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I. Chapter I A. Summary 1. On a cold day in April of 1984, a man named Winston Smith returns to his home, a dilapidated apartment building called Victory Mansions. 2. Thin, frail, and thirty-nine years old, it is painful for him to trudge up the stairs because he has a varicose ulcer above his right ankle. 3. The elevator is always out of service so he does not try to use it. 4. As he climbs the staircase, he is greeted on each landing by a poster depicting an enormous face, underscored by the words "BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU." 5. Winston is an insignificant official in the Party, the totalitarian political regime that rules all of Airstrip One—the land that used to be called England—as part of the larger state of Oceania. 6. Though Winston is technically a member of the ruling class, his life is still under the Party's oppressive political control. a. In his apartment, an instrument called a telescreen—which is always on, spouting propaganda, and through which the Thought Police are known to monitor the actions of citizens—shows a dreary report about pig iron. 7. Winston keeps his back to the screen. a. From his window he sees the Ministry of Truth, where he works as a propaganda officer altering historical records to match the Party's official version of past events. 8. Winston thinks about the other Ministries that exist as part of the Party's governmental apparatus: a. the Ministry of Peace, which wages war; b. the Ministry of Plenty, which plans economic shortages; c. and the dreaded Ministry of Love, the center of the Inner Party's loathsome activities.
WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
B. From a drawer in a little alcove hidden from the telescreen, Winston pulls out a small diary he recently purchased. 1. He found the diary in a secondhand store in the proletarian district, where the very poor live relatively unimpeded by Party monitoring. a. The proles, as they are called, are so impoverished and insignificant that the Party does not consider them a threat to its power. 2. Winston begins to write in his diary, although he realizes that this constitutes an act of rebellion against the Party. a. He describes the films he watched the night before. b. He thinks about his lust and hatred for a dark-haired girl who works in the Fiction Department at the Ministry of Truth, and about an important Inner Party member named O'Brien—a man he is sure is an enemy of the Party. c. Winston remembers the moment before that day's Two Minutes Hate, an assembly during which Party orators whip the populace into a frenzy of hatred against the enemies of Oceania. d. Just before the Hate began, Winston knew he hated Big Brother, and saw the same loathing in O'Brien's eyes. 3. Winston looks down and realizes that he has written "down with big brother" over and over again in his diary. a. He has committed a thoughtcrime—the most unpardonable crime—and he knows that the Thought Police will seize him sooner or later. b. Just then, there is a knock at the door. C. Chapter 1 Quiz 1. In one paragraph, describe “Victory Mansions,” where Winston Smith lives. a. a dilapidated apartment building called Victory Mansions. Details include broken elevator; the hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats.; holes in the floor; 2. In one paragraph, describe Winston Smith. a. Thin, frail, and thirty-nine years old, it is painful for him to trudge up the stairs because he has a varicose ulcer above his right ankle.
D. analysis 1. The first few chapters of 1984 are devoted to introducing the major characters and themes of the novel. 2. These chapters also acquaint the reader with the harsh and oppressive world in which the novel's protagonist, Winston Smith, lives. a. It is from Winston's perspective that the reader witnesses the brutal physical and psychological cruelties wrought upon the people by their government. 3. Orwell's main goals in 1984 are: a. to depict the frightening techniques a totalitarian government (in which a single ruling class possesses absolute power) might use to control its subjects, b. and to illustrate the extent of the control that government is able to exert. 4. To this end, Orwell offers a protagonist who has been subject to Party control all of his life. He has arrived at a dim idea of rebellion and freedom. 5. Unlike virtually anyone else in Airstrip One, Winston seems to understand that he might be happier if he were free. 6. Orwell emphasizes the fact that, in the world of Airstrip One, freedom is a shocking and alien notion: a. simply writing in a diary—an act of self-expression—is an unpardonable crime. 7. He also highlights the extent of government control by describing how the Party watches its members through the giant telescreens in their homes. 