Thoughts on 1984 and Parable of the Sower

The ending of 1984 is very bleak, with Winston being conditioned into the perfect Party member, completely loyal to Oceania, hateful toward Oceania's enemies, and fully accepting that the memories of his past are fake. With Winston and Julia having had their rebellion quite literally beaten out of them, there seems to be no hope of overthrowing the Party. However, a shred of this hope can still be found in the most unlikely of places: the book's appendix, The Principles of Newspeak. The appendix is written in past tense, with phrases like "... Newspeak would have  finally superseded Oldspeak" and "Its vocabulary was so constructed", implying that Newspeak, and the Party by extension, no longer exists in the present day. Perhaps an underground rebellion formed despite the Party's attempts to stamp it out, or maybe the Party fell apart on its own. Regardless of how it happened, it remains clear that the system set up by the Party was eventually torn down....

After I read through the Room 101 scene, I had some questions about the logistics of Room 101, mainly about how exactly the Thought Police figure out a person's greatest fear. In Winston's case, he talked to Julia about it in the upstairs room of Mr. Charrington's shop, a room that happened to contain a telescreen. The Thought Police must have heard him and taken note of his fear. But what about people who never speak about their fears out loud? When O'Brien talks to Winston in the Ministry of Love, he claims that he knows everything Winston is thinking. However, I don't believe this to be the truth, because if the Thought Police truly knew everyone's thoughts, they likely would have arrested Winston much earlier, perhaps when he first thought about writing in his diary. If the Thought Police can't figure out someone's fears by reading their mind or listening to their conversations, then they can't effectively use Room 101 on that person. It is possi...