to find its many other meanings that lie in deeper waters. He says he wants readers to be "waving at the author's name on the shore" (11) and to me this meant that he wants the readers to consider what the author may have meant in his writing but not let it control what they take from the poem. This is because the speaker wants each individual to find what the poem means to them.

He then compares the poem to a prisoner, being tied "to a chair with rope / and torture a confession out of it" (13-14). In this part of the poem the speaker is referring to the readers who do not want to analyze poetry and come up with their own meaning but instead want the answer to be given to them. The speaker resents these kinds of readers and wishes they could see poetry as more of an adventure, where one can discover new meanings throughout. The speaker does not want poems to be tied down by the reader because there are so many possibilities within each poem if only the reader is willing to "feel the walls for a light switch" or "water-ski across the surface". The speaker wants poetry to mean more than a simple answer, he wants it to have individual meaning for each person that comes across it.