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Although there is general agreement that the ‘Goldstein’ book and the Appendix both stem from the same satiric impulse, the degree of Orwell’s success in combining satire and naturalism remains a subject of debate. Crick may be right to leave the matter open: ‘Perhaps [Orwell] had not solved the structural problem of integrating these two things into the narrative, or perhaps their unintegrated documentary appearance was fully deliberate.’ But, if the ‘documentary appearance’ was deliberate, what did Orwell hope to achieve? Although Samuel Hynes, among others, has rightly noted the dependence of Orwell’s imagination on ‘the sense of recorded fact,’ I cannot agree with him that the ‘Goldstein’ book and the Appendix serve ‘as a kind of make-believe documentation’ intended to ‘make the world more horrible by verifying it.’ On the contrary, I would suggest that the real horror of the ‘Goldstein’ book is not that it verifies the world of the novel but that it fails to verify any world. Does Big Brother exist? Does Goldstein exist? Does the Brotherhood exist? Did the Party write the ‘Goldstein’ book? Winston cannot get straight answers to his questions, and neither can the reader.

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