8. The panic that grabs hold of Winston when he realizes that he has written "down with big brother" evidences his certainty in the pervasive omniscience of the Party and in the efficiency of its monitoring techniques. 9. Winston's diary entry, his first overt act of rebellion, is the primary plot development in this chapter. a. It illustrates Winston's desire, however slight, to break free of the Party's total control. b. Winston's hatred of Party oppression has been festering for some time, possibly even for most of his life. 10. It is important to note that the novel, however, opens on the day that this hatred finds an active expression— a. Winston's instinct to rebel singles him out of the sheep-like masses. b. Unlike the rest of the general public who do not find the Party's contradictions problematic, Winston is aware of himself as an entity separate from the totalitarian state. c. He realizes that writing in the diary has altered his life irrevocably and that he is no longer simply another citizen of Oceania. d. In writing in the diary he becomes a thought-criminal, and he considers himself doomed from the very start: i. "Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever ... Sooner or later they were bound to get you." (19) 11. One of the most important themes of 1984 is governmental use of psychological manipulation and physical control as a means of maintaining its power. a. This theme is present in Chapter I, as Winston's grasping at freedom illustrates the terrifying extent to which citizens are not in control of their own minds. b. The telescreens in their homes blare out a constant stream of propaganda, touting the greatness of Oceania and the success of the Party in ruling it. c. Each day citizens are required to attend the Two Minutes Hate, an intense mass rally in which they are primed with fury and hatred for Oceania's rival nations, venting their own pent-up emotions in the process. d. The government, meanwhile, expresses its role in outlandishly dishonest fashion, as seen in the stark contradiction between the name and function of each of its ministries. e. The net effect of this psychological manipulation is a complete breakdown of the independence of an individual's mind. f. Independence and will are replaced by a fear of, and faith in, the Party; indeed, individual thought has become so alien the population accepts that the Party has made it a crime.
II. chapters II & III A. summary (20) 1. Winston opens the door fearfully, assuming that the Thought Police have arrived to arrest him for writing in the diary. a. However, it is only Mrs. Parsons, a neighbor in his apartment building, needing help with the plumbing while her husband is away. b. In Mrs. Parson’s apartment, Winston is tormented by the fervent Parsons children, who, being Junior Spies, accuse him of thoughtcrime. c. The Junior Spies is an organization of children who monitor adults for disloyalty to the Party, and frequently succeed in catching them—Mrs. Parsons herself seems afraid of her zealous children. (23) d. The children are very agitated because their mother won't let them go to a public hanging of some of the Party's political enemies in the park that evening. 2. Back in his apartment, Winston remembers a dream in which a man's voice—O'Brien's, he thinks—said to him, a. "We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness." 3. Winston writes in his diary that his thoughtcrime makes him a dead man, then he hides the book.
B. summary: chapter III (27) 1. Winston dreams of being with his mother on a sinking ship. a. He feels strangely responsible for his mother's disappearance in a political purge almost twenty years ago. b. He then dreams of a place called The Golden Country, where the dark-haired girl takes off her clothes and runs toward him in an act of freedom that annihilates the whole Party. c. He wakes with the word "Shakespeare" on his lips, not knowing where it came from. d. A high-pitched whistle sounds from the telescreen, a signal that office workers must wake up. 2. It is time for the Physical Jerks, a round of grotesque exercise. a. As he exercises, Winston thinks about his childhood, which he barely remembers. b. Having no physical records such as photographs and documents, he thinks, makes one's life lose its outline in one's memory. 3. Winston considers Oceania's relationship to the other countries in the world, Eurasia and Eastasia. a. According to official history, Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia, but Winston knows that the records have been changed. 4. Winston remembers that no one had heard of Big Brother, the leader of the Party, before 1960, but stories about him now appear in histories going back to the 1930s. (33) 5. As Winston has these thoughts, a voice from the telescreen suddenly calls out his name, reprimanding him for not working hard enough at the Physical Jerks. a. Winston breaks out into a hot sweat and tries harder to touch his toes.
