BARRON'S BOOK NOTES

GEORGE ORWELL'S
1984

^^^^^^^^^^GEORGE ORWELL: THE AUTHOR AND HIS TIMES

Two days before he died, the author of 1984 left a will saying that he wanted no
biography written. Like most novelists, he wanted his work judged for and by
itself. This is ironic, since few novels reflect the author's progress through
life--and the stormy political climate of his times--as clearly as George Orwell's
1984. Most Orwell scholars see the life as a logical "road to 1984." Knowing about
Orwell's life, therefore, will help you know the novel.

Orwell began life with the name Eric Blair. He was born in India in 1903, the son
of what he called a "lower-upper-middle class" family. For the author, this was an
important distinction. The term meant that he came from the same social background
as the landed gentry but was set apart by the fact that his family had very little
money. His father worked for the British government in India, where he could live
well on less money. Like most British officials, he sent the family back to England
to spare them the hardships of the heat and of the monsoon season.

Growing up in Henley-on-Thames, west of London, Eric knew by the time he was four
or five that he wanted to be a writer. Like his character Winston Smith in 1984, he
thought of himself as an outsider and a rebel. He told one childhood friend: "You
are noticed more if you are standing on your head than if you are right side up."

At eight, he was packed off to boarding school at St. Cyprian's, where he was more
of an outsider than ever, as a lone scholarship student among wealthy children. The
schoolmaster and his wife used kicks and caresses to keep the boys in line. This
was Eric's first taste of dictatorship, of being helpless under the rule of an
absolute power. Orwell transfers these feelings to Winston, who in 1984 finds
himself trapped in a harsh totalitarian system.

In an essay called "Such, Such were the Days," Orwell writes about being beaten for
wetting his bed. The masters were quick to point out, whenever he got into trouble,
that he was a "charity" student. They found him difficult and unresponsive. Like
most lonely children, Eric consoled himself by making up stories in his head, and
holding imaginary conversations with himself.

Later Orwell wrote that during his first twenty-five years he was writing, and
living, a continuing story in his head. He began as a Robin Hood-like figure,
starring in imaginary adventures. Later he became the careful observer, trying to
describe what was going on around him as accurately as possible. This seems very
like Winston in 1984--a man who commits crimes in his head while outwardly obeying
Party orders. At Eton, a prestigious public school (equivalent to U.S. private or
prep schools), Blair wrote some verse and worked on school magazines. Once again a
scholarship student, he remained an outsider. In the years immediately following
World War I, he was part of the antinomian movement at Eton, committed to
overturning current standards and belief. Although he was against religion, Blair
was confirmed in the Anglican Church, or Church of England, along with the rest of
his classmates. Later he would be married and buried in Anglican ceremonies.

When his classmates went on to Oxford or Cambridge, Eric was faced with a decision.
He could not afford to go to a university and his grades kept him from winning any
more scholarships. He may have been sick of studying. And so he decided to join the
Indian Imperial Police, a British force assigned to keep order in British
dependencies. This pleased his father, who had rejoined the family in England. With
the blessings of the family, Eric went out to Burma for a five-year hitch.
Later he wrote of this experience, "In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by
large numbers of people...." Life must have been difficult for an aspiring writer,
who was employed to keep order in a foreign country in the name of the British
empire. Eric hated the police and everything they stood for; he often hated the
people he was supposed to help, and he hated the things he was called upon to do in
the name of his country. He felt isolated, lonely and deserted. You'll see how he
uses this sense of guilt and isolation in portraying Winston Smith, who feels
guilty about working for the ruling Party.

Orwell claimed later that his spell in Burma ruined his health. His lungs had
always troubled him, and in 1927 he was sent back to England on a convalescent
leave. That year he resigned from the police and dedicated himself to becoming a
writer. His father never quite forgave him.

An avid reader whose favorite writers included futurist H. G. Wells (War of the
Worlds) and satirist Jonathan Swift (Gulliver's Travels), Blair began reading and
writing in earnest. He was excited by The People of the Abyss, by Jack London, who
had gone "down and out," putting on rags and living among the destitute, the
underclass, so he could write a book about them.

Blair decided to go "down and out" too--partly because he was trying to gather
material, and partly because he wanted to erase the guilt and disgust he felt for
serving in the Indian Imperial Police and for being a member of the privileged
class. He bought tramps' clothes from a second-hand store and began a five-year
period in which he lived, off and on, among tramps in flophouses. He took odd jobs
and lived on pennies, first in London and then in Paris. Although he had begun to
write for periodicals, he eventually ran out of money. Broke and desperate, he
ended up with pneumonia in the paupers' ward in a French hospital.

During his "down and out" period, Blair learned what life was like for the
underclass--desperate people with little hope for a decent future. Unlike them,
however, he had a comfortable home to retreat to. You'll read in 1984 that Winston
goes among the underclass, or proles, but can't or won't join them. Perhaps Orwell
believed too strongly in class divisions to deny them completely.

Writing about his "down and out" experiences, Blair did what most good writers do:
he transformed and fused what had happened to him to build a coherent story. The
book went through several versions. He was about to give up on it when a friend
took the manuscript to an agent who found him a publisher.

Down and Out in Paris and London was first published in 1933. Blair chose a
pseudonym because, he said, "I am not proud of it." On paper, at least, he became
George Orwell. Although friends and family continued to call him "Eric," he was
George Orwell to everybody who read and wrote about him. In time he thought of
having his name legally changed. If Eric Blair was the little boy who was lonely at
school and who, in Burma, did things he was not proud of, George Orwell was the
writer with a cause. That cause defined itself in the 1930s.

By this time he was teaching school. Though he attracted several women, he was a
late-bloomer socially and apparently he was never quite at ease with women.
According to those who knew Orwell, he neither understood nor liked women very
well, a fact that may have influenced his drawing of women characters--including
Julia, Winston's lover in 1984.

This did not prevent his falling in love with Eileen O'Shaughnessy in 1935. As soon
as he met her at a party, he knew he wanted to marry her. Schoolteaching was not
for him, though, and he had moved to London and worked in a bookstore. He had just
published Burmese Days, his first novel, and was at work on A Clergyman's Daughter.
(His novel about his bookstore days would be called Keep the Aspidistra Flying.)
The year 1936 was perhaps the most important in Orwell's life. In January, his
publisher, a founder of the Left Wing Book Club, commissioned him to live among the
unemployed coal miners in the north of England and write a book about their lives.
The publisher hoped to awaken the English to their poverty and suffering so that
people would act to change conditions.

According to friends, Orwell went north without preconceptions. In Burma he had

learned what evils an absolute government can do even when it's trying to help
people. His "down and out" days had taught him about class divisions and the
horrors of poverty. Living among the poor in Northern England, he underwent a
socialist conversion. Recognizing the plight of the poor was not enough, though; he
had to urge the public to do something about it. And so he wrote The Road To Wigan
Pier, alerting the public to the harsh lives of these people.

That summer George and Eileen married and went to live above a country store in an
English village. While Eileen, a trained psychologist, got stuck tending the store,
Orwell wrote. Their honeymoon ended dramatically with the outbreak of civil war in
Spain, where Francisco Franco and his Spanish generals were trying to overthrow the
brand-new people's government.

Idealists from all over the world were going to Spain to help the new government,
which had only recently taken the place of a monarchy. They saw Franco's fascists
as threatening the cause of freedom and democracy everywhere. Meanwhile, in
Germany, the Nazi party under Adolph Hitler was in complete power. Hitler was
rattling his weapons, preparing a bid to take over Europe. In Russia, the people's
revolution had done away with the czarist ruling class, but under Stalin, the
Communist government threatened the freedom of the people. Stalin was engaged in
purging his enemies from the party. Both these totalitarian powers were now aiding
Franco. Orwell saw this as an opportunity to live out his ideals and went to Spain
to fight for the "Popular Front" government.

The political thicket Orwell waded into was so complex that historians are still
trying to untangle it. There were several parties fighting Franco; alliances kept
changing. Orwell was excited by what appeared to be a classless society in
Barcelona. To help preserve it, he joined one of the splinter parties fighting
Franco and went to the front to fight.

By the time he returned to Barcelona six months later, everything had changed. The
classless society had vanished; the rich were back in power. The party he had
joined was out of favor and he was in danger of being purged. Riots and street
fighting raged. History rewrote itself as he watched. Although it would be eight
years before Orwell found the vocabulary to transform the nightmare into a novel,
these experiences paved the way to 1984. Injured by a sniper's bullet, Orwell left
Spain disillusioned by the sad end of the Popular Front's efforts: Franco would
take over the country. Orwell was convinced that Stalinism, which purged political
enemies for the "good" of the state, was as dangerous as Nazism. He was also
certain that he must fuse his politics and his art.

He would become a political reformer, trying to change the world through his
writing. In "Why I Write," he says, "Every line of serious work that I have written
since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and
for democratic socialism, as I understand it."

Orwell was a democratic Socialist who believed in a centralized government that

would take over such things as medical care and running the railroads for the good
of the people, bringing benefits to all. At the same time, he believed this
government should be run by the people. This was, he believed, the fine line Great
Britain must tread--doing what was best for the people without hampering their
freedom.

At the time, he believed Britain could do this while staying out of the impending
clash with Hitler. During this period in the late 1930s, Hitler prepared to make
war, while in Russia, Stalin got rid of his enemies through a series of political
purges. Hitler and Stalin were allied. Orwell finished his book about the Spanish
experience, and called it Homage to Catalonia. Ill again, he went with Eileen to
Morocco to recuperate.

Meanwhile, Hitler marched on Poland, on Holland, on Belgium, on France. Britain's

entry into World War II in 1940 was inevitable and marked the end of Orwell's brief
period as a pacifist. He enlisted in the Home Guard because his health prevented
his joining the armed forces.

Later Orwell wrote propaganda for the BBC, an education in how to know one thing
yet say another for the good of the people. As you'll see, this training
foreshadowed Winston's job in the Ministry of Truth. England was under attack by
air, and buzz bombs, Nazi V-2 rockets, exploded on London almost daily until the
war ended. Every day people lived with death and danger and shortages of food and
clothing. Russia, which had begun the war as Germany's ally, took up arms against
Hitler, grappling with the Nazis at Stalingrad. History, then, laid the groundwork
for 1984, in which major powers are always at war but the enemy keeps changing.

By 1944 Orwell was finishing Animal Farm, a parable about Stalinism. Because the
Soviet Union was now a British ally, he had a hard time getting it published.
Besides that, he was ill again. Eileen needed surgery but they put it off because
of expense. In the final days of the war he went to Paris and Germany as a war
correspondent. He was hospitalized again. While he was in Germany Eileen died in
surgery, leaving him with an infant son they had adopted. Grieving and ill, he came
home to begin another novel. This would be his last.

Publication of Animal Farm brought Orwell recognition and freedom from financial
pressure. An enemy of totalitarianism, he saw what he thought were totalitarian
tendencies in the British government. He took a country house on a remote island
where he lived off and on while writing this final work, originally titled "The
Last Man in Europe." Sick as he was, he put off going to the hospital until he had
a first draft finished. His doctor said, "If he ceases to try to get well and
settles down to write another book he is almost certain to relapse quickly."

But Orwell had a mission. He wanted 1984 to be "a showup of the perversions to
which a centralized society is liable, and which have already been realized in
Communism and Fascism." He feared for Britain. Struggling against enormous physical
odds (as Winston struggles under torture), he went home to finish a second draft.
"The striking thing," he said of his increasing weakness, "is the contrast between
the apparent normality of the mind and its helplessness when you attempt to get
anything on paper."

Once more he put off treatment in order to make a final typescript. He had broken
his health but he had finished the novel that would outlive him by generations.
Hospitalized, Orwell saw the novel published in 1949. It was widely praised in a
postwar world that had awakened to the realities of the Cold War in which there are
no friends, only friendly enemies. It was taken as a chilling warning by readers
who lived with the daily possibility of absolute nuclear destruction, a possibility
which had been raised by the explosion of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Japan, in the last days of World War II.

Unlike his hero, Winston Smith, who was defeated by the society and by his own
weakness, George Orwell ended his life with a triumph.
It is useful to remember that every writer uses real life for material, but only
the best writers learn how to transform it into living fiction. With intelligence
and skill, they take what they know to create what they don't know, making
something so real that it is truer than real life. In 1984, George Orwell has done
this brilliantly. Because he was a wonderful novelist before he became a political
reformer, he had the skill to make his message known all over the world.

