1984 (1,8) The Lottery
Aug. 26th, 2011 07:55 amContinuing his walk in the prole quarters, Winston comes across a group of men getting into a heated argument over the lottery and whether any number ending in ‘7’ has ever won. Winston can only mourn in his thought that hope rests only in the proles:
The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention. It was probable that there were some millions of proles for whom the Lottery was the principal if not the only reason for remaining alive. It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant. Where the Lottery was concerned, even people who could barely read and write seemed capable of intricate calculations and staggering feats of memory.This is all the more pathetic because Winston knows, as everyone in the Party knows, the Lottery is a ruse, as lotteries always are.