1984: Winston's Nostalgia

George Orwell, 1984

"The thought flitted through Winston's mind that it would probably be quiet easy to rent the room for a few dollars a week, if he dared to take the risk. It was a wild, impossible notion to be abandoned as soon as he thought of; but the room had awakened in him a sort of nostalgia, a sort of ancestral memory" (Orwell, pg 100)

Winston says this quote while being inside a prole's home, and gazing around the room which contains many objects from the society which existed before, when there was no totalitarianism. It is significant, because throughout the novel small hints are given here and there, which point to the fact that Winston Smith is still extremely attached to the past. Such clues include him buying a glass paperweight, and writing in a journal as a way of keeping in touch with "a time when thought is free, and men are different from one another." (Orwell, pg 30) But this act, the one of him pondering about renting the room which possesses many antiquities and no telescreen,no longer implies, but rather explicitly shows how much Winston is longing to have the same amount of privacy and security as he vaguely remembers having before Big Brother appeared.

This quote also makes the reader realize that they have the ability to do certain things which they don't even think of as "freedom of choice." Because there are specific occupations, such as being capable of sitting inside one's home and writing in a journal, that one never stops to think about how "fortunate" they are to be capable of doing them in today's society. While in this novel, the protagonist has to risk being caught by the "Thought Police" when doing such activities. Winston also perceives such private activities like one of the things that would bring him the greatest amount of inner bliss. But in today's world, most of the joy that one can get from doing these things has been drained due to their monotony; because after all, it's often not the things that we do daily that excite us, but rather, the ones that we do rarely. This quote also shows how certain objects have such a powerful effect over one's memory, because they possess the ability of reawakening certain memories or feelings, which one might have been unaware of their existence. One such object is the room from the quote, which acquaints Winston with his memories of what resting in a room like that felt like.

The reason why this quote was chosen is because it explicitly reflects the protagonist's values and morals; it shows that he is thinking about bending certain rules in order to go back, and live in a residence like the ones which existed before the age of totalitarianism.