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, say the posters in Orwell's novel. His warning has
passed into the language.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: THE PLOT

In the near future of 1984, the world is divided into three superpowers, which are
always at war. In battered London--a part of Oceania--middle-aged Winston Smith
works as a minor member of the ruling Party, under the leadership of all-seeing,
all-powerful Big Brother. He lives under the eye of a TV monitor. If he does
anything out of order, a voice barks out instructions. The trouble is that the
Party frowns on art, on sex, on the life of the mind--in fact, on everything except
Party business, hatred of the Party's enemies, and love of Big Brother.

Every Party member knows the worst crime of all is Thoughtcrime: having evil
thoughts against the Party or Big Brother. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, warn the
posters.

As Winston's story opens he's committing a crime in spite of Big Brother. Troubled
by dreams and memories of better times, inspired by secret glances from O'Brien, a
member of the powerful Inner Party, Winston is starting a diary. Practically the
first thing he writes is a major offense: DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER.

At work in the Ministry of Truth, Winston alters books and periodicals to keep up
with the changing Party history. Oceania is allied with Eastasia in war against
Eurasia--but were they always? Rebel leader Emmanuel Goldstein is the public enemy
in the daily Two Minutes of Hate--but was he always? Three enemies of the Party
confessed and repented their Thoughtcrimes--did they really? Troubled by questions
and memory flashes, Winston retreats to the "down and out" or prole (short for
proletarian) neighborhoods, where the lower classes breed and squabble without
Party interference. He spends happy hours in the second-hand store where he bought
the diary.

Meanwhile Winston is afraid the dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department where
he works is going to turn him in for Thoughtcrime. He's certain O'Brien is a secret
enemy of the Party. To his astonishment, the dark-haired girl slips him a note: I
LOVE YOU. Julia wants to meet. They go to the prole sector to begin an affair,
another crime against the state. Winston is seduced not only by Julia but by the
idea of rebellion. He and Julia continue their affair in a private room above the
second-hand store. He thinks it's love like theirs that will eventually destroy the
Party.

What Winston most hopes for happens. He gets a message from O'Brien. At night he
and Julia go to O'Brien's lavish home and swear they'll do anything they can to
help O'Brien's secret group, The Brotherhood, to overthrow the Party.

Winston's determination is strengthened by a sudden political change: Oceania is no

longer at war with Eurasia, now Eurasia is at war with Eastasia. Eurasia is the
ally. According to Big Brother it has always been this way, so Winston has to
change all the records to make this true.

In the midst of his despair and confusion, he has one thing to cling to. O'Brien
has given him a forbidden book by Goldstein, the enemy of the Party. Winston takes
the book to his secret room and begins to read the extensive writing on Party
philosophy. When Julia comes, he reads it aloud to her. By the time he's finished,
she's asleep. After dozing, Winston goes to the window to watch a huge prole mother
singing as she hangs out the wash for her enormous family. He is thinking that the
proles are the hope of the future when suddenly his world collapses.

Within seconds the Thought Police crash in. Winston's nice landlord is not what he
seems. Neither is O'Brien. Winston is held prisoner and tortured in the Ministry of
Love, where O'Brien spends months trying to brainwash him. The final step comes
when O'Brien takes Winston to Room 101, where that which he most fears is waiting.
As a cage of rats closes over his face, he forgets everything, even his love for
Julia. His spirit is broken. As the novel ends, Winston is back at work, his affair
ended and his diary destroyed, along with his memories and the last fragments of
his personality.

The State has triumphed. Winston has learned to love Big Brother.

Not all the characters in 1984 are rounded individuals like Winston, Julia, and
O'Brien. Many have parts like bit players in a stage play, carrying signboards that
signal the author's intentions. If you look at them one by one, you'll be able to
write about the difference between characters as people and characters as symbols,
or emblems.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: BIG BROTHER

To begin with, Big Brother is not a real person. All-present as he is, all-powerful
and forever watching, he is seen only on TV. Although his picture glares out from
huge posters that shout, BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, nobody sees Big Brother in
person.

Orwell had several things in mind when he created Big Brother. He was certainly
thinking of Russian leader Joseph Stalin; the pictures of Big Brother even look
like him. He was also thinking of Nazi leader Adolph Hitler and Spanish dictator
Francisco Franco. Big Brother stands for all dictators everywhere. Orwell may have
been thinking about figures in certain religious faiths when he drew Big Brother.
the mysterious, powerful, God-like figure who sees and knows everything--but never
appears in person.

For Inner Party members, Big Brother is a leader, a bogeyman they can use to scare
the people, and their authorization for doing whatever they want. If anybody asks,
they can say they are under orders from Big Brother.

For the unthinking proles, Big Brother is a distant authority figure.

For Winston, Big Brother is an inspiration. Big Brother excites and energizes
Winston, who hates him. He is also fascinated by Big Brother and drawn to him in
some of the same ways that he is drawn to O'Brien, developing a love-hate response
to both of them that leads to his downfall.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: WINSTON SMITH

Orwell named his hero after Winston Churchill, England's great leader during World
War II. He added the world's commonest last name: Smith. The ailing, middle-aged
rebel can be considered in many different lights.

1. You'll have to decide for yourself whether Winston is a hero in his secret
battle with Big Brother, or whether he's only a sentimental man with a death wish,
who courts his death openly through an illegal love affair and through his alliance
with the enemies of Big Brother.

a. If Winston is a 20th-century hero, it seems logical for him to keep a diary even
though he knows it will hang him. It is right for him to follow his heart and have
an affair with Julia. He is doing the only possible thing by seeking out O'Brien
and joining the Brotherhood, which is committed to overthrowing Big Brother.
Naturally he will defy authorities even after he is captured and tortured, trying
to keep one last shred of personality intact.

b. If he's so heroic, why is he so foolhardy? It makes no sense for him to create a

permanent love-nest when he knows it will speed his capture. "It was as though they
were intentionally stepping nearer to their graves," he thinks. A careful man would
never open up to O'Brien without knowing whether he is to be trusted. You can argue
that Winston's continuing defiance of the Party after his capture is one more way
of courting disaster. Do you think Winston secretly enjoys torture? Although he
confesses to everything they want him to, he extends the torture by continuing his
inner defiance--something the Party seems to know. Winston's thoughts in Part Two,
Section IV, point to this interpretation.

2. You can learn more about Winston by considering his view of sex as a means of
rebellion. He's divorced because his wife couldn't produce the baby the Party
expects, and wouldn't consider sex for any other purpose because desire is
Thoughtcrime. He is drawn to Julia because she is "corrupt," which means she enjoys
sex and has previously taken several lovers. Knowing he will be punished, he falls
in love with her. Winston's ideal partner for the future is not Julia, but the
mountainous prole woman who hangs out the laundry for her many children. Another of
Winston's ideal women, whom Winston writes about in his diary, is the refugee
mother protecting her child with her own body. Orwell may be arguing that woman-as-
mother is to be honored, but any other kind of love is to be punished.

3. Is the real love affair in Winston's mind, and is it with O'Brien? O'Brien is on
Winston's mind in Part One, Section I. Winston dreams about him in One, Section II,
when O'Brien says, "We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness." In
Three, I, this dream is fulfilled in an astonishing way. Does O'Brien stand for
hope or for the fulfillment of Winston's death wish? Does he seek him out precisely
to bring about his capture? Look at Part Three, Sections I, II, III and IV, where
Winston is captured and brainwashed. He doesn't hate or resist O'Brien. Instead the
two minds are locked in a bizarre courtship. Winston respects his destroyer as he
never respects Julia.

4. Winston's ideas about class lines tell us something about his values, and
Orwell's.

a. Winston despises his middle-class neighbors, the Parsons. He bitterly resents

and envies the lower classes because they are vital, physical and mindlessly happy.
They are also slightly gross to him--particularly the huge woman with the laundry.
He sees the underclass as the hope for the future, yet recognizes that they have
neither the brains nor the means to start a revolution. What's more, he doesn't
like them well enough to join them, or even enough to disappear among them. Why
doesn't he run away to the ghetto? BECAUSE HE IS NOT LIKE THEM.

b. O'Brien is his ideal, even after O'Brien starts brainwashing Winston. O'Brien is
a member of the Inner Party, polished and sophisticated, and so high up in the
organization that he enjoys a handsome, comfortable apartment and a servant. Does
this reflect some hidden attitude of Orwell's that conflicts with his role as
defender of the masses?

5. Nostalgia for the past is central to Winston's rebellion. He alone seems to

remember that there was life before the Party; to remember the now vanished rural
landscape, to pine for the mother he betrayed. The antique diary he buys; the old-
fashioned paperweight that is central to the story; his recurring dreams and
memories--all make him different. Is Winston really trying to design a new future,
or does he want to get back into the past, where it's safe?

6. Some people think Winston is really George Orwell dressed up in a blue Party
uniform. He seems to have some of Orwell's ailments, and many of the same worries,
and he lives an active inner life as Orwell did at St. Cyprian's. On the other
hand, Winston finally crumples under pressure from the Party, whereas Orwell fought
illness to finish his stunning novel. Do you think Winston is really only an
extension of Orwell, or is he a full-blown character living a life of his own, in
order that he can carry Orwell's warning about the dangers of totalitarianism to
the public? You can argue either way.

Winston, as a character, is complex and troublesome because the author has used
words to create a living, breathing person. Perhaps the most important question
you'll decide for yourself is: Does this man deserve what happens to him? Could he
have escaped if he had tried hard enough? Did he or did he not get what he wanted?
Again, it's your decision.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: JULIA

Unlike Winston, Julia is basically a simple woman, something of a lightweight who

loves her man and uses sex for fun as well as for rebellion. She is perfectly
willing to accept the overnight changes in Oceania's history and doesn't trouble
her pretty head about it. If Big Brother says black is white, fine. If he says two
and two make five, no problem. She may not buy the Party line, but it doesn't
trouble her. She falls asleep over Winston's reading of the treasured book by
Goldstein. Revolutionary doctrine? Zzzzz. The act is enough for her; she doesn't
need a rationale.

Orwell draws Winston's love object lovingly. Julia is all woman, sharp and funny as
she is attractive, but she may also be a reflection of the author's somewhat
limited view of the opposite sex. It might be useful to look at her more carefully.
Is she the one-sided creation of a male author?

1. Julia may be lovable precisely because she stands for something forbidden.
Perhaps the author thinks sexually active women are for fun, and only mothers are
to be looked up to! Do the lovers Winston and Julia have much to talk about? (Read
Part Two, I, IV and V before making up your mind.)

2. Perhaps Julia is the practical realist, who knows that doctrine is bunk and that
Winston is begging for trouble when he starts asking questions. She is the
organizer, who approaches him and sets up a time and place for their meetings.
She's the one who points out that they're going to be caught, and that when they
are, they will confess and betray everything they care about--except each other.
(Look at Part Two, I, III, IV for evidence to support this opinion.)

3. Julia, not Winston, may be the true rebel. When O'Brien asks the couple whether
they would betray all their principles to Overthrow Big Brother, it's Julia who
says she will never, ever give up Winston. (See Part Two, VIII.)

4. Julia may be a weakling, the cause of Winston's downfall. Without the affair, he
may have been able to keep his rebellion a secret. What would have happened if she
hadn't tagged along to meet O'Brien? Julia does not lead the Thought Police to
Winston, but without her, he would have been harder to catch. When the lovers are
captured, it is Julia who betrays Winston right away. When they meet one last time
at the end, it is Julia who is thick in the waist and dead in the heart and
completely indifferent to him. (Read Part Three, V.)

Julia has many sides. Do they add up to a whole person? You'll have fun deciding.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: O'BRIEN

Probably the most interesting thing about O'Brien is that we have only Winston's
opinion of him. This burly but sophisticated leader of the Inner Party is supposed
to be head of the secret Brotherhood dedicated to the overthrow of Big Brother. In
his black coverall, he haunts both Winston's dreams and his waking moments to the
very end of the novel.

1. O'Brien may be a kind of super-being. He is certainly Winston's hope for the

future as the novel opens. Winston's early reveries and his doglike devotion in
Part Two, VIII, support this view. He seems to represent freedom and privilege to
the downtrodden Winston. Even when Winston is in prison in Part Three, he is glad
to see O'Brien. If the Thought Police are the "bad cops" after Winston's capture,
O'Brien is the "good cop" who keeps Winston's confidence even as he destroys him.
He's certainly Big Brother's mouthpiece, or preacher, as he explains Party doctrine
to Winston in Part Three, II-IV.