C. analysis: chapters II-III 1. Winston's fatalism is a central component of his character. a. He has been fearing the power of the Party for decades, and the guilt he feels after having committed a crime against the Party overwhelms him, rendering him absolutely certain that he will be caught and punished. 2. Winston only occasionally allows himself to feel any hope for the future. a. His general pessimism not only reflects the social conditioning against which Orwell hopes to warn his readers, but also casts a general gloom on the novel's atmosphere; it makes a dark world seem even darker. b. An important aspect of the Party's oppression of its subjects is the forced repression of sexual appetite. i. Initially, Winston must confine his sexual desires to the realm of fantasy, as when he dreams in Chapter II of an imaginary Golden Country in which he makes love to the dark-haired girl. c. Like sex in general, the dark-haired girl is treated as an unfathomable mystery in this section; she is someone whom Winston simultaneously desires and distrusts with a profound paranoia. 3. The Party's control of the past is another significant component of its psychological control over its subjects: a. that no one is allowed to keep physical records documenting the past prevents people from challenging the government's motivations, actions, and authority. b. Winston only vaguely remembers a time before the Party came to power, and memories of his past enter his mind only in dreams, which are the most secure repositories for thoughts, feelings, and memories that must be suppressed in waking life. 4. Winston's dreams are also prophetic, foreshadowing future events. a. Winston will indeed make love to the dark-haired girl in an idyllic country landscape. b. The same is true for his dream of O'Brien, in which he hears O'Brien's voice promise to meet him "in the place where there is no darkness." c. At the end of the novel, Winston will indeed meet O'Brien in a place without darkness, but that place will be nothing like what Winston expects. i. The phrase "the place where there is no darkness" recurs throughout the novel, and it orients Winston toward his future. 5. An important motif that emerges in the first three chapters of 1984 is that of urban decay. a. Under the supposedly benign guidance of the Party, London has fallen apart. b. Winston's world is a nasty, brutish place to live—conveniences are mostly out of order and buildings are ramshackle and unsafe. c. In contrast to the broken elevator in Winston's rundown apartment building, the presence of the technologically advanced telescreen illustrates the Party's prioritization of strict control and utter neglect of citizens' quality of living. 6. Winston's encounter with the Parsons children in Chapter II demonstrates the Party's influence on family life. a. Children are effectively converted into spies and trained to watch the actions of their parents with extreme suspicion. b. The fear Mrs. Parsons shows for her children foreshadows Winston's encounter in jail with her husband, who is turned in to the Party for committing thoughtcrime by his own child. i. Orwell was inspired in his creation of the Junior Spies by a real organization called Hitler Youth that thrived in Nazi Germany. ii. This group instilled a fanatic patriotism in children that led them to such behaviors as monitoring their parents for any sign of deviation from Nazi orthodoxy, in much the same manner that Orwell later ascribed to the Junior Spies.
D. summary (34) 1. Winston goes to his job in the Records section of the Ministry of Truth, where he works with a "speakwrite" (a machine that types as he dictates into it) and destroys obsolete documents. a. He updates Big Brother's orders and Party records so that they match new developments—Big Brother can never be wrong. b. Even when the citizens of Airstrip One are forced to live with less food, they are told that they are being given more than ever and, by and large, they believe it. 2. This day, Winston must alter the record of a speech made in December 1983, which referred to Comrade Withers, one of Big Brother's former officials who has since been vaporized. a. Since Comrade Withers was executed as an enemy of the Party, it is unacceptable to have a document on file praising him as a loyal Party member. b. Winston invents a person named Comrade Ogilvy and substitutes him for Comrade Withers in the records. i. Comrade Ogilvy, though a product of Winston's imagination, is an ideal Party man, opposed to sex and suspicious of everyone. ii. Comrade Withers has become an "unperson," he has ceased to exist. 3. Watching a man named Comrade Tillotson in the cubicle across the way, Winston reflects on the activity in the Ministry of Truth, where thousands of workers correct the flow of history to make it match party ideology, and churn out endless drivel—even pornography—to pacify the brutally destitute proletariat.
