Ultimate Sociopolitical Dystopia

George Orwell’s nightmarish novel “1984” features character Winston Smith, who’s trapped in a hellish totalitarian world of the future. He desperately struggles to survive by obeying the all-encompassing dictates of “Big Brother,” the frightening symbol of the brutal regime controlling all aspects of life, including the thinking process, ruthlessly enforced by the “Thought Police.”
      The slightest violation of even one of Big Brother’s oppressive rules – the worst being a “thoughtcrime,” an unspoken belief or doubt contradicting the dominate ideology — meant being crushed like a cockroach.  Winston, however, is plagued by dangerous flashbacks throughout the story. These serve two purposes; the first is to remind him of his past and family, and the second to expose the horror created by Big Brother. Without the flashbacks, Winston would’ve remained oblivious to what he had lost. 
    One flashback occurred during one of the daily Two Minutes Hate sessions, in which he remembers a dream where someone assured him they would meet him in a “place with no darkness.” However, Winston makes the catastrophic mistake of believing it was O’Brian, a regime enforcer masquerading as a rebel, who was the reassuring dream figure. 

    Another flashback was of his mother and sister looking at him mournfully from somewhere underground. This causes Winston to feel deep emotional pain, particularly from his guilt of having stolen some of their food.  It is yet another crime in this dystopia as memories of such things is strictly forbidden. Yet he cannot help but realize they were “sacrificed to his own…..the things that now suddenly struck Winston was that his mother’s death….was tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no longer possible.  Tragedy belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love, and friendship..”
    The last flashback featured his father, who was carrying him down the stairs into the Tube subway to find shelter and safety from the bombs raining down above during the revolutionary war. Winston barely remembers much else about his dad and feels a terrible emptiness in the probability he had died in the war not much later. Once again, as with his mother and sister, Winston experiences a jarring sensation, of longing, guilt, and anguish, over what he once had.  Should the Thought Police ever discover such subversion, he would be doomed.