2. O'Brien may be rather a super-villain, who maliciously engineers Winston's

downfall. After all, he seeks Winston out. He gives him the illegal Goldstein book,
and it may be O'Brien's voice Winston hears from the TV set as he is captured at
the end of Part Two. It is certainly O'Brien who brainwashes him, and O'Brien who
takes Winston to the dreaded Room 101 to complete his "rehabilitation."

3. Maybe O'Brien is a love object. Look again at Winston's doglike devotion at the
end of Part Two, when he is caught. "It was starting," he thinks almost joyfully.
"It was starting at last!" Look at the way O'Brien brainwashes Winston, from
Section II in Part Three to the end. When he enters, Winston is almost reassured.
"Don't worry, Winston; you are in my keeping.... I shall save you. I shall make you
perfect." Terrified as he is, Winston seems glad. From here to the finish, Winston
and O'Brien are engaged in a delicate dance of life and death and, perhaps, love,
that ends in Room 101, where Winston is confronted by that which he most fears. The
experience changes him completely, and forever.

The minor characters in 1984 are not so much people as sign-carriers bearing
Orwell's message. Everybody stands for something.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: THE PARSONS FAMILY

Winston's neighbors are drawn from the World War II days of the Hitler Youth when
children were junior party members and so fired up by Nazism that they would even
turn in their parents for speaking against the party. The Parsons children are on
the lookout for Thoughtcrime. Their mother is scared to death of them. The father
is the stereotypical dumb, zealous Party member who loves decorating the
neighborhood for Hate Week and adores Big Brother. Watch what happens to him in
Part Three, when the kids finally turn him in.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: MR. CHARRINGTON

The sweet old proprietor of the second-hand shop where Winston hides out loves
antiques and talks about the old days in heartwarming tones. His antiques are not
what they seem to be, and neither is Mr. Charrington. He is in fact a powerful
member of the Thought Police and part of O'Brien's elaborate plot to snare Winston.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: THE PROLE WOMAN

This great big lady has SYMBOL written all over her. Winston sees her as emblem of
the hope for the future. She is like a brood mare standing out there doing her
laundry, with her heavy, veined legs and her overblown female apparatus ready to
drop babies to populate the future. The problem is that Orwell never explains how
his uneducated and mindless proles can ever get their act together to make a
revolution. Is this problem accidental, or is it one of the author's ironies,
designed to sharpen his warning?

^^^^^^^^^^1984: WINSTON'S MOTHER

This shadow figure appears only in Winston's dreams and memories. She stands for
better days, for the past, and in a funny way for Winston's guilt. He survived; she
didn't.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: SYME

This Party member is too intelligent for his own good--another type. He is
preparing a "Newspeak" dictionary, and he tells Winston--and us--that once the
national vocabulary has been narrowed to a few hundred words, people won't be able
to do or think bad things because they won't have words for them. Naturally he is
purged.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: GOLDSTEIN

Here's another type--the Trotsky of Oceania. Like the Russian revolutionary leader,
he has been purged and has become a Party enemy. Some writers say Goldstein's book,
which is quoted at length in Part Two, is a parody of political writings of the
time, including a book by Leon Trotsky, a Russian revolutionary leader who had been
purged. For Winston, Goldstein is the symbol of opposition to the Party--until he
discovers who really wrote the book.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: OLD MAN

Only the proles remember the past because nobody bothered to rewrite their history.
This old drunk remembers, all right, but the bits are useless to Winston because
all the old man can think about is his twitchy bladder and various shortages
because he is "like the ant, which can see small objects and not large ones."

^^^^^^^^^^1984: JONES, AARONSON, RUTHERFORD

Three revolutionary leaders purged from the new Party. Only Winston remembers them.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: SETTING

George Orwell's 1984 is set in Oceania in a city that's still named London, in a
country called Airstrip One. The most important thing about the setting is that
this is London in the near future. This remains true no matter what year you read
the book.

In this near future, which is drawn from Orwell's imagination and from conditions
in London around World War II rocket bombs launched by some remote and unseen enemy
(either Eurasia or Eastasia, according to Big Brother) explode here and there. All
the buildings are delapidated. Victory Mansions, where Winston lives, is shabby and
rundown. Even in the Ministry Of Truth, where Winston works, everything is drab.

The most important physical element in almost every scene is the telescreen, which
both watches citizens and gives war news, music, political speeches and messages
from Big Brother. Everywhere are posters with Big Brother's picture, bearing the
slogan:

^^^^^^^^^^1984: THEME

Orwell's stated purpose dictates the major theme. He wants to warn people what can
happen when governments are given too much power. He wants to show us how such
governments can develop, and what methods they use to keep the people they are
governing in their power. As you read THE CHARACTERS and THE STORY, a section-by-
section discussion of 1984, you'll find this major theme discussed at length, along
with several other themes the author has developed.

1. AS WARNING AGAINST TOTALITARIAN GOVERNMENTS

You'll find the Party in Orwell's novel is all-powerful because it's run by a group
whose major purpose is to gain and keep power. Their methods are harsh and
efficient. They crush anybody who tries to commit an independent act (this includes
keeping a diary or having an affair). Orwell describes the political history and
psychological underpinnings in Goldstein's book, extracted at length in Part Two,
IX.

2. AS DESCRIPTION OF TOTALITARIAN METHODS

We see how this works as we follow the story of Winston Smith--how the Party keeps
watch over everybody and what methods it uses to keep individuals in line.

3. AS DESCRIPTION OF ONE MAN'S LONELINESS

Winston's memories of a happier past, his dreams and his hopes, lead him to fight
the system. He seeks out O'Brien because he is lonely for somebody to talk to; this
is spelled out in Part Three. In Part Two he has an affair with Julia, because he:

a. Is lonely and wants somebody to love.

b. Wants to fight the system through all illegal affair.

c. Is both lonely and wants to fight the system. (As you read Part Two, you can
form arguments to support all these themes.)

4. AS DESCRIPTION OF WHAT HAPPENS TO ANYBODY WHO FAILS TO OBEY A

^^^^^^^^^^1984: TOTALITARIAN GOVERNMENT

In Part Three especially, this is spelled out as Winston is tortured and

brainwashed. He is being punished for asking questions and for daring to have
independent thoughts.

5. AS THE STORY OF ONE MAN BRINGING ON HIS OWN DOOM

Starting in Part One, when Winston begins the diary, reading through Part Two, in
which he begins his affair and tries to contact the secret Brotherhood that opposes
the Party, you'll find strong indications that Winston brings his capture and
brainwashing on himself through defiant acts. Given the fact that his story has to
end badly to emphasize Orwell's message of warning, you may believe Winston is
being a brave rebel who would rather die than live under Party rule. It's also
perfectly respectable to believe that Winston, in his loneliness, may be committing
a form of suicide. A third way of looking at this is that Winston brings on his own
capture, brainwashing, and conversion because in his heart he wants to be just like
everybody else.
Remember that very few novels can be reduced to answers by-the-numbers. Good
fictional characters like Winston, are as well-rounded as real human beings, which
means their moods and their motives are complicated and changeable. Your own
personal responses and opinions are going to be important as you respond to George
Orwell's novel.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: STYLE

Orwell writes like many English novelists, with an eye for detail and the
occasional comic touch. His style is basically clean and sharp and unornamented. He
doesn't rely on numerous colorful adjectives and he doesn't overwrite. What he does
do is choose the exact word to convey what he means at every step.

The long political excerpt from Goldstein's book, which occupies the second half of
Part Two, is in a slightly different style. Orwell was using as his model political
writings of his time, named in the discussion of Section IX in Part Two.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: POINT OF VIEW

The novel 1984 is narrated in the third person, through a point-of-view character,
Winston Smith. This means that Winston functions as the camera recording all the
events. We see, hear and learn only what Winston can see, hear and learn, as it
happens. We can see into Winston's thoughts and share his dreams and memories, but
we see the other characters only as Winston sees them. We can't know anything
Winston doesn't know, but since we are outside Winston's story, we can look at it
and see danger when he doesn't--as when he goes openly to O'Brien's place in Part
Two. We see what Winston sees but we also see Winston as he looks to others--
something the character himself can't do.

At no point does the narrative point of view shift to any other character's mind.
This is Winston's story from beginning to end.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: FORM AND STRUCTURE

Although written as a novel of the near future, 1984 is not science fiction. It is
a political parable, whose effectiveness comes: 1. from the author's ability to
involve us so deeply in Winston's story that we care about him; 2. from the
author's political convictions, his knowledge of political conditions, and his
ability to project what might happen from what he already knows.

The novel 1984 is divided into three parts and an appendix.

PART ONE introduces Winston and his life in the near future, under the thumb of the
ruling Party. It traces his first act of rebellion, and establishes his loneliness.

PART TWO shows Winston trying to change his life by having a love affair with
Julia, and meeting O'Brien, who he thinks is in a secret Brotherhood dedicated to
overthrowing the Party. It shows his rising hopes for a better future being dashed
by his capture. Part Two bulges because it contains a lengthy piece of political
writing that may wreck the novel's structure, by bringing dramatic action to a
complete halt.

PART THREE details Winston's brainwashing by O'Brien, his resistance and eventual
collapse, and his conversion to Party beliefs.

THE APPENDIX contains a description of Newspeak. It is a kind of narrative

leftover that didn't fit into the novel.
Notice that 1984 is one of the few novels with an appendix, the kind of thing you
usually find in texts. Along with the political excerpt in Part Two, the Appendix
advances the author's political message but may not help the book as novel. You may
want to write about your approval of, or objection to, these extra sections.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: THE STORY

What won't come across in any plot summary is the fact that, in addition to being
both scary and prophetic, George Orwell's 1984 is a satiric novel, which means it's
humorous, too. A look at any ten pages shows the wry and satiric way Orwell looks
at things. Winston is a typical Englishman with a stiff upper lip and an eye for
the grotesque. His story is more frightening than any melodrama precisely because
it is funny. The novel falls in three parts.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: SECTION I

Winston Smith, Party member and civil servant, comes home to the ramshackle Victory
Mansions in the capital of Airstrip One, which used to be called England. The
London of Orwell's near future is very like London after World War II, with its
bombed-out buildings and its shortages and power failures. What's different are the
posters of a huge face with eyes that seem to follow you everywhere, and bearing
the legend:

^^^^^^^^^^1984: BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.

He is. Winston knows it. A TV screen dominates his room, and in addition to
bringing war news and exercise classes, the thing sees everything within range. It
watches Winston. With today's TV monitoring systems and tactics learned from spy
movies, we'd probably yawn and throw a blanket over it, but in Orwell's day this
was big stuff. TV existed only in laboratory situations, and nobody had thought
much about using it to look at things as well as to show them.

Winston is a small, skinny, middle-aged man wearing the blue Party coverall. He has
fair hair and ruddy, chapped skin. He keeps his back to the screen in case the
Thought Police tune in. From his window he can see the Ministry of Truth, where he
works. On the building's face are lettered the Party slogans:

^^^^^^^^^^1984: IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

Was London always like this? Winston can't quite remember. What he knows is that
the government is everywhere.

NOTE: For Orwell, an absolute government is something to hate and fear. He's trying
to warn us against letting any government get this powerful. He communicates this
warning through Winston, "the last (thinking) man in Europe."

Lighting a Victory cigarette and taking a slug of watery Victory gin, Winston
unveils an antique book he bought illegally in a "free" store (one the Party does
not run). Risking capture and death for committing a private act, he is about to
begin a diary. His first entry is about a newsreel he has seen in which a gallant
refugee mother protects her child from a helicopter attack on the boat they're in.
This was a story written years before we saw film of the boat-people fleeing Viet
Nam and Cambodia under fire.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: NOTE: WINSTON'S WORLD AND OURS

As you follow Winston, notice:

Which things are like conditions in our world today--wars at the fringes of the
territory, for instance; totalitarian governments in Eastern Europe and Latin
America; the presence of TV in every home to indoctrinate, if not to spy. Was
Orwell a prophet or was he pushing events in his world of 1948 to their logical
conclusion? Look for critical opinions at the end of this guide, and then decide
for yourself.

Which things are different? Remember, Winston's future is our present. How powerful
is our government, compared to the government of Oceania as portrayed in the pages
to come? How are they alike? How different? On the basis of the first three
sections, you'll be able to write about how Winston's life is different from ours,
from his private life to his place in society and the role technology plays for
him.

