book 2 Ch. 3-6

Pg. 79 ‘Did I ever tell you, old boy,’ he said, chuckling round the stem of his pipe, ‘about the time when those two nippers of mine set fire to the old market-woman’s skirt because they saw her wrapping up sausages in a poster of B.B.? Sneaked up behind her and set fire to it with a box of matches. Burned her quite badly, I believe. Little beggars, eh? 

This quote shows how kids in Oceania grow up to praise Big Brother. Everybody in Oceania has to praise Big Brother and with the children praising Big Brother there is less and less of a chance for people to want to disobey big brother. This also makes me think about how the parents don’t tell the children not to commit actions like these. They don’t tell their children this because they can’t. If they were to tell their children that these actions are rude then they would be seen as criminals because they care about people who disobey big brother. I think that it might be difficult to be a parent in Oceana because the children can do almost whatever they want, as long as it harms the right people. It makes me ask: Should these children be punished for burning someone? Something else to think about is that the man was chuckling when he told Winston this. The man believed that kids burning a woman was a little bit funny. This shows us how the people of Oceania think about things we might think are bad. A good comparison here would be if two people were fighting and one of them kills the other. The person that killed the other person would still have to go to jail because they killed someone. In Oceania, it is okay to commit crimes as long as they are for the Party.