Questioning

“Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with balks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard an their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden  walls sagging in all directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger path and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken houses?” (3)

This is one of the first times that Winston starts questioning the motives of the Party.  Doubt and suspicion fill Winston’s mind as he looks out at the city.  He finds it hard to believe that everything the Party tells him about the history of the Party and the city is true.  The imagery that Orwell uses not only shows Winston’s suspicion, but it also shows the state of living at this point.