As he writes, Winston broods on his day at work. Who is the dark-haired girl, and
why is she following him? What was O'Brien, the burly, urbane and powerful Inner
Party member, doing in their sector during the Two Minutes' Hate today? Everybody
in the section was taking out pent-up emotions on Emmanuel Goldstein, the rebel
leader on the telescreen when Winston found himself distracted. (The Party uses
Goldstein to focus members' hatred. Like the Nazis, the Party whips up anti-Jewish
sentiment--Goldstein is a Jewish name--along with hatred for the superpower they're
currently at war with. When everybody's hatred is at a high pitch, the Party
channels this hatred into love for Big Brother.)

NOTE: The parts of the government of Oceania are:

Minitrue, the Ministry of Truth, or propaganda arm. This is where Winston works.

Minipax, the Ministry of Peace, which makes war.

Miniplenty, the Ministry of Plenty, which arranges shortages.

Miniluv, the hated and feared Ministry of Love, the center of secret Party
activities. When he is captured, Winston will find out what happens here.

Today Winston was distracted by the nearness of the dark-haired girl, whom he hates
because he wants her but knows he can't have her. Worse yet, in the few seconds
before the Two Minutes' Hate wrought its inevitable magic and everybody present
loved Big Brother, Winston hated Big Brother. He was even more excited because he
caught O'Brien looking at him. "It was as though their two minds had opened and the
thoughts were flowing one into the other through their eyes." He thinks O'Brien may
be part of the Brotherhood pledged to overthrow Big Brother. Some readers believe
Winston's real love affair in 1984 is with O'Brien. Watch them together in scenes
to come and see what you think.

In a unique mixture of sex and politics, the Party channels sexual frustration to
its own purposes. In Winston this channeling misfires. Lust and politics get all
mixed up with the dark-haired girl, because, he now realizes, it's the Party's
fault that he can't have her. He looks down and finds to his horror that he has
been writing, over and over: DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER. He has committed the
unforgivable--Thoughtcrime, as it's called in Newspeak. He knows his action will
lead to capture and punishment. Thought Police will drag him away in the middle of
the night (just the way Nazis in World War II took people to concentration camps).
He will end up in the mysterious Ministry of Love, where terrible things happen to
people who oppose Big Brother. He will be vaporized.

There is a knock at the door. Winston fears the worst.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: NOTE: ON NEWSPEAK

In an Appendix at the end of the novel, Orwell describes Newspeak. It's the
official language of Oceania, made to meet the needs of INGSOC, or English
Socialism. When it becomes universal, Orwell tells us, nobody will be able to
commit unwanted acts or think bad thoughts because actions and thoughts cannot
exist without language to describe or define them. Example: "Free" will mean
"without." A cat will be "free" of ticks, but people will no longer hanker for
"freedom." Things will be "ungood" or "double plus ungood," but never bad. Orwell
is playing with both words and politics. He asks us to believe that language
affects life. You may disagree, but for the purposes of his story, Orwell asks us
to believe that limiting vocabulary limits thought and action.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: SECTION II

Instead of Thought Police, the person at Winston's door is his neighbor, Mrs.
Parsons. Although Party members call one another comrade, this timid lady is very
much a Mrs. Will Winston help her fix the plumbing? Her plump, patriotic husband is
out on Party business. Winston is harassed by her monstrous children, who, in a
patriotic fervor, accuse him of Thoughtcrime. They are Junior Spies.

NOTE: In World War II, Hitler Youth, indoctrinated from childhood, grew up to turn
in their parents. Orwell uses the Parsons children as strong indicators of the
dangerous political climate.

Depressed and anxious, Winston retreats to memories of a dream in which someone

said, quietly, "We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness." He is sure
it was the voice of O'Brien. And this is important: "Winston had never been able to
feel sure... whether O'Brien was a friend or an enemy. Nor did it seem to matter
greatly. There was a link of understanding between them...." Yes, they will meet in
the place where there is no darkness. In his loneliness and isolation, emotions
which may mirror Eric Blair's loneliness in Burma, this hope is enough for Winston.

Writing in his diary, Winston reflects that this criminal act makes him a dead man.
Look for echoes of this thought, especially as Part Two ends. His fatalism is
interesting. Does this defiant act reflect high heroism or is it the result of a
death wish? You can argue this either way, on evidence found in the book. At the
moment, Winston wants to save his skin, so he carefully hides the diary.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: SECTION III

Winston dreams he's with his mother in a sinking ship. We're reminded of the heroic
refugee mother from the newsreel in Section I. Winston is struck with guilt.
Although his mother disappeared in a political purge, he feels somehow responsible.
We'll see why later.

In the next instant he is in a dream landscape in a place he calls The Golden

Country, a stubbly pasture where the dark-haired girl appears. She strips naked and
runs toward him. He sees this as an act of destruction--the girl wiping out the
Party in one free gesture. (In a Party that suppresses sex, anything sexual is
rebellion.) He wakes saying, "Shakespeare."

^^^^^^^^^^1984: NOTE: WINSTON'S DREAMS

Look carefully at Winston's dreams. They're prophetic and symbolic. Every one
signals something important to come in the book. Look at:

1. The dream about O'Brien. Yes, they are going to meet in the place where there is
no darkness, but it's not what Winston thinks, as we find out in Part Three. He
doesn't know the possible outcome but in his loneliness he can hardly wait.
2. The dream about his mother foreshadows memories to be revealed to Winston near
the end of Part Two. Many people think Orwell uses the idea of woman as mother as
ideal. What does this make of Julia, who has sex for fun? Watch how Orwell treats
her and Winston's affair.

3. The Golden Country. This dream is the most heavily symbolic. It is directly
prophetic, as you'll see when Winston finally meets the dark-haired girl; but
there's more to it as an expression of Winston's yearning for the past. Look at:

a. The country as England's rural past.

b. The girl in her nakedness as a symbol of love, perhaps, but for Winston at this
point, as rebellion.

c. "Shakespeare." The arts in England have been wiped out by the Party. They, along
with beauty and truth, are another part of the past that Winston longs for.

When he wakes, Winston reflects on childhood memories as he goes through the

motions of his daily routine. Current history and his memories do not coincide.
Oceania is and always was at war with Eurasia in alliance with Eastasia, according
to all the books and papers, but this isn't the way Winston remembers it. The
records are changed. "Double-think" or "reality control" makes this possible: "To
know and not to know... to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out,
knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them...." Revisionism, a
political fact in some countries today, is the ammunition of Orwell's imaginary
Party.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: NOTE: ON REVISIONISM

Today we're familiar with revisionism--the altering of history texts and removal of
certain images to conform to prevailing policies. In some cases history is revised
because we have made new discoveries. For instance, our wide knowledge of Franklin
D. Roosevelt's illness has changed the way we look at his presidency. While he was
in office, the seriousness of his illness was kept secret for the good of the
government; the country was at war and needed to have complete faith in the power
of its president. In the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, history
has changed with the regimes. For instance, statues and pictures of Stalin, once
prominent everywhere, have been removed from the Soviet Union, as recent regimes
have tried to disassociate themselves from Stalin and his practices.

In Winston's case, a leader has been created. As he remembers it, nobody had heard
of Big Brother before 1960. Now that he's a figurehead, history has been backdated
so that there are tales of Big Brother's exploits as far back as the 1930s. In
Orwell's day, such practices were relatively new. Since his death, history has made
his cautionary novel look like grim prophecy.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: SECTION IV

Winston is at work in the Records section of the Ministry of Truth, engaged in the
kind of revision that keeps the Party going. In his cubicle is a "speakwrite"
(today it would be a computer terminal); a tube for written messages and one for
newspapers; and a "memory hole," in which he destroys obsolete documents. Today
Winston would probably complete his entire operation on his handy word processor.
As messages came up on the screen, he could note the necessary changes and record
over them, erasing history with the touch of a button.

It's probably safe to guess that for Winston's feelings, at least, Orwell draws on
his own World War II days with the BBC, when he wrote newscasts for broadcast in
India. For morale purposes, then, certain facts would have to be withheld, and even
defeats had to be described in an upbeat manner.

Winston's job is to update Big Brother's old speeches, in which the leader might
have guessed wrong about where a skirmish with the enemy would take place, or how
badly the chocolate ration is going to be cut. In the latter case Winston also has
to make the cut in rations look like an increase. Later he's going to have to make
this kind of change on a massive scale--watch for it.

Daily, Winston destroys the old documents and creates new ones to cover policy
changes. All these changes have to be incorporated into new editions of back
newspapers, books, and all written records; these are destroyed and replaced to
keep up with "history." Could people really do this in Winston's day (Orwell's,
rather), or even today? Perhaps Orwell was making his point by exaggeration.

Elsewhere in the Ministry of Truth, thousands of workers are creating cheap novels
and daily horoscopes, all the trappings of the popular culture. The clever trash is
designed to keep the proles so happy that they won't notice how many hardships and
shortages the Party has caused. There is even a pornosec with a product so racy
that Party members aren't allowed to peek. Remember this later when Winston
reflects on the Party line on sex.

Today Winston is faced with a challenge. In Newspeak his order reads: "times
e.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplus ungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise
upsub antefiling." Orwell translates for us: "The reporting of Big Brother's Order
for the Day in the Times of December 3rd 1983 is extremely unsatisfactory and makes
references to nonexistent persons. Rewrite it in full and submit your draft to
higher authority before filing."

The author is about to introduce a central concept. A former high Inner Party hero,
praised in one of Big Brother's speeches, has mysteriously fallen out of favor and,
we must guess, has been liquidated, or as Orwell has it, "vaporized." It is not
enough that Big Brother has made him disappear. He must be expunged from the
record. Not only does Comrade Withers cease to exist; he never did exist. Comrade
Withers is now an unperson. This thinking is central to Party survival as we see in
Two, IX, in Emmanuel Goldstein's book.

Winston revises the records brilliantly, by the simple expedient of invention.

Winston settles for a simple invention that calls for the fewest changes in
records: he makes up Comrade Ogilvy. With tongue in cheek, Orwell, through Winston,
presents a Party paragon who from infancy refuses all but military toys, turns in
his uncle to the Thought Police at eleven, organizes the junior Anti-Sex League,
and at age seventeen designs a grenade that blows up thirty-one prisoners at one
pop. He dies gallantly, and, according to this revised speech by Big Brother,

He was a total abstainer and a non-smoker, had no recreations except a daily hour
in the gymnasium, and had taken a vow of celibacy, believing marriage... to be
incompatible with a twenty-four-hours-a-day devotion to duty. He had no subjects of
conversation except the principles of Ingsoc, and no aim in life except the defeat
of the Eurasian enemy and the hunting-down of spies, saboteurs, thought-criminals,
and traitors generally.

Tickled with his invention, Winston decides not to award Comrade Ogilvy the Order
of Conspicuous Merit because it will entail too many changes in the record.

NOTE: It's interesting at this point to look at two alterations in texts in the
Soviet Union. In the course of World War II, the Soviets, who had been allied with
Hitler, switched alliances to fight with England and the United States. A Small
Soviet Encyclopedia, published in 1941, reflects a change in position that took
place in the middle of a press run. Early copies describe U.S. President Roosevelt
as a capitalist waging war for imperialist gain. By the end of the run, he has
become the hope of the Russian people and a foe of fascism.

When the Russian leader Lavrenty Beria fell from favor he became an "unperson."
Subscribers to the Large Soviet Encyclopedia, one scholar reports, were sent a set
of fresh pages on the Bering Sea and entries on a little-known figure called
Bergholz, to replace certain pages in the BER-section. They were to remove the
Beria pages with a razor blade and insert the new ones. In 1952, Czechoslovak
Communist Evan Loebl, accused of crimes against the state but not executed,
underwent a long interrogation process that continued even after he had confessed.
"I was quite a normal person," he said, "only I was not a person." Watch what
happens to Winston later, in Part Three.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: SECTION V

In the canteen, Winston lines up for lunch along with Syme, who works in the
Research Department. Syme, a specialist in Newspeak, is preparing the Eleventh
Edition of the Newspeak dictionary. He is tiny, sad, and too smart for his own
good.

The food is vile, improved only slightly by the addition of Victory gin, the swill
the Party provides, along with Victory Coffee and Victory Cigarettes, names echoing
second-rate "Victory" products available in London after World War II, when
conditions made it impossible for people to obtain anything better.

