Significance of syme and parsons

[engstudent021]

i am doinf something in english class where i must disscuss the significance or syme and parsons to the book. Can anyone help?
Thanks

[Yanksrock227]

They are people who are a little closer to Winston at that point in the novel. You can have but a few people in the world of 1984 that you can trust. These two are the closest people to trust that Winston has. They would probably not be his friend so much as closer comerade. But they are a way for the author to show that if someone gets vaporized from history that is close to you, you never mention their name again. It just kind of shows how little emotion the people of the inner and outer parties have.

[The Atheist]

i am doinf something in english class where i must disscuss the significance or syme and parsons to the book. Can anyone help?
Thanks

OK.

The important point about both is how and why they end up in the hands of the Thought Police. Winston [and therefore the reader] believes that Parsons, with his slavish obedience and devotion to the Party, would never be vaporised, while Syme is marked early as someone who will find himself in Room 101, simply because he thinks too much.

That both end up in the same boat as Winston, through no real fault of their own, strengthens the thesis that anyone, anytime, can fall foul of the Thought Police.

Syme's crime is his intellect - he is unable to doublethink his way out of a conundrum with a rhyme [did Orwell pick the name "Syme" precisely because it rhymes with "rhyme"?], when a pure Party member wouldn't have worried about the rhyme or meter of a poem and wouldn't have ended up using a deleted word/image.

Parsons, on the other hand, shows that even living the most perfectly pro-BB life has its dangers. Due to his devotion to the Party, Parsons brings his children up to live life as part of the Party and they clearly see their responsibility to the Party being far greater than any responsibility to their parents.

[Teacher]

Atheist is right on target. Orwell's simple point is that anyone and everyone is on his way to Room 101.

To me, most interestingly is Parsons' fate. Look at who turns him in. Again, Orwell points to the power of children who "drank the KoolAid". Parsons did his level best to follow Big Brother's ideology. It doesn't matter. In fact, can we really be sure that Parsons actually did talk in his sleep.

There's no one exempt.