I've been reading 1984 for three weeks and I've really enjoyed everything I've read so far. But now I've reached the part where Winston starts reading Goldstein's book, and it's so boring. More than 20 pages (I think) of the character simply reading a book within a book really broke the rhythm of the work for me. Did anyone else feel this way?
I think the whole novel is just an instrument to make the reader read Orwell's anti-totalitarian statement. Goldstein's book is the real focus of the novel, it's George Orwell's thoughts and explaination on how the world operates. But if it was a separate manifesto book about politics, no one would read it, thinking it's boring like you do right now, so he had to incorporate it into his novel.
I fully agree. Goldstein's book, in my opinion, is the best part of 1984. Creating a fictional world around the book allows the audience to see how this society works in action instead of it just being hypotheticals.
I was sad we didn't got to read it all. đ
Idk having a 30 or so page political essay wedged two thirds of the way into the novel kinda kills the flow
But the Lion and The Unicorn is a similar tract. Also penned by Eric himself.
It's very readable.
Also. I'm old enough to remember when ,"books" like this were reprinted cheap as chips byP.R.C.although this was afore the Tiannamen sq events... Source: unreconstructed Marxist here.. And it's not boring, it's arguably world and lore building. By stalling the action in the book just so to just before this, Orwell sets up the next part of the book perfectly. Edited for spelling.
Interesting
From what Iâve read, OâBrien is actually Orwellâs concept of what James Burnham is (Managerial Revolution author)
I thought that Goldsteins book really solved many mysteries about the story.
There are many books that make good use of the âbook within a bookâ motif such as Dune, HP Lovecraft, and Lord of the Rings. Some people have even published fake Necronomicons for the Lovecraft fans
What mysteries did it solve? In my opinion it created more questions than it solved.Â
About the backstory and ideology of Ingsoc.
What if literally the whole thing is just not true?Â
Even a completely fictional work would greatly clarify the world of 1984
Yes, it would.Â
However you would never know how much of it is fiction. The whole thing? Or just the details? Maybe most of it is fake but there are a few kernels of truth?Â
This is what I love about Goldsteins book, it leaves me with more questions than answers each time.Â
Is that not the whole point of "Goldstein's" book?
Edit: lol just saw your other post in the thread, clearly you have the same interpretation as I do. Carry on, don't mind me.
Even quite sophisticated reads fail to put together that "Oligarchical Collectivism" is not Orwell's explanation to the reader, but the Party's propaganda to dissenters.
It's not meant to be the truth behind all the lies Winston was told, but the half-truths and evasions the party permits to those who can see through the first layer of lies.
It may help to realise that, just as Big Brother is a fiction in universe, so is Emanuel Goldstein. You could call it "controlled opposition".
I've always found it funny that, although Goldstein is a (probably) made-up scapegoat, by a state, which might not exist (at least in the way Oceania or Air Strip 1 are introduced), lead by a party of which we still know only one real member, in a made-up alternative universe, still has to check one very popular scape-goat box: he has a Jewish sounding last name.
Obviously they'd use every tool at their disposal to make him easy to hate. Here in the real world, I didn't understand certain people's hatred of George Soros until I learned he's Jewish. Can't say I understand antisemitism, but I do understand that, sadly, it's not hard to find if you know where to look.
As Mark Fisher pointed out, the allure of the Necronomicon was the fact it was only ever cited, never quoted.
I canât believe not everyone likes Goldsteinâs book. I care way more about the world the story happens in than Winston.
I dont remember it being boring, i thought it was very interesting hearing about what was going on in the rest of the world and why Oceania was the way it was. Its when things in the book really start to pick up imo too, Winston is finally "in" on the conspiracy. Its also certainly the most thought provoking part of the book for me.Â
I will keep details very light here because I don't know how to spoiler tag.... but once the origin of the book is revealed it really makes you question EVERYTHING.Â
Who really is Goldstein? Is he real? Was he ever? Are the contents the book accurate? If so how much? What parts of it are, or are not, and why? How do the origins of the book change the implications of how Winston came upon it?Â
Is Eurasia even real? Is southeast Asia even real? Is the war even real?Â
I think the thing is, Orwell didnât care about Winstonâs fate, other than to make it as bleak as he could. Orwell wanted people to realize what a monster Stalin (and by extension Soviet Communism) really was. This was in spite of his own socialist beliefs.
When Orwell saw how Party members in the West slavishly followed Stalinâs line, he knew the world was in trouble. 1984 shows us the logical outcome of this.
That meme of Obama giving himself an award described Orwell writing Winston gushing over how the book is the greatest thing heâs ever read (which Orwell also wrote)
I suppose the caveat to that is Winston was totally deprived of any source of information and entertainment that isn't formulaic brain rot propaganda, and he's also hopelessly infatuated with any trinket and bauble from the old world.
So him loving it so much is less a reflection of the quality of the prose, and more of a reflection of Winston himself
Orwell also makes it a point to cut back to Julia falling fast asleep whenever Winston reads the worldbuilding exposition book, and she's just humouring Winston whenever she tells him it's fascinating
but yeah it is a little masturbatory
I really enjoyed that part
Same here itâs one of my favorite parts of the book. To each their own.