Winston prompts Syme to talk about the Eleventh Edition, which he does, saying
gleefully that he is busy destroying thousands of words, along with the works of
Shakespeare, Milton and others. This gives Orwell an opportunity to incorporate
some of his political thinking into the text, although as a novelist he knows
better than to drop it in whole. He dresses it up by pretending it's a dramatic
conversation, weaving in Syme's manner and Winston's responses along with details
about the setting. When he's finished, he still has a lot more to say hence the
awkward Appendix elaborating on Newspeak.

Syme says, "Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of
thought? In the end we shall make Thoughtcrime impossible because there will be no
words in which to express it."

One of these days, Winston thinks, Syme is going to be vaporized. Syme points to a
couple spouting Party jargon and introduces a new word: duckspeak. "Applied to an
opponent, it is abuse; applied to someone you agree with, it is praise." He is
clearly too intelligent and outgoing to survive in the Party.

In comes Parsons, a completely different kind of Party member. Pudgy and zealous,
Parsons is collecting money for the neighborhood Hate Week; he can't wait to start
decorating. He apologizes for his kids' harassing Winston, but he's clearly proud
of their Party fervor.

All hands listen to a joyful announcement from the Ministry of Plenty that the
chocolate ration has been raised-from thirty grams to twenty. How can people
swallow this? It's either grin or be vaporized. It makes as much sense to Winston
as the contrast between the ill-fed, funny-looking Party members and the Party
ideal of handsome blonde stereotypes (not unlike Hitler's "ideal" Aryans).

Uncertain about how many of his rebellious thoughts show in his expression and
gestures, Winston breaks into a sweat when he discovers he's being watched. The
dark-haired girl whom he fears is a state spy sits at the next table.
^^^^^^^^^^1984: SECTION VI

Winston records his last sexual encounter (with a prole prostitute) in his diary.
The entry is a springboard for Orwell's consideration of sex and politics. Being
caught with a prostitute might get Winston five years in a labor camp, but the real
crime is "promiscuity" between Party members, which at the moment Winston finds
unthinkable because of his Party conditioning. He'd like it, but thinks nobody
would dare.

The aim of the Party, Winston believes, is to remove all pleasure from sexual acts.
Sex and marriage are a mere necessity, like "a slightly disgusting minor
operation," to be undertaken for the purpose of producing infant Party members. He
understands that the Party is trying to suppress the sexual instinct--but for
purposes he hasn't yet identified.

His ex-wife Katharine had a "stupid, vulgar, empty" mind and shrank from sex,
submitting only for Party purposes. When it became clear that she and Winston were
not going to produce a baby, they separated.

Orwell has political reasons for drawing women and sex the way he does in this
chapter. He also has artistic reasons: to show us that Winston is lonely and ready
for the affair with Julia. He also wants us to know that Winston has more than love
in mind:

"And what he wanted, more even than to be loved, was to break down that wall of
virtue, even if it were only once in his whole life." This is romantic, but look at
what he thinks next: "The sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion."

Does Winston think of women as something to be used, or is this Orwell's view?

Watch the unfolding affair with Julia and decide whether you think Winston is ever
really in love with her. Does he respect Julia for who she is, or is she simply the
first available woman?

Back to the diary. Winston's remembered prostitute took him to her room where he
discovered that she was old, ugly, and made him feel dirty. He took her anyway.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: SECTION VII

Winston writes: "If there is hope it is in the proles." The proles, Winston thinks,
could shake off the Party as a horse shakes off flies--if they could be roused. But
his example of their potential for rebellion is a few hundred prole women
stampeding for a bunch of tin saucepans. Two bloated women tug over a pan; their
quarreling disgusts him:

Left to themselves, like cattle... they had reverted to... a sort of ancestral
pattern. They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve,
they passed through a brief blossoming period of beauty and sexual desire, they
married at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part,
at sixty.

This seems to be the best they can do. It isn't much! Their minds are so simple
that the Thought Police can keep them in line. Being without general ideas, they
can only focus their discontent on petty grievances. They watch football or have
sex at will because, as a Party slogan sums it up: "Proles and animals are free."

Is this really what Winston thinks about the common people? Is it what Orwell
thinks? If it is--and we never know for certain--both character and author are
dreadful pessimists, and Winston's later reflection that the proles are the hope
for the future is an empty one.
Remember that in describing the Ministry of Truth Orwell exaggerates to get our
attention. He may be exaggerating here in order to underscore his warning to his
fellow Englishmen, and to make them so mad at him that they will wake up and take
action. Perhaps his response to the proles is so conditioned by his years at St.
Cyprian's, Eton and Burma that he has let his ingrained sense of the British class
system and his snobbery get the better of him. See what you think.

NOTE: Some readers think the fact that Orwell was dying while he finished this
novel accounts for the pessimistic view of society and its future, while others
think he was using every weapon in his arsenal to wake up his readers. Remember,
only a few years earlier Hitler tried to create a world similar to 1984 in Germany,
and Russia was in the grip of a strong centralized government at the time that
Orwell was writing.

Picking up a revised children's history, Winston tries to sort out the truths from
the lies. Was London really worse off before the Revolution? The Party claims to
build ideal cities, but Winston's London is a shambles. He has trouble remembering
the past because "Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was
forgotten, the lie became truth."

Just once in his life, Winston possessed concrete evidence of a Party lie. It
happened this way: In the Middle Sixties, the original leaders of the Revolution
were wiped out. Among the last arrested were Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford, who
disappeared and then came back to make public confessions. They were pardoned and
reinstated. Winston once saw them in the Chestnut Tree Cafe, a questionable hangout
for discredited Party members, where a song played: "Under the spreading chestnut
tree I sold you and you sold me...." As Winston watched, Rutherford heard the song
and began to weep. We'll see the cafe and hear the song again in Part Three.
Several years later Winston comes upon a photograph that proved the "traitors" were
really in New York when they were supposed to be in Eurasia, committing crimes
against the state. (This paralleled a similar case in the Soviet Union during
Orwell's lifetime.) Winston held in his hand physical proof--the photograph--that
the Party had lied. Frightened, he destroyed it, but he still remembers. "The past
not only changed, but changed continuously." He writes in his diary: I understand
HOW: I do not understand WHY.

Winston may very well be the only man alive who remembers or cares about the truth.

In the last section Orwell prepared us for Winston's encounter with Julia. In this
section he prepares us for Winston's confrontation with the Party. Note that
Winston looks to a woman to express his rebellion. In his loneliness, he also turns
to O'Brien. He is writing the diary for--or to--O'Brien. Pay close attention to the
last thing Winston writes: "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make
four. If that is granted, all else follows." Orwell is setting him up for his
destruction, as we see in Part Three.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: SECTION VIII

It's a nice evening and although solitary acts are frowned on, Winston goes for a
walk. He is drawn to the prole sector, where a shouted warning flattens him just as
a rocket bomb (like the "buzz bombs" of World War II) hits. Winston thinks proles
have some instinct that lets them know about such things.

As he wanders among them, he sees the common people as sexual, careless, almost
animal in their simple pleasures, which include the Lottery and drinking in pubs.
He envies their simplicity, a fact which some readers would argue is a figment of
the author's class-conscious imagination. Others say he is exaggerating for effect.
What do you think?
In the pub, Winston fastens on an old man as a possible link to the past. Certainly
the man remembers the days before Big Brother. But when they try to talk, the man
seems to remember only gents in top hats who wanted him to touch his cap, and times
when he wasn't plagued by a twitchy bladder. What Winston is trying to find out is
whether the Party line is true: that the lower classes were oppressed by bloated
capitalists in the terrible days of hardship that were ended by the Revolution,
when the Party came to power.

"Was life better before the Revolution than it is now?" Winston knows the question
is not answerable because all the relevant facts are outside the range of vision of
the old people who might remember. When memory fails and the records are altered,
there is no standard against which the Party's claims can be tested. Orwell seems
to foresee a time in which the elite will be at work altering the records, leaving
the past to the apparently faulty memories of the lower classes.

Winston retreats to the streets and discovers that the secondhand shop where he
bought the diary is still open. Mr. Charrington, the white-haired proprietor,
smiles kindly and welcomes Winston. The gold and silver of yesteryear have been
melted down, so what remains in his shop has little tangible value, except as a
link with the past that Winston has been seeking.

On a table in the back is a rounded glass paperweight. Except for the image of Big
Brother on posters and telescreens, it is the single most important object in the
shop. The glass is clear as rainwater, and at its center is a lovely pink shape.
The paperweight is important to Winston as a symbol of the lost past. It has
another equally important symbolic role in the story, which we'll discover in Part
Two. The old man tells Winston that the pink shape is coral, and, as soon as
Winston buys it, offers to show him his private upstairs room. It is here that
Winston will play some of his most important scenes as the novel unfolds, The room
itself is an emblem of more civil times, when a man could sit by the fire with his
feet up, safe from the watchful television eye. Ah, the old man says, he never had
the money for the telescreen, and never felt the need of it. He owns only a few
worthless books--everything printed before 1960 has been destroyed by the Party.

The room does, however, contain one other major item: a print of St. Clement's
Dane, one of London's most venerable churches. The frame, the old man says, is
fixed to the wall. Keep an eye on this print; it's important for several reasons:

1. It's a symbol of London's lost past, which Winston longs for. The church has
been half-destroyed and turned to other uses by the Party.

2. It's a springboard for the children's rhyme that is repeated throughout the
novel: "Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement's; you owe me three
farthings, say the bells of St. Martin's...." The rhyme moves Winston as he
reflects on the fate of London's churches.

3. Like Mr. Charrington, the print is not what it seems--as we'll discover at the
end of Part Two.

Leaving Mr. Charrington reluctantly, Winston heads home with the paperweight in his
pocket. His heart almost stops when he sees a figure in blue overalls. It's the
dark-haired girl, and he fears she is following him. Paralyzed, he wonders if he
can brain her with the incriminating paperweight. He heads home, frightened and
drained of the will to resist.

He takes out his diary, reflecting: "It was at night that they came for you, always
at night. The proper thing was to kill yourself before they got to you." In what he
took to be a moment of danger with the girl, Winston had lost the power to act.
This section is important to any study of Winston's character, since he thinks
about O'Brien and about what will happen to him after the Thought Police take him
away. He knows that before death he will suffer torture, but wonders why: after
all, nobody ever escaped detection or failed to confess. "Why then, did that
horror, which altered nothing, have to he embedded in future time?"

He reflects again on what he thinks O'Brien said: "We shall meet in the place where
there is no darkness." He thinks he knows where this is. It's the "imagined future,
which one would never see, but which, by foreknowledge, one could mystically share
in." Is this Winston's death wish at work? His loneliness? His desire to be like
other people? It may be all three.

From a coin, Big Brother stares at him. He studies the legend:

^^^^^^^^^^1984: IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

NOTE: Orwell never quite manages to explain these slogans in the course of the
novel, so they are defined in an unwieldly extract from Emmanuel Goldstein's
revolutionary bible. We'll discuss this when we get to Part Two.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: SECTION I

It's morning. Winston is heading for the men's room when he sees the dark-haired
girl who frightened him so the other night. She's wearing a sling and falls on her
injured arm. Winston helps her up. To his astonishment, she slips him a note which,
after elaborate precautions, he reads and destroys. In her unformed handwriting she
has written:

I love you.

He wants a few minutes alone to consider this, but Parsons joins him, babbling
about decorations for Hate Week. All afternoon he is haunted by the girl's face. At
the sight of the words I love you, "the desire to stay alive had welled up in him,
and the taking of minor risks suddenly seemed stupid." He goes through the motions
of the business day, hiding what he feels.

How are he and the girl going to meet without raising suspicions? Maybe he can bump
into her in the canteen. The next week is one of fevered anticipation and worry.
Finally they manage to sit at the same lunch table, speaking without looking up so
anyone watching won't see.

They meet in Victory Square under the eyes of several telescreens, but crowd
movement allows them to slip close and make plans as truckloads of Eurasian
prisoners go by. They will take separate trains out of Paddington station and meet
on a country lane Julia knows. For a second they hold hands.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: SECTION II

Winston is in the country, perhaps for the first time since childhood. Has he spent
his adult life in the city because it suits the author's convenience or are there
other reasons? See what you think.

The couple meet in a flowered field, free from hidden microphones. Here they can
escape the drabness, the crowded conditions, the sameness of city life. The girl,
whom Winston thinks of as "experienced," has been here before. They exchange a few
words and then embrace. She is young and attractive, but when she kisses him he
feels not desire, only disbelief and pride.
Her name is Julia, she says. He tells her his name and confesses that he almost
bashed her with the paperweight because he thought she worked for the Thought
Police. She rips off the junior Anti-Sex League sash and hands him a piece of
chocolate. He can't understand why she is attracted to him, as he's older.

