Early in
the book, the reader learns thatis constantly struggling to remember his past, and that he often
fails:
It was no use, he could not remember: nothing
remained of his childhood except a series of brightly-lit tableaux, occurring against no
background and mostly unintelligible.
But there are
flashbacks throughout. One significant memory sequence occurs after the Two Minutes of Hate
session where he thinkssympathizes with him. He remembers a dream he had where a person
approached him and told him that he would meet him in a "place where there is no
darkness." Winston identifies this voice with O'Brien, with disastrous
consequences.
Wiinston also has a poignant dream about his mother and sister,
neither of whom he really remembers. They are staring at him from what seems to be an
underground, or even underwater place, and he is overwhelmed by the feeling that their lives had
been "sacrificed to his own." This sequence serves to show what has been lost since
the rise of the totalitarian state:
The thing that now
suddenly struck Winston was that his mother's death...was tragic and sorrowful in a way that was
no longer possible. ...belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy,
love, and friendship...
Another flashback is used to
suggest what has happened to cause the rise of Big Brother. Winston remembers his father hauling
him down a flight of stairs to a Tube station which served as a bomb shelter. "Since that
time," Winston remembers, "war had been literally continuous." Flashbacks are
thus used to demonstrate Winston's yearning for humanity, to show what the totalitarian state
has taken from people, and to provide background for the events portrayed in the
novel.
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