Remember that Orwell was an essayist. In fact he is the greatest essayist maybe ever. His novels arenât really very good as novels, other than 1984 and maybe Down and Out in Paris and London. (Animal Farm is a fable.)
So he wants to make his point about the importance of truth. While his essays about the Spanish Civil War are outstanding, they arenât widely read.
He was dying as he wrote 1984 and he knew it. This was his chance to make his point. So he puts an essay in to be sure we all get it.
Goldsteinâs book feels slow because it isnât meant to âentertainâ â itâs meant to expose the operating manual of Oceaniaâs power. Orwell is showing you the internal logic of the system Winston is trapped in.
What youâre reading is the ideology of oligarchical collectivism laid bare: a political order where a tiny ruling class maintains power not by solving problems, but by ensuring the social conditions that make change impossible.
Goldsteinâs text explains three things that the novel itself doesnât give you space to stop and analyze:
The Party doesnât rule for the people â it rules to preserve the conditions of its own rule. Oligarchical collectivism is the doctrine that rationalizes this: the collective exists only as a rhetorical tool that masks total concentration of power in the Inner Party.
Itâs about stabilizing society by wasting surplus production and keeping everyone too exhausted, frightened, and materially insecure to organize. Goldsteinâs book reveals that the enemy isnât Eurasia or Eastasia â the enemy is a population capable of thinking clearly.
The Partyâs goal isnât to make people believe lies; itâs to eliminate the very conditions in which truth or falsity could matter. Thatâs why âdoublethinkâ is the core of the book â itâs the psychological technology that allows a ruling class to maintain absolute dominance without constant violence.
Once you see that, the âbook within the bookâ stops feeling like an interruption. Itâs the decoder ring for the entire novel. Orwell uses it to show that totalitarianism isnât powered by ideology at all but rather by the systematic hollowing-out of language, history, and shared reality.
This is the best distillation of the Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism I've seen, and I read the book 35 years ago.
Appreciate that! All the best. Cheers to keeping the knowledge alive and critically engaging.
"Perpetual war isnât about victory."
Does this only work when Eastasia and Eurasia are following what appears to be the same political system?
It seems to work really well with these three supernations in a balanced state, never progressing, always going back and forth.
And while this current supposed state of the world by 1984 implies a period of conquest, where the old democracies were unable to defend against the united military power of countries under ingsoc, it makes me wonder what would happen if this state wasn't attained.
What if one of the superpowers, like Eastasia, were able to prosper in a conventional dictatorship (or even a very strict democracy...maybe). Would they not develop their production capacity and technology far beyond Oceania, very quickly?
I like this line of thought, and I think it would be impossible to maintain due to the nature of power. It corrupt ls, it wants more, and if any one nation could or will or did, they would certainly break ranks and try to take over the other.
Though knowing that, the winner of any war would be weakened by the fighting, allowing the 3rd party to come in for the kill. So maybe it keeps everyone in a cold war. Though if their production capabilities and tech were so far ahead, and I dont want to look at n.korea and russia right now (a real dictatorship just incapable of real progress, and a huge country wholly unprepared for a new age war), maybe they just haven't had the need to push their capabilities?
But I highly doubt one would be naive to think the other two weren't plotting, and so by staying stagnant they'd just be waiting for death.
So either the tippy top elite are just the leaders of the three super countries all agreeing they love power and control over their people too much to risk or the book is written right before the next world war.
I want to reread it, but it's just so depressing.
Great questions/points. Love this book, so I greatly appreciate this conversation! I think the key is that the system in 1984 isnât just about military balanceâitâs about internal control through perpetual crisis.
Youâre right that if one superpower actually prospered and advanced, the whole arrangement would collapse. But thatâs exactly why the system works: none of them want to prosper in a conventional sense. The ruling elites in all three superstates have discovered something more valuable than economic growth or military victory: total internal control.
The perpetual war serves their shared interest: it justifies rationing, surveillance, and the destruction of surplus production that might otherwise raise living standards and give people the freedom to think critically. Each regime needs the external threat more than they need actual victory.
The âbalanceâ isnât maintained by agreement between the superpowersâitâs maintained because each elite class independently recognizes that breaking the stalemate would undermine their own grip on power. A real victory would mean demobilization, economic normalization, and the educated, prosperous population that comes with it. Thatâs the enemy.
So yes, in theory one nation could pull ahead. But the Party doesnât measure success in GDP or technologyâit measures it in control. And by that metric, the system is already perfectly optimized.
I think it was more like:
1) Power is what Power does
2) War is Management
3) Truth is irrelevant
The novel is written from Winston's perspective. When you're reading it you don't know anything Winston does not know.
So when Winston gets to hide away reading all these secrets about the world, you have to learn them at the same time. They cannot be drip fed throughout the novel earlier
same thing just happened to me, left the book for a week and Iâve just finished it in one sitting today. wish i could erase it from memory and reread it all over again
Why no I loved it
Thatâs my favourite part of the book. The explanations it gives for how the society works is fascinating and scary
I personally liked that section, probably way more than the previous pages. It is the part that oozes with world building and real life reflections. If you think it's boring though, don't worry. 1984 gets more interesting after Goldstein's book...