"It was something in your face," she says. "...As soon as I saw you I knew you were
against them."

Julia leads Winston to a secret woods, where he remembers at once the "Golden
Country" of his dreams. Orwell now gives us a loving description of the country,
and of a singing bird. Winston's desire awakens. When he and Julia come together
the experience is almost as lovely as it was in his dream in Part One.

Has Julia done this before? Yes, she says, with scores of Party members. Winston is
not distressed; on the contrary, "he wished it had been hundreds--thousands.
Anything that hinted at corruption filled him with a wild hope.... Anything to rot,
to weaken, to undermine!" Since Winston equates sex with rebellion, he tells her
that the more men she has had, the more he loves her. She says she loves sex and is
"corrupt to the bone," and they embrace. It is not Julia alone that arouses him but
rebellion, "not merely the love of one person, but the animal instinct, the simple
undifferentiated desire: that was the force that would tear the Party to pieces."

Rebellion is what flames Winston's desire. He realizes rolling away from her, that
there is no pure love and no pure lust in a world ruled by the Party, since
everything is polluted with fear and hatred. If we are to believe Winston, his
response to Julia is the Party's fault.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: SECTION III

When Julia wakes she is all business, dealing with the details of their safe return
home. It is clear that she has a "practical cunning" which Winston lacks. Unlike
Winston, Julia is open and breezy. She flings her arms around him and then leaves.
They go home by separate routes, with plans for a future rendezvous.

They never go back to the clearing in the fields. The next time, they meet in
another of her hiding places, a ruined church in a countryside leveled by an atomic
bomb. Their other meetings are rushed encounters in which they exchange a few
words. The logistics of work hours and Party activities (if you keep the small
rules, says Julia, you can break the big ones) keep them apart most of the time.

At the church, Julia describes her life in a hostel with thirty other girls
("Always the stink of women! How I hate women!") She says she is "not clever," but
she feels at home with the machinery that composes novels in the Fiction Department
where she works. Because Julia is young, her memories are Party memories. All the
workers in the Pornosec are girls because they're supposed to be "so pure" that
they won't be aroused by the material. She knows that she herself is no longer
"pure" enough.

Julia describes her first affair and gives her view of life. Her rebellion against
the Party consists in having a good time without the Party's finding out. She has
no interest in Party doctrine, has never heard of the secret Brotherhood and thinks
organized rebellion against the party is stupid. The clever thing is to break all
the rules and stay alive.

Julia gives us a good overview of why the Party Prohibits sex. The Party's sexual
repressiveness, she says, is designed to induce hysteria that can be turned into
war fever and leader worship. Making love uses up energy that could be turned to
Party ends. Privation creates hostility that can be turned on the Party's enemies.
The Family has been turned into an extension of the Thought Police--everybody is
surrounded by informants. (It takes Julia to point this out to Winston; she is the
clever one.)

Winston recalls a hike (perhaps his only other excursion to the country) with his
wife Katharine. When he showed her some flowers on the side of a cliff, he thought
of pushing her off. He didn't have the nerve, though, and he didn't believe it
would matter whether he pushed her or not, since "In this game that we're playing,
we can't win." Winston seems to be a defeatist, who knows things will end badly.
Julia's function is to deny that they are doomed, to insist on the power of luck
and cunning and boldness. To Winston's "We are the dead," Julia replies, "We're not
dead yet."

Orwell seems to use the couple as speakers for opposite sides of an argument.
Either the world is so far gone that there is no hope, no matter how hard people
struggle, or people are strong and resourceful and there is hope. People either
can't change their circumstances--or they can. In this novel Orwell seems to load
the dice against his characters, but in this part of the story, at least, there
appears to be some reason for the characters--and the reader--to hope.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: SECTION IV

Winston has taken a drastic step. He has rented the room above Mr. Charrington's
shop so he and Julia will have a place to be alone together. On the gateleg table
in the corner is the glass paperweight. In fact, a vision of the paperweight on Mr.
Charrington's table is what inspired him to risk capture by renting the room.

Outside, somebody is singing. It is "a monstrous woman, solid as a pillar, with

brawny red forearms." She is hanging up diapers and singing aloud, something no
Party member would ever do. Keep an eye on this woman, as she is central to
Winston's story and carries one conscious message from the author as well as--
perhaps--an unconscious one. We'll come to her later.

Overworked as the city prepares for Hate Week, Winston and Julia have had to put
off meeting because she is having her period. He is surprised now by how angry this
makes him. Their first act of love was, for him, an intellectual gesture, but now
he finds he wants and needs her, and wishes they had the leisure to be like an old
married couple, walking out together, able to be alone together "without feeling
the obligation to make love every time they met." It is for this reason that he has
rented the room.

This section portrays Winston as much more of a romantic lover than he seemed in
his first encounter with Julia, but he is still a fatalist, thinking: "It was as
though they were intentionally stepping nearer to their graves." This seems to make
something of a star-crossed lover of him; in other words he is in love precisely
because the love is doomed.

Julia enters, with packets of sugar, real coffee, and real bread, luxury items
usually reserved for Inner Party members. She has brought something else. She tells
him to turn his back. Once again he sees the red-armed woman in the courtyard and
thinks she would be happy to go on like that forever, singing and hanging up the
wash.

When he turns around, he's delighted because Julia has put on makeup. He has never
seen a Party woman with a painted face. She looks not only prettier, but "far more
feminine." But when he takes her in his arms, he notices that she's wearing the
same perfume as his last prostitute.

Most of Winston's thoughts, however, are romantic. He lets Julia see him naked for
the first time. They sleep in the double bed as light from the sunset slants into
the room, and, waking, Winston wonders whether in the old days couples always had
the leisure to dawdle in bed after making love.

His reverie is shattered by the appearance of a rat. Winston shudders with horror
because he is assailed by memories of a recurring nightmare. In his dream, he is
standing in front of a wall of darkness, looking out on something too dreadful to
be faced. It has something to do with rats, he thinks. Remember the dream. It's
important in Part Three.

Julia reassures him and then gets up to tour the room, investigating the shabby
antiques with some amusement, and bringing the paperweight back to the bed. Winston
calls the paperweight a "little chunk of history that they've forgotten to alter.
It's a message from a hundred years ago...." When she looks at the picture of St.
Clement's, Winston recites the first two lines of the old verse and Julia fills in
the next two: "You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St. Martin's, When will
you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey...."

Julia may not know the next two lines but she remembers the end: "Here comes a
candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head!"

After Julia leaves, Winston gazes into the glass paperweight. He imagines the glass
as the arch of the sky, a whole world containing himself and this room full of
antiques: "The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia's life
and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal."

NOTE: Here, as elsewhere in 1984, Orwell uses objects--an antique table, an antique
clock, a print of the church of St. Clement's Dane--to create atmosphere and to
give the reader a strong sense of place. Through Winston's response to these
objects, we get a clear picture of Winston's love for the past. All novelists use
details to bring us into rooms we've never seen; many, like Orwell, use physical
objects to stand for much more than their face value. The paperweight, as we saw
after Julia left, a symbol of the past. Keep an eye on that picture of the church,
which Julia offered to take down and clean. It also reminds Winston of the past,
and of the old verse, but it has one last function to perform.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: SECTION V

Syme has become an unperson; it happened overnight. In the summer heat, with the
city wheels grinding around the clock in preparation for Hate Week, Winston hardly
notices. Proles and the Parsons children alike are singing and playing a new ditty
drummed up for the occasion, "Hate Song." The senior Parsons is hanging banners and
streamers in the heat, in preparation for the event.

Even the proles are fired up, by the weather, by an increase in flights of rocket
bombs, and by a huge poster of a Eurasian soldier that appears everywhere,
inspiring hate. Winston retreats with Julia to the room above Mr. Charrington's--
the two lovers are sweltering and pestered by bugs, but content.

The affair has been good for Winston, who has given up gin and begun to put on a
little weight. He's cheered by the knowledge that the room is available, even when
he can't get to it. The room to him is a world, a pocket of the past, where extinct
animals can talk. Everything he cares about is here.

One of Winston's extinct animals is Mr. Charrington, who produces memories in the
same way that he produces antiques to charm Winston.

In this section we see Winston and Julia as star-crossed lovers once more. Even
Julia knows their happiness can't last long and this inspires them to "despairing
sensuality," which makes the affair seem sweeter. Until now, you could have argued
that Winston was a sexist who used Julia as a weapon in his private revolution. But
during this interlude he gives signals that his love has come to mean more.

Winston begins to have fantasies: that their affair can last; that he can escape
with Julia into the world of the paperweight, where time stops; that Katharine will
die so they can marry; that they can commit suicide; that they can change their
identities and live among the proles.

"In reality"--writes Orwell--"there was no escape." Why not? Julia knew her way
around--why couldn't she and Winston disappear from view and live a happy life
among the proles? There was no reason why Orwell couldn't have arranged for them to
be caught, later in order to satisfy the purpose of his novel.

There are two possible reasons why the lovers don't try to escape:

1. By the time Orwell finished his first draft of the novel and began a second one,
he was ailing. Perhaps he lacked the physical strength to add additional chapters
to his book.

2. Perhaps Orwell, like Winston, was a slave to his class. Even when the author was
living among the coal miners and their families, he was not one of them. He was
revolted by unpleasant sights and smells. Neither he nor Winston would be
comfortable living among such people; it would have been out of the question.

Instead of plotting their escape, Winston and Julia begin to talk about rebellion--
finding their way into the secret Brotherhood. He tells her about the "strange
intimacy" he feels with the sophisticated Inner Party member O'Brien, even though
they have never met.

We begin to hear about Julia's political attitudes. She can't believe that there
will ever be widespread opposition to the Party. She assumes, however, that
everybody like herself, rebels privately. She believes that stories about Emmanuel
Goldstein and the war in Eurasia are Party inventions designed to keep people in
line.

Although Julia believes in love, she knows that the Party is an unalterable fact of
life and that "You could only rebel against it by secret disobedience or, at most,
by isolated acts of violence such as killing somebody or blowing something up." Her
own particular rebellion is sexual.

It's Julia who suggests that the government has invented the war and arranges for
the rocket bomb to fall to keep everybody on their toes. At the same time she buys
the Party myths "because the difference between truth and falsehood did not seem
important to her."

Is she a featherbrain or a realist? Orwell and Winston seem to want to see her both
ways. Julia makes some profound observations about politics, yet when Winston tells
her about the picture he saw of Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford and how it proved
the Party lied, she is indifferent, telling him: "I'm not interested in the next
generation, dear. I'm interested in us." And when he calls her "a rebel from the
waist downwards," she hugs him in wild delight.

Do Winston and his creator respect this woman? In some lights, yes. In some, no.
They admire her cheerful realism, may even envy it, but Winston undercuts this by
thinking: "In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully
on people incapable of understanding it.... By lack of understanding they remained
sane."

^^^^^^^^^^1984: SECTION VI
Just when Winston begins to think that Julia isn't a fit intellectual companion,
O'Brien gets in touch. Winston thinks this is what he's been waiting for all his
life.

Meeting O'Brien in the halls of the Ministry, Winston is speechless. His heart
pounds. Is he merely excited at being in the presence of an important political
figure, or is his attraction more personal and profound? Defining the nature of
this attraction is going to help us decide what Winston's feelings for O'Brien
really are.

At the moment he is thrilled because O'Brien praises his work and alludes to the
missing Syme--a hint that O'Brien may be a Party enemy, too. O'Brien offers to show
him a Newspeak dictionary if he'll drop by one evening after work. He gives Winston
his address. Winston is sure he's reached the outer edges of the Brotherhood.

Winston sees this as the next step in a process that, for him, began years ago. The
first step was a secret thought. The second was the diary. The third, we can
assume, was his affair with Julia. The next will be his relationship with O'Brien,
and after that?

"The last step was something that would happen in the Ministry of Love.... The end
was contained in the beginning.... He had always known that the grave was there and
waiting for him." These sound like the thoughts of a man who is in love not with
Julia, not with O'Brien, but with death.