III. chapters V & VI A. summary Chapter V (43) 1. Winston has lunch with a man named Syme, an intelligent Party member who works on a revised dictionary of Newspeak, the official language of Oceania. a. Syme tells Winston that Newspeak aims to narrow the range of thought to render thoughtcrime impossible. b. If there are no words in a language that are capable of expressing independent, rebellious thoughts, no one will ever be able to rebel, or even to conceive of the idea of rebellion. 2. Winston thinks that Syme's intelligence will get him vaporized one day. a. Parsons, a pudgy and fervent Party official and the husband of the woman whose plumbing Winston fixed in Chapter II, comes into the canteen and elicits a contribution from Winston for neighborhood Hate Week. 3. He apologizes to Winston for his children's harassment the day before, but is openly proud of their spirit. 4. Suddenly, an exuberant message from the Ministry of Plenty announces increases in production over the loudspeakers.
5.
Winston reflects that the alleged increase in the chocolate ration
to twenty grams was actually a reduction from the day before, but those
around him seem to accept the announcement joyfully and without 6. Winston feels that he is being watched; he looks up and sees the dark-haired girl staring at him. a. He worries again that she is a Party agent.
B. summary: chapter VI (55) 1. That evening, Winston records in his diary his memory of his last sexual encounter, which was with a prole prostitute. a. He thinks about the Party's hatred of sex, and decides that their goal is to remove pleasure from the sexual act, so that it becomes merely a duty to the Party, a way of producing new Party members. b. Winston's former wife Katherine hated sex, and as soon as they realized they would never have children, they separated. 2. Winston desperately wants to have an enjoyable sexual affair, which he sees as the ultimate act of rebellion. a. In his diary, he writes that the prole prostitute was old and ugly, but that he went through with the sex act anyway. b. He realizes that recording the act in his diary hasn't alleviated his anger, depression, or rebellion. c. He still longs to shout profanities at the top of his voice.
C. Analysis Chapters IV-VI 1. Winston's life at work in the sprawling Ministry of Truth illustrates the world of the Party in operation—calculated propaganda, altered records, revised history—and demonstrates the effects of such deleterious mechanisms on Winston's mind. a. The idea of doublethink—explained in Chapter III as the ability to believe and disbelieve simultaneously in the same idea, or to believe in two contradictory ideas simultaneously—provides the psychological key to the Party's control of the past. b. Doublethink allows the citizens under Party control to accept slogans like "War is peace" and "Freedom is slavery," and enables the workers at the Ministry of Truth to believe in the false versions of the records that they themselves have altered. c. With the belief of the workers, the records become functionally true. Winston struggles under the weight of this oppressive machinery, and yearns to be able to trust his own memory. 2. Accompanying the psychological aspect of the Party's oppression is the physical aspect. Winston realizes that his own nervous system has become his archenemy. a. The condition of being constantly monitored and having to repress every feeling and instinct forces Winston to maintain self-control at all costs; even a facial twitch suggesting struggle could lead to arrest, demonstrating the thoroughness of the Party's control. b. This theme of control through physical monitoring culminates with Winston's realization toward the end of the book that nothing in human experience is worse than the feeling of physical pain. 3. Winston's repressed sexuality—one of his key reasons for despising the Party and wanting to rebel—becomes his overt concern in Chapter VI, when he remembers his last encounter with a prole prostitute. a. The dingy, nasty memory makes Winston desperate to have an enjoyable, authentic erotic experience. He thinks that the Party's "real, undeclared purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act." b. Sex can be seen as the ultimate act of individualism, as a representation of ultimate emotional and physical pleasure, and for its roots in the individual's desire to continue himself or herself through reproduction. c. By transforming sex into a duty, the Party strikes another psychological blow against individualism: under Big Brother's regime, the goal of sex is not to reproduce one's individual genes, but simply to create new members of the Party.
