The place where there is no darkness.

"'We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.'" (Orwell 25).

This is a sentence from a dream Winston has. Years after he has this dream, he identifies the voice that speaks these words to him as O'Brien's, a man whom he works with and feels a certain connection with, although as he says later on this page, he is not sure whether they are friends or enemies. This quote says a lot about Winston's connection with O'Brien as well as the society in the novel as a whole. When you first read this sentence, a "place where there is no darkness" sounds like a positive thing, a place with no unhappiness or distress. Similarly, when utopias (or dystopias) like the one in the book are first planned or created, they seem like a good thing; a society with no one fighting one another, and everyone united in everything. However, things do not always play out like this. A place with no darkness also means a place with no shadows, and no shadows means no place to hide. The society clearly does not work for everyone, as some people are appalled by the censorship and lack of privacy that go hand-in-hand in the community of Oceania. In fact, as it turns out, the "place where there is no darkness" is NOT a positive place; it is, as we find out later, the cell that Winston is put into at the end of the novel. Nothing is as it seems; good and bad exist interchangeably and ARE interchanged.