NOTE: One critic has raised the possibility that 1984 is not a political novel at
all, but an existential one. If we remember that Winston is "The Last (thinking)
Man in Europe," we can recognize the truth in this. The Party and the unwashed
proles alike underscore Winston's isolation both in thought and body; and the fact
that he never really finds a kindred soul guarantees his despair. His girlfriend
doesn't understand him and his mentor, O'Brien, seeks to destroy him. If we accept
this interpretation, then 1984 is the story of one man's intellectual and actual
loneliness, and his "rebellion" is, rather, a planned suicide. In this
interpretation O'Brien is quite simply, the means to death, which Winston embraces
as he would a lover.

This is an unorthodox interpretation, but one you may have fun playing with since
Winston marches straight into the clutches of O'Brien and the power he represents.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: SECTION VII

Winston wakes from another dream. This one does not so much foreshadow future
events as trigger a memory. His dream takes place inside the paperweight, which
Orwell gave us as an emblem for the past. In the dream he discovers that the arm
gesture made by the refugee mother in the newsreel is one his mother made.

Until this moment, he tells Julia, he had believed that he caused his mother's
death.

He recalls a childhood spent hiding out in Underground stations during air raids.
His father was already gone and the city was a shambles. His mother is dead at
heart. They are hungry all the time. He remembers badgering his mother for food; he
takes food from her and his baby sister because hunger is the strongest thing he
feels. In one last guilty act he steals chocolate from both of them, and runs away.

He tells Julia he never saw them again. She mumbles, "All children are swine," and
drifts off to sleep. Winston remembers his mother protecting his baby sister, and
thinks: "The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that mere
impulses, mere feelings, were of no account...." He admires his mother for making
the protective gesture in spite of the fact that she knows her family is doomed.

The proles, he thinks, still harbor such emotions. They are human, whereas Party
members have their emotions suppressed. "We are not human," he says.

Julia is awake now, and they agree that the best and safest thing would be to
separate and never come here again. Yet they both seem to belong to a past in which
emotions mattered, and they know they can't and won't separate.

They talk about the loneliness of capture. Julia points out that yes, they will
confess, but nothing can make her stop loving him. Winston hopes he will feel the
same way. "They can't get inside you," he says. "If you can feel that staying human
is worth while, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them."
Orwell will show us the irony of these brave speeches in Part Three.

Just when human commitment seems possible, Orwell propels his brave couple into a
rash gesture that leaves us crying out, Be careful!

This is, essentially, the couple's last chance to proceed cautiously, their last
opportunity to change course, flee or seek out another hiding place. What do they
do instead? They throw caution to the wind and take a fatal step forward.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: SECTION VIII

If only there were some way we could warn Winston! But he is too full of hope and
confidence. "They had done it," he says, "they had done it at last!"

They've gone to O'Brien's house. We've seen enough spy movies to know that you go
to such meetings separately, and in disguise. Not these two. With almost nothing to
go on, except an equivocal glance, Winston has brought the woman he loves to the
command post of the Brotherhood.

First, let's look around O'Brien's apartment, another place where Orwell uses
detail to put us in the picture and to tell us about the characters.

Winston is impressed. A servant has shown them into a softly lit room with a
velvety carpet. It's a far cry from the squalor of Victory Mansions and the shabby
room above Charrington's shop. They smell good food and real tobacco; they are
intimidated by the Asian servant in the white coat. Everything is exquisitely
clean. Although he is a self-styled writer of the people, Orwell seems to love to
dwell on these upper-class luxuries.

O'Brien is at his desk. He delivers a final message to the speakwrite and turns off
his telescreen. Winston is astonished. "You can turn it off!"

This is a privilege.

At the glimmer of a smile from O'Brien, Winston declares himself. In fact, he

declares both of them. He and Julia are enemies of the Party, he says, thought-
criminals and adulterers who want to join the Brotherhood. He is saying this so
they will be at O'Brien's mercy; he wants to make it clear that they are
trustworthy.

As he finishes speaking, the servant enters. O'Brien tells Winston not to worry,
the servant is "one of us." O'Brien pours them glasses of wine, a rarity in the
days of Victory gin. They drink to Emmanuel Goldstein, who, O'Brien tells them, is
a real person, not a Party fabrication. According to O'Brien, Goldstein is still
alive and the Brotherhood is a reality.
O'Brien tells Winston something he should have been smart enough to know (unless,
as some readers suspect, Winston has a death wish): that it was dangerous for the
couple to come together. They have to leave separately, Julia first.

Ignoring Julia, taking it for granted that Winston speaks for both of them, O'Brien
leads Winston through a strange litany that almost echoes Christian baptismal
ceremonies. They agree to give their lives, commit murder, commit numerous alien
acts on behalf of the Brotherhood, to commit suicide, to part forever.... "No!" the
lovers cry, and O'Brien praises them for telling him how they truly feel.

Dismissing the servant, O'Brien offers quality cigarettes and tells the couple they
will be working in the dark, obeying orders without knowing why. They'll never know
who the others in the Brotherhood are.

Winston is transfixed by O'Brien's authority, his natural grace: "When you looked
at O'Brien's powerful shoulders and his blunt-featured face, so ugly and yet so
civilized, it was impossible to believe that he could be defeated." Even Julia is
impressed.

The success of the organization, O'Brien says, depends on secrecy. After they drink
to the past (Winston's choice), O'Brien dismisses Julia.

In exchange for Winston's disclosure of his secret hiding place, O'Brien offers to
send him a copy of the bible of the Brotherhood, rebel leader Emmanuel Goldstein's
book. Winston will regret this the day he finds his briefcase exchanged for an
identical one carrying the book.

Perhaps we will meet again, says O'Brien; and Winston answers at once, "In the
place where there is no darkness?" Without surprise, O'Brien echoes the phrase.
This has been so carefully prepared by the author that it hits with a satisfying
thump.

At Winston's instigation O'Brien supplies the missing line to the "Oranges and
lemons" rhyme. The second line is, "When will you pay me? say the bells of Old
Bailey," to which O'Brien adds, "When I grow rich, say the bells of Shoreditch."
This calls to mind the telling last line: "Here comes the chopper to chop off your
head." Winston remembers this line but he has chosen to suppress it.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: SECTION IX

It is in this section that art and politics collide and Orwell's fascination with
his message gets in the way of the story. It contains great huge swatches of the
Goldstein book, which echoes political writings of the time, including The
Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians, both by James Burnham; The Revolution
Betrayed, by Leon Trotsky, and perhaps Das Kapital, by Karl Marx.

Unfortunately, for readers of fiction, political theory is never as gripping as the

question of what's going to happen to the characters, which is why this chapter
almost breaks the back of the book. Fortunately, Orwell is a good enough writer to
keep us going. He has raised enough questions about the fate of Winston and Julia
to make us sit still for this ideological interruption. We may squirm a little, but
when the lights come up on the show after the political interlude, we're still in
our seats.

Winston is "gelatinous" with fatigue after putting in a ninety-hour week. Right in

the middle of Hate Week, history took an abrupt about-face and Oceania was not at
war with Eurasia at all. Oceania was at war with Eastasia; Oceania and Eurasia were
fighting side by side.
You can imagine how much alteration of records this involved, including quick
changes in the middle of one Inner Party member's speech. As the people listen to
this "little Rumpelstiltskin figure, contorted with hatred," they realize that the
enemy has changed and that they're carrying the wrong signs! Orwell is clearly
exaggerating for comic effect, showing us how arbitrary these changes are, and how
easily the people are manipulated. Hate Week goes on.

Winston is anxious to do as good a job as he can because he's conscientious about

his work; he's even proud of a good job well done. But he's also the secret rebel
who is disgusted by outrageous doublethink of this kind. He is, furthermore,
carrying Goldstein's book.

After work, Winston retreats to the room at Mr. Charrington's, where he leafs
through the book and waits for Julia to arrive. He's thrilled to be reading The
Book, called

The Theory and Practice

of Oligarchical Collectivism

by Emmanuel Goldstein.

This is Orwell's chance to talk ideology with us. Let's study the major points.

Chapter 1

^^^^^^^^^^1984: IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

The opening section divides the world into three orders of people: High, Middle and
Low. They've always been divided; they've always had opposing and irreconcilable
aims. The names have changed over the centuries but "the essential structure of
society has never altered."

Orwell is going to have Winston skip to another chapter and then return to this
one. He spells out the class divisions here so that he can go on to Goldstein's
discussion of the High order (in Oceania, called the Inner Party), or hierarchy,
with this eternal division established. In 1984, O'Brien, the privileged,
sophisticated inner Party member, represents this High order. The Middle order
includes Winston and Julia and the various bit players (minor characters) like
Syme, Parsons, and Winston's other colleagues at work. This group takes orders from
the High order and has to scrape along without the High order's luxuries or
authority; yet it's still better off (according to Goldstein) than the Low order.
Naturally the Low order in 1984 is made up of our friends the proles.

Orwell is clearly exaggerating to make his point, but you may want to remember that
Orwell was the poor boy in a rich man's school, which must have formed his ideas on
the High order. In his "down and out" days he went among the lower class as a kind
of sightseer. He was not one of them; he only wrote about them. This may account
for his portrayal of the proles as more or less mindless masses ill-equipped to
rebel.

As Orwell lets Winston skip to Goldstein's Chapter 3, remember:

1. The book is drawn from many real-life sources, including the ones named at the
head of this section in your guide.

2. Orwell is drawing both on his knowledge of Communism in Stalin's Russia, and his
memories of Hitler's Germany.
3. As he was writing, in the years after World War II, the U.S. and Great Britain
were already allied. The Soviet Union was beginning to consolidate its power in
Eastern European countries. The phrase "Cold War" had entered the language. British
leader Winston Churchill had described the division between Eastern and Western
European countries as the "Iron Curtain."

4. Orwell is using Goldstein's analysis to underscore his warning against allowing

any government to gain too much power.

Since Goldstein repeats himself, it's useful to look at his argument point by
point, as Orwell spells it out.

Chapter 3

^^^^^^^^^^1984: WAR IS PEACE

Goldstein describes a world in which Russia has absorbed all of Europe to make
Eurasia. The U.S. has absorbed the British Empire to form Oceania. Eastasia has
emerged as the third power after decades of fighting. It is made up of China and
countries to the south, Japan, and "a large but fluctuating portion of Manchuria,
Mongolia and Tibet." These three superpowers are permanently at war, but it is a
strictly limited, frontier war conducted by a small number of specialists, either
at sea, around Floating Fortresses, or "on the vague frontiers whose whereabouts
the ordinary man can only guess at." These boundaries keep changing as each side
enjoys a temporary victory.

Reading any current issue of a newspaper or news magazine, you'll be surprised at

how many news stories recreate this very same scenario. None of the three
superpowers, Goldstein says, can be totally conquered, even by the other two in
combination. They're too evenly matched, and protected by their geography and
resources. Between their frontiers are stretches of territory that keep changing
hands: equatorial Africa, certain Middle Eastern countries, Southern India and
Indonesia, which are rich in resources and heavily populated, providing "a
bottomless reserve of cheap labor." The fighting flows back and forth in these
areas.

"The primary aim of modern warfare [in accordance with the principles of
doublethink, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the
directing brains of the Inner Party] is to use up the products of the machine
without raising the general standard of living." Why is this so?

According to Goldstein, the opening of the machine age in the early 1900s should
have ended human drudgery and therefore created human equality. In a world where
everybody had enough to eat and a comfortable place to live, inequality would
disappear and wealth would confer no distinction. What would happen to power then?
A literate society would sweep it away.

To protect itself, the High order mentioned in Goldstein's first chapter had to
keep the masses in poverty and ignorance. The most efficient way to do this was to
wage war. "The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives,
but of the products of human labor," Goldstein says.

The war effort engages people and resources that might otherwise be directed toward
making life too comfortable for the masses. War:

1. Eats up any surplus. This means luxury goods are reserved for the Inner Party, a
fact that underscores the high position of the High order. The few goods that
filter down to Outer Party members separate them from the proles. The hierarchy is
enforced.

2. Encourages the people to hand authority over to a hierarchy. "The consciousness

of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a
small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival."

The Party fosters a wartime mentality. This means fear of the enemy (whomever the
enemy is at any given time); hatred of the enemy; love for the Party, and the joy
of triumph at Party victories.

According to Goldstein this wartime mentality is strongest in Inner Party members.

Although these members may know that certain news is false, or that there is no
real war, through doublethink they believe in the war anyway, even as they believe
in victory when no real victory is possible.

To keep this system in operation, the Party turns to technology to refine methods
of thought control and to develop new ways to kill great numbers of people
efficiently, because "The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of
the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent
thought."

