Why Does Orwell Include Detailed Passages From Goldsteins Book In 1984?
Like the “newspeak” section at the end of the book, the lengthy extracts from Goldstein’s book (if he is the author or even exists) on Oligarchical Collectivism tend to be skipped by readers. Nevertheless they are important to the novel as a whole. Firstly, the extracts reinforce the reader’s (and of course Winston’s) belief in a genuine opposition to the Party; the belief is only really undermined much later, when O’Brien claims to have written much of it himself. Even then, we are left with the faint possibility that the Brotherhood and its aims really are meant by Orwell to be summed up in “The Book.” (Though I don’t believe that Orwell presents the Book as a serious political manifesto; even Winston notices that it isn’t really telling him anything new. Some critics just see the extracts as a parody of Trotskyism.) The extracts also give us a perspective that Winston, who has lived with the Party for most of his life, lacks; it fills in some gaps regarding how it came into being, a