Sometimes that feeling is intentional from the author. That part is supposed to break the flow of the story, it's meant to drag on. When you finish the book you'll have a better understanding as to why Orwell places such a long unbroken focus on one thing at that moment in the story.
I can see how someone would see it as boring. I find it fascinating. It's like Orwell considered every possibility and he has an explanation for every facet of society and how it breaks down and can be exploited or controlled.
The whole book has really little artistic value, it's a bad literature. Edgy for the purpose of being edgy, nothing more
Only my entire highschool English class
I actually liked getting to see Goldstein's book. This kind of meta-analysis inside the literature itself is really appealing, TBH.
Some books just aren't for everyone. Goldstein's book was the best part of 1984.
I personally couldn't stand the romance aspects of it with Julia. Orwell could have done her character better, but I understand she was an implementation to showcase a young female sex rebel against the conventions of Party norms; which was something that definitely couldn't be explored with Winston alone.
It's a slab of exposition and it might've been better if Orwell had managed to incorporate it into the narrative but it's still informative analysis.
Yeah for me it was bit of a slogan bit its an important part of the story and the one you can project onto real life the best.
I'm feeling like this right now, with the difference that I'm some pages from Goldstein's book :/
Possibly somewhere there is a reader of romance novels, complaining about the wedding at the end because "Love is so boring".
They may be related to you.
"I've been reading 1984 for three weeks" bro reads 1 word per minuet
Kind of, yeah. I remember skimming it to find the parts that were more relevant and interesting. I feel like Orwell got a bit indulgent and just wrote about his theories of power and society.
I mean, in a way, yes, but also... no... no... just.... no...Â
It is much more interesting to re-read Goldsteins book with the context of who wrote it, and where Winston ACTUALLY got it from. With that understanding that the book itself is what we would call an "unreliable narrator" you can start to read between the lines and ask questions about what parts of the book are real/true, and what is a fabrication, amd WHY might the parts that are truthful be included, and why are the parts that are falsified be falsified.Â
If you only skim over this part of the book once and then never re-read it or analyze it deeper, you miss all of that nuance.Â
Tbh I don't believe O'Brian that they just fabricated the book. I think that was a random lie he just threw out. The history of Oceania also doesn't matter to me much and whether it's true or false -- the origins of the current situation aren't as important as the theory, and the theory I find to be largely compelling and accurate. I think you're assigning too much importance to the section and nuance to Orwell's intentions. I don't think he wrote that section with the intention of making it a puzzle at all really.
I think a lot of writers end up creating things much larger and much deeper than they intended.Â
There's the age old example of the English teacher saying "why did he make the curtains blue, is it representative of his deep depression, or the loss of his wife?"Â The author: the curtains were blue
However, the point of this meme in my opinion isnt that English teachers are stupid for examining the nuanced in everything, the point is that when you critically analyze things and ask questions you learn more about it, you think about it more, it makes you lay more attention.
 Sometimes you may find things you wouldnt have otherwise, sometimes we may find themes and messages hidden in the work that the author never intended. A great example of that would be the classic fascist science fiction opera "starship troopers" which was originally not supposed to be all that political, let alone a passive endorsement of fascism. Then sombody with media literacy read the book and thought it would be funny to put Neil Patrick Harris goose stepping in the film adaptation.Â
And sometimes the curtains simply are blue. To each their own.
Yes, sometimes they are. But if you never ask those questions and think more deeply, the curtains will always just be blue, no more, no less.Â
Some people are happy that way.Â
My grandfather, for example, really lenjoyed the "completely apolitical" series "The Hunger Games"
Media literacy isnt for all of us, and thats OK!Â
No. Remember how O'Brian mentions he wrote some of the book?
It's not Orwell revealing The Truth to the reader, it's the party telling lies and half truths to its dissenters.
Yeah, and I'm saying he lied about writing it. I agree with the assessment in Goldstein's book about the nature of power and the formation of totalitarian states. I think Orwell just slotted it in and added a justification posthoc
Plausible, but no. The ideas presented in Goldstein's book are essentially those of James Burnham, an American Marxist who broke away from Troksky.
Orwell wrote several highly criticial reviews of Burnham's The Managerial Revolution and its sequels. So Orwell knew the arguments, but disagreed with them.
EDIT: In a brainfart, I originally wrote "James Buchanan" - 15th US president. It's James Burnham.
Kapitanoâs right here. Goldsteinâs book wasnât random or âslotted inâ â itâs Orwell reworking James Burnhamâs managerial-elite thesis into a dystopian extreme. The Party partially authoring it is the point: itâs a mix of truth and ideological framing designed to shape dissidents, not a secret dump of âreal history.â
Treating OâBrienâs admission as a random lie breaks the internal logic. The book-within-the-book is part of the machinery of control, not an indulgent tangent.
Orwellâs weakness as a novelist is his didacticism.