IV. chapter VII A. summary (60) 1. Winston writes in his diary that any hope for revolution against the Party must come from the proles. a. He believes that the Party cannot be destroyed from within, and that even the Brotherhood, a legendary revolutionary group, lacks the wherewithal to defeat the mighty Thought Police. b. The proles, on the other hand make up eighty-five percent of the population of Oceania, and could easily muster the strength and manpower to overcome the Police. c. However, the Proles lead brutish, ignorant, animalistic lives, and lack both the energy and interest to revolt; most of them do not even understand that the Party is oppressing them. 2. Winston looks through a children's history book to get a feeling for what has really happened in the world. a. The Party claims to have built ideal cities, but London, where Winston lives, is a wreck: i. the electricity seldom works, ii. buildings decay, iii. and people live in poverty and fear. 3. Lacking a reliable official record, Winston does not know what to think about the past. a. The Party's claims that it has increased the literacy rate, reduced the infant mortality rate, and given everyone better food and shelter could all be fantasy. b. Winston suspects that these claims are untrue, but he has no way to know for sure, since history has been written entirely by the Party.
In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it.
4. Winston remembers an occasion when he caught the Party in a lie. a. In the mid-1960s, a cultural backlash caused the original leaders of the Revolution to be arrested. b. One day, Winston saw a few of these deposed leaders sitting at the Chestnut Tree Cafe, a gathering place for out-of-favor Party members. c. A song played—"Under the spreading chestnut tree /I sold you and you sold me"—and one of the Party members, Rutherford, began to weep. d. Winston never forgot the incident, and one day came upon a photograph that proved that the Party members had been in New York at the time that they were allegedly committing treason in Eurasia. e. Terrified, Winston destroyed the photograph, but it remains embedded in his memory as a concrete example of Party dishonesty. 5. Winston thinks of his writing in his diary as a kind of letter to O'Brien. a. Though Winston knows almost nothing about O'Brien beyond his name, he is sure that he detects a strain of independence and rebellion in him, a consciousness of oppression similar to Winston's own. b. Thinking about the Party's control of every record of the truth, Winston realizes that the Party requires its members to deny the evidence of their eyes and ears. c. He believes that true freedom lies in the ability to interpret reality as one perceives it, to be able to say "2+2=4."
B. summary: chapter VIII (70) When memory failed and written records were falsified ... 1. Winston goes for a walk through the prole district, and envies the simple lives of the common people. a. He enters a pub where he sees an old man—a possible link to the past. b. He talks to the old man and tries to ascertain whether, in the days before the Party, people were really exploited by bloated capitalists, as the Party records claim. c. The old man's memory is too vague to provide an answer. d. Winston laments that the past has been left to the proles, who will inevitably forget it. 2. Winston walks to the secondhand store in which he bought the diary and buys a clear glass paperweight with a pink coral center from Mr. Charrington, the proprietor. a. Mr. Charrington takes him upstairs to a private room with no telescreen, where a print of St. Clement's Church looks down from the wall, evoking the old rhyme: i. "Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement's / You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St. Martin's." 3. On the way home, Winston sees a figure in blue Party overalls—the dark-haired girl, apparently following him. a. Terrified, he imagines hitting her with a cobblestone or with the paperweight in his pocket. b. He hurries home and decides that the best thing to do is to commit suicide before the Party catches him. c. He realizes that if the Thought Police catch him, they will torture him before they kill him. d. He tries to calm himself by thinking about O'Brien and about the place where there is no darkness that O'Brien mentioned in Winston’s dreams. e. Troubled, he takes a coin from his Docket and looks into the face of Big Brother. f. He cannot help but recall the Party slogans: "war is peace," "freedom is slavery," "ignorance IS STRENGTH."
C. analysis: chapters VI-VII 1. After a trio of chapters devoted largely to the work life of minor Party members, Orwell shifts the focus to the world of the very poor. a. The most important plot development in this section comes with Winston's visit to Mr. Charrington's antiques shop, which stands as a veritable museum of the past in relation to the rest of Winston's history-deprived world. b. The theme of the importance of having knowledge about the past in order to understand the present is heavily emphasized here. c. Orwell demonstrates how the Party, by controlling history, forces its members into lives of uncertainty, ignorance, and total reliance upon the Party for all of the information necessary to function in the world. 2. Winston's trip to the prole district illustrates the relationship between social class and awareness of one's situation. a. Life in the prole district is animalistic, filthy, and impoverished. b. The proles have greater freedom than minor Party members such as Winston, but lack the awareness to use or appreciate that freedom. 3. |
