1984 Victory Gin

[jbor]

on 13/5/03 10:37 AM, pynchonoid wrote:

> Many utopian/dystopian novels
> do feature drugs -- soma in  _Brave New World_  for
> example -- but not _1984_, which relies instead on
> totalitarian social organization, closed media
> propaganda loop, and brute force to achieve social
> control. 

What about "Victory gin"? At the end of the novel when Winston is in the
Chestnut Tree Café he is served a never-ending supply of the stuff,
apparently on the Party's tab and certainly one of the contributing factors
in his final submission to doublethink. Winston takes shots of Victory gin
throughout the novel, first thing in the morning, at work, as soon as he
gets home. It gives him a momentary buzz, a feeling of "freedom", albeit
illusory. In fact, it's rather insidiously an instrument of the social
control orchestrated by Big Brother.

best