Room 101 Essay

919 Words4 Pages
Please read: a personal appeal from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales Read now Room 101 From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia This article is about the room mentioned in the book Nineteen Eighty-Four. For the TV series of the same name, see Room 101 (TV series). For the radio series, see Room 101 (radio series). Room 101 is a place introduced in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. It is a torture chamber in the Ministry of Love in which the Party attempts to subject a prisoner to his or her own worst nightmare, fear or phobia. “ You asked me once, what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world. ” — O'Brien Such is the purported omniscience of the state in the society of Nineteen Eighty-Four that even a citizen's nightmares are known to the Party. The nightmare, and therefore the threatened punishment, of the protagonist Winston Smith is to be attacked by rats. Smith saves himself by begging the authorities to let his lover, Julia, have her face gnawed by the ferocious rodents instead. The torture, and what Winston does to escape it, breaks his last promise to himself and to Julia: never to betray her emotionally. The book suggests that Julia is likewise subjected to her own worst fear, and when she and Winston later meet in a park, he notices a scar on her forehead. The original intent of threatening Winston with the rats was not necessarily to go through with the act, but to force him into betraying the only person he loved and therefore break his spirit. Orwell named Room 101 after a conference room at Bush House where he used to sit through tedious meetings.[1] When one of the possible original room 101s at the BBC was due to be demolished, a plaster cast was made by artist Rachel Whiteread. The cast was displayed in the cast courts of the
Open Document