Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [192]

At the age of three Comrade Ogilvy had refused all toys except a drum, a sub-machine gun and a model helicopter. At six – a year early, by a special relaxation of the rules – he had joined the Spies; at nine he had been a troop leader. At eleven he had denounced his uncle to the Thought Police after overhearing a conversation which appeared to him to have criminal tendencies. At seventeen he had been a district organiser of the Junior Anti-Sex League. At nineteen he had designed a hand grenade which had been adopted by the Ministry of Peace and which, at its first trial, had killed thirty-one Eurasian prisoners in one burst. At twenty-three he had perished in action. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 192

Note

The cradle-to-grave vita of a wholly invented loyalist — each stage more absurd than the last, delivered in deadpan chronological monotony. The jolt is that this parody of the ideal Party biography is indistinguishable in tone from genuine Party hagiography; the reader cannot tell where satire ends because there is no ‘end’ to satirize. Orwell makes invention structured and rhythmic, so the fakery itself becomes a kind of form.