To what extent, does an exploration of storytelling in 1984 lead to a deeper understanding of human experiences?

The subject of storytelling is central to

since side-by-side with 's rebellion against the Party is his
attempt to
find out what preceded its dominance. The Party, of course, has
its own version of this, which
is widely disseminated. Winston knows that
this version is a lie:

But where did
that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case
must
soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposedif
all
records told the same talethen the lie passed into history and became
truth. "Who controls
the past," ran the Party slogan, "controls the future:
who controls the present
controls the past."

Winston is continually
frustrated in his attempt to discover the
story of the human race before and without the Party.
No one else seems
interested, not even , who lives in the moment and has no interest in

philosophy or history. When Winston tries to question an old man in a public bar (a
dangerous
thing to do and a sign of Winston's hunger to learn about the past)
the old man remembers
nothing except a few random words and details.
Eventually, Winston gives up the
attempt:

Within twenty years at the most, he reflected,
the huge and simple
question, "Was life better before the Revolution than it is now?"
would have
ceased once and for all to be answerable. But in effect it was unanswerable even
now,
since the few scattered survivors from the ancient world were incapable
of comparing one age
with another.

This aspect of 1984
tells us much about the
frailty and unreliability of human memory but also, paradoxically, about
its
centrality to the human experience. The people around Winston are hopeless and
deracinated
because they have lost the collective story of their past. It is
this that allows the Party to
control their past, present and future and
makes Winston, aspoints out, "the last
man," since everyone else has
forgotten the stories that made them
human.