The dystopian novel is a unique category in literature, with its own unique sets ot stylistic rules. With dystopia, you also get a particular type of reader, and a particular type of writer. One would not expect, for example, dystopia out of F. Scott Fitzgerald or Ernest Hemingway. These authors, while having their own demons, take humanity’s flaws and portray them on a realistic stage. Dystopia takes the flaws of humanity and makes them normative for everyone. This is the world of writers like Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale) and George Orwell. These writers draw readers who have, like them, put enough thought into deconstructing society that an interjection such as “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism” becomes an interesting diversion – even a necessary part of the tale. The reader needs to know what made the world change from his own reality to the reality of the story. How did the world that existed before World War II, for example, become divided into three huge political units in a matter of decades? The questions of actual logistics are somewhat important, but the questions of motivation are even more so. The question becomes: what lies beneath our own reality that makes the world of Big Brother possible? The reader needs exposition to understand this. While 34 pages (the length of Orwell’s philosophical aside in 1984 is indeed a long diversion, it is an effective – even necessary – part of the novel.
The point at which the diversion takes place is ideal. The 34-page break is found in a book that an anonymous man brings to Winston in the middle of a rally. Winston is at his own most vulnerable, what with the huge workload that went along with changing the news and information of the last five years to reflect that Eastasia was now Oceania’s enemy, not its ally; instead, war was with Eurasia: “a large part of the political literature of five years was now completely obsoleteand records of all kindshad to be rectified at lightning speed” (Orwell). Winston and his colleagues had to work “eighteen hours in the twenty-four, with two three-hour snatches of sleep.” This weariness makes Winston even more likely to rebel – which is what O’Brien and the rest of the Thought Police really want, so they can retrain him sooner.
Another reason why this time is ideal is that the flaws in Big Brother’s façade are the most obvious. Winston knows that he is covering up the truth of the past by undertaking such major alterations to the historical record. He has to devote serious thought to his task: “[o]ften it was enough merely to substitute one name for another, but any detailed report of events demanded care and imagination. Even the geographical knowledge that one needed in transferring the war from one world to another was considerable” (Orwell). There is no way that Winston can tell himself that the changes did not take place. He cannot believe the lie that he and the rest of the Records Department, and Big Brother, expect the masses in Oceania to believe – that the last five years of information are all lies spread by Goldstein. This idea is so absurd, that by the time Winston gets home from his eighteen-hour days, wearied to the point of insurrection, he is all to ready to believe, all to ready to slip into O’Brien’s hands.
Because of the distinctive nature of dystopia, a lengthy missive such as the one that Orwell inserts into 1984 is, while a narrative risk, an important step in creating the world in which Winston lives for the reader. 1984 is by no means a short book; this passage constitutes less than 10 percent of the entire novel. The philosophical notes in the book are crucial to understanding the reasons for Orwell’s protest; by the time the passage appears in the novel, though, the reader sees its philosophical bases in the world of Winston – and in his own as well.
