What question was asked in the bar?

's life is
defined by a kind of perpetual confusion: given how he is trapped within the Party's
manipulation of truth, while he remains self aware as to how artificial that manipulation
actually is.This is one of his great frustrations with life in the world of
: he believes in truth, even as he lives in a society which continually
manipulates facts to achieve its designs.Worse still, as a member of the Outer Party (which must
live under the full weight of 1984's surveillance apparatus), he is given
no recourse for discerning the truth from the propaganda, because everyone else within those
circles is just as trapped in the manipulations as he himself is.

In Chapter
8 of Part 1, Winston Smith travels into one of the Prole neighborhoods (who, it should be noted,
are largely left in squalor).Here, he spots an old man going into one of the pubs.For Smith,
this is a deeply important opportunity, because all real memory of time before the Revolution
has been erased within official circles and rewritten by propaganda (leaving it impossible for
Winston himself to decipher where truth ends and the lies begin).But here, he finds someone who
has actually lived through those changes, and could be expected to remember the world as it had
been before.

Hence, as he goes to speak with the old man, he imagines the
questions he wants to have answered (which would guide the conversation that would
follow):

He would go into the pub, he would scrape
acquaintance with that old man and question him.He would say to him: "Tell me about your
life when you were a boy.What was it like in those days?Were things better than they are now, or
were they worse?" (, 1984, chapter 8)

What follows is a conversation.It is a frustrating experience for Winston, however,
because the old man's memory has been affected by age (leaving Winston without the clear answers
he is searching for).This conversation culminates when, in desperation and frustration, Winston
asks the main question he needs an answer to: whether life had been better in the present or in
the past.