“What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the pneumatic tubes led, he did not know in detail…” Winston Smith is an on the whole loyal devotee to the Party, (the totalitarian entity which has sole governance over the country in which he resides). Despite his seemingly unwavering loyalty to the Party, he still knows very little of its activities anywhere outside of his direct role inside the party, describing the place the pneumatic tubes led to as an “unseen labyrinth”. Orwell has clearly used labyrinth to describe the ministries’ inner workings to outline the lengths of which the party has gone to to keep it’s workers completely in the dark. This fact, illustrated constantly throughout the text, another example of which, clearly communicated to the reader by the fact that Winston doesn’t know what even the man whom he sits next to everyday, the readers being told, “Winston hardly knew Tillotson, and had no idea what work he was employed on.” From this, it seems, that the party has engineered itself so that secrecy is common practice. It has made it such that no one can understand how it operates, meaning that it is impossible to dissect and bring down. Orwell has illustrated in his writing a very prominent issue at his time, being that governing bodies kept the inner workings of their organisations behind closed doors in order to maintain control and to have as much power as they desired.
Raise your voice, open your mind, unlock your imagination