Going through my analysis is kind of like watching paint dry, right? Of course, I am doing the best that I can but I do recognize that I am moving kind of slowly. I thought maybe we would savor one chapter a week or so.

Chapter three is another short chapter. It starts out with a dream that Winston has and finishes with another session with the telescreen. Instead of introducing new terms, this chapter starts to develop the idea of the effects of Big Brother.

Erasing Emotion- Strong themes are building that tie emotion to being human and how over time emotion is being stripped. Love and sexuality continue to dominate the list of emotions. There is the love of his mother and then the sudden appearance of a naked woman without context to the rest of his dream.

It is not the first time that we have heard that Winston pre-dates the transition to Big Brother. But he was young and therefore lives in a partial world of pre-governmental transition with some remnants of what we would consider family values. We are led to believe that his mother died as a result of loving her son, Winston. It is a thought crime after all.

Distinguishing emotion and function I would say differentiates humans from machines and possibly humans from other animals. So, by removing emotion it sort of homogenizes people as really an entity rather than an individual. Supervised activities such as periodic calisthenics further attempts to keep people’s minds from wandering but also unifies common experience; another standardization tactic.

Dreams and sexual repression continue to build in the next couple of chapters. Those will be covered when we get there. I just had a wild hare and searched the connection between Freud and Orwell right now as I was writing this. It would seem like I am not the only one to have seen a commonality. Here is an example.

That is just one example of the multiple opinions and connections that people have made. It does appear that people have put much more effort into this than I have, for instance I saw a Master’s Degree thesis in my search. I have personally never studied psychology so I am not really qualified to speak on the validity of the argument. However, I do recognize the components of Freudian psychology and the connections to the story line.

Wow, that just twisted my mind. Here I was thinking that this story was a brilliant forecasting of the future and it could be much more dimensional then that. Maybe the story accidently predicted the future or maybe the Freudian theory really is driving the behavior of humanity? I am going to leave it there for today as something to think about.