It is aiming to Goldstein that the world remains unchanged, even though all three
superpowers have the atomic bomb (it first exploded in 1945, two years before
Orwell began this book). The powers have concluded that dropping the bomb would
spell the end to organized society and therefore to their power. We don't have to
look beyond U.S.-Soviet SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty) negotiations to
find modern parallels.

None of the superstates will invade any of the others because:

1. They won't risk a step that might cause serious defeat.

2. "Cultural integrity" must be maintained. Oceania, for example, must keep its
people ignorant of other societies. If the average citizen met the "enemy,"

a. He'd find out the "enemy" is very like himself, and "The fear, hatred, and self-
righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate."

b. He'd find conditions in all three superstates are much the same, and therefore
learn that there would be no advantage to victory and no point to war.

c. He'd find that all three ruling philosophies are much alike and that the systems
they support are basically the same, with the same structure, the same worship of a
semi-divine leader, the same economy existing by and for continuous warfare.

Remaining in conflict, the three powers prop one another up. With no real danger of
conquest, they can deny reality. In the old days, Goldstein writes, "Physical facts
could not be ignored. In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and
two make five, but when one was designing a gun or an airplane they had to make
four." Efficient rulers learned from past mistakes, so they needed a knowledge of
history. Confronting real risks, their goals were checked by reality.

With a continuous war in which there is no real danger, the citizen's grip on
reality is determined by what the Party tells him. He's like "a man in interstellar
space, who has no way of knowing which direction is up and which is down."
Continuous war preserves the special mental atmosphere which a hierarchical society
needs, for the Higher order to maintain power.

This is an important point because it's one of the underpinnings of Party

philosophy in the novel. It certainly helps explain why O'Brien, in Part Three,
tries to hammer into Winston's head that "two and two equals five"--a formula that
Orwell uses to stand for all the other mental acts of surrender a Party victim must
make.

Goldstein writes: "The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects,
and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to
keep the structure of society intact." By becoming continuous, war has ceased to
exist. The effect would be similar if the three superstates agreed to live in
peaceful isolation, each "a self-contained universe, freed forever from the
sobering influence of external danger." This is the inner meaning of:

^^^^^^^^^^1984: WAR IS PEACE

At this point Orwell must have realized he was taxing his readers with too much
theory, and so he has Julia come in and throw herself into Winston's arms. She
seems indifferent when he says he has the book. In bed together, they hear the red-
armed washerwoman singing. Julia is sleepy but Winston insists on opening the book
and reading it to her aloud. He goes back to the first chapter.

In dramatic terms, Orwell has stopped his story cold again to teach us more about
totalitarian theory. Because he's still very much a novelist, he makes this lull in
dramatic action function as a lull in the story. He is also introducing detail that
will work dramatically in Part Three.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: NOTE:

1. The long reading postpones Winston's downfall, giving us a chance to worry about
him and be angry with him for lying here reading when he ought to be planning an
escape. He and Julia are already established as doomed lovers; they have taken the
final risk by meeting O'Brien and accepting the book. Unless they're going to try
to escape, there isn't much left for Orwell to tell. It won't serve his purpose to
let them get away, and it may be that, as a novelist, he was feeling too rushed by
his failing health to have the time or energy to describe even an unsuccessful
escape attempt. He certainly intended to have Winston's story end as it does--but
not yet.

2. He needs this detailed description of Party thinking to set up Part Three, in

which Winston and O'Brien are locked in mental battle. Keep in mind Goldstein's
points as O'Brien and Winston tangle in Part Three, and look for the irony involved
as O'Brien reveals who really wrote the book.

You may want to decide how you regard this extract: as a story-wrecker or as an
essential part of the book. Either position is respectable. Think about it as
Winston goes on reading.

Chapter 1

^^^^^^^^^^1984: IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

Orwell repeats the paragraph dividing society into High, Middle and Low orders,
adding: "The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the
High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with
the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim... is to abolish all
distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal."

Goldstein believes the Low order is too crushed by drudgery to have time for such
thought. He sees history as a cyclical process--continuing struggle in which the
High is overthrown by the Middle, aided by the Low. The Middle takes over, becomes
the High, and then suppresses the Low. A new Middle group splits off from the Low
or Middle group to challenge the High and the cycle begins again.

As you follow Goldstein's argument, try to decide whether this essentially

pessimistic view is a true picture of the world as it is today. It's possible to
argue both ways--to say that yes, this is the way of the world, or no, we are
progressing toward a better society. An essential question asked by Goldstein's
book is whether humanity is better off now than, say, a hundred years ago, or than
it will be in the future.

Goldstein writes that the average human is physically better off, but "no advance
in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human
equality a millimeter nearer." For the Low, there is only the occasional change in
masters.

By the late 19th century, Goldstein says, many thinkers pointed to this cyclical
process as evidence that inequality was built into the nature of life. In the past
the High had claimed the need for a hierarchical society to support its position of
power. The Middle, which had used concepts of freedom, justice and fraternity to
justify its bid for power, were going to have to adjust their rhetoric to allow for
the cyclical theory. How could they promise equality to a Low order if history
proclaimed that there would always be a Low order? They had to adjust their
thinking, too. If technology made true equality possible, they would lose all their
power.

Although Socialism was established to create liberty and equality (the Utopian, or
perfect society), the new Middle groups would make changes in it. Their aim? To
keep power once they got it. The new movements, Goldstein writes, aimed to
perpetuate unfreedom and inequality, to freeze history. Once the cycle was complete
and the Middle became High, they intended to stay High. The new, powerful parties
Goldstein names are Ingsoc (English Socialism) in Oceania, Neo-Bolshevism in
Eurasia, and Death-worship in Eastasia.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: NOTE: ON SOCIALISM

In a letter written at the time, Orwell made it plain that he was not attacking
English Socialism or the British Labor party. He was angered by Fascism (strong
national government under a dictator) in Germany and Spain, and by the perversion
of socialist ideals in Stalinist Russia. He wanted through exaggeration to point
out the dangers of totalitarian ideas because, he said, "I believe that
totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere."

Socialism is a political and economic theory of organization based on collective or

governmental ownership of the means of producing and distributing goods and
services. Today the government in England operates health care services,
transportation, mining and some radio and TV programming, among other things.
Orwell feared government control pushed too far would endanger human freedom.
Warning people about totalitarianism in other countries, Orwell wanted people in
democratic countries to be aware of the grim possibilities raised when they
delegated too much authority to their own governments.

For groups who had recently seized power, Goldstein continues, the possibility
raised by the machine age of real equality presented a danger. In order to solidify
their control, the new governments, beginning around 1930, became harshly
authoritarian. They resorted to imprisonment without trial, the use of war
prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture, the deportation (Hitler's
treatment of the Jews, for example) of entire populations.

The new High order, according to Goldstein, is made up of bureaucrats, scientists,

publicity experts and other middle--and upper-middle working-class people hungry
for pure power and ruthless in their attempts to gain it. Compared to the old
ruling class, they're unaffected by liberal ideas, and brutally efficient. Aided by
print, TV and film, they have used propaganda and surveillance to expand their
influence and to suppress private thoughts and actions.

This group consolidated its position through collectivism, or the abolition of

private property, according to Goldstein. By abolishing private property, the new
High order concentrated it in far fewer hands than before--their own. Collectively,
he says, the Party in Oceania owns everything because it controls everything, and
disposes of the products as it thinks fit.

The Party accomplished this by "collectivizing," taking over factories, mines,

land, houses, transport in the name of Socialism. INGSOC "has in fact carried out
the main item in the Socialist program, with the result... that economic inequality
has been made permanent."

A ruling group, says Goldstein, can fall from power:

1. By being conquered from outside.

2. By a revolt of the masses.

3. By permitting a strong, discontented Middle group to develop.

4. By losing self-confidence and the will to rule.

A ruling class with a strong enough desire to rule can remain in power permanently,
Goldstein says. The existence of superstates (WAR IS PEACE) eliminates the
possibility of being conquered from outside. Since the masses have no basis for
comparison, they don't know they're oppressed and won't revolt. Continuous warfare
maintains morale and keeps out people from other societies.

The only remaining dangers to the Party are the rise of the Middle group and "the
growth of liberalism and skepticism in their own ranks." To eliminate these
dangers, society is organized as a pyramid. At its top is Big Brother, the
infallible and adored figure created to focus the love, fear and reverence of the
people. Next comes the Inner Party, the "brain" of the State. Next is the Outer
Party, or "hands." At the base of the pyramid are the proles.

In principle anybody can enter any branch of the Party. The rulers are held
together by belief in INGSOC and its aims. In fact, however, there's less mobility
than there was in the old days of capitalism. Since membership is not passed down
according to blood lines, the Party pretends to be above "class privilege"; but few
people move from one group to another. Why not? The Party sees to it.

The Party perpetuates itself and its power by naming its successors. In order to
remain in power forever, the Party keeps the proles in a state of ignorance and
uses Thought Police to monitor Party members and prevent independent thought--and
therefore questions about the system.

Thought Police make sure Party members hold the right opinions and have the right
instincts by watching them constantly and weeding out anybody who deviates from the
Party norm. From childhood Party members are trained in:

1. Crimestop, or "protective stupidity"; in other words, stopping short of any

dangerous thought.

2. BlackWhite, or thinking of Big Brother as omnipotent and the Party as infallible

even when they're not. This implies discipline--saying black is white if ordered.
It also means believing it.

3. Doublethink, or holding two contradictory beliefs at the same time, and

believing both of them. This makes possible the alteration of the past (what
Winston does at the office). With no past to compare things with, everybody is
satisfied with present-day conditions. More important, changing the records
safeguards the infallibility of the Party, removing from the records any hint that
the Party was ever wrong about anything.

This ability to change the past is central to INGSOC. In controlling the past, the
Party controls the minds of its members. Since the Party possesses absolute truth,
memories have to be trained to forget the old and accept the new through
doublethink. The trick is to combine belief in Party infallibility with the power
to learn from past mistakes. This makes for many contradictions, which are at the
heart of Party rule. The Party is built on unreality, or "controlled insanity."
Insane people don't ask dangerous questions.

Why, Goldstein asks, should human equality be prevented, and at such cost? This is
the central secret, which consists....

We're not going to get the answer to this one. Winston--who, as you may have
forgotten by now, is reading all this aloud to Julia--gives her a poke. Is she
awake?

The clever girl has dozed off. Winston snuggles down, thinking he knows how life
became so terrible, but not why. We've been led to believe the answer is in the
very next sentence, but Orwell has chosen to keep the answer from us and from
Winston. He feels sleepy, confident, safe, and falls asleep murmuring, "Sanity is
not statistical." His crime, then, is being sane enough to keep asking questions--
and he will pay.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: SECTION X

Winston wakes to a cold stove and to the prole woman singing in the courtyard.
Julia joins him at the window and together they stare down at her. "It had never
before occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty... coarse in the grain
like an overripe turnip, could be beautiful." Now it does. He slips his arm around
Julia's slim waist, and laments that they will never have a child. The woman down
there may have no mind, he thinks, but she has "strong arms, a warm heart, and a
fertile belly." He imagines the woman bearing children, grandchildren, in a sort of
"mystical reverence" that extends to the sky and all the people under it. He
concludes that the future belongs to the proles, and thinks this must be
Goldstein's secret. Winston believes that the proles are immortal and that in the
end they will awake and build a new society. But even in this mystical reverie, he
seems somewhat condescending to the lower orders. "Out of those mighty loins a race
of conscious beings must one day come," he says. "You were the dead; theirs was the
future."

"We are the dead," say both Winston and Julia. And then a third voice knifes into
the room, saying, "You are the dead." This is the voice of doom Winston foresaw
when he started the diary.

The telescreen was behind the picture of St. Clement's Dane that Winston was so
fond of, and that Julia had wanted to take down and give a good cleaning. The print
crashes from the wall and Winston thinks: "It was starting, it was starting at
last!" He seems excited. Outside is the tramping of boots. A thin, cultivated voice
Winston thinks he recognizes completes the old nursery rhyme: Here comes a candle
to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head!
A ladder crashes through the window and troops enter, uniformed in black, wearing
iron-shod boots and carrying clubs. They look very much like Hitler's storm
troopers. As they threaten Winston, one of them smashes the paperweight, and the
bit of coral at the center tumbles out. How small, Winston thinks, how small it
always was! The world of the paperweight, which was the world of the past where
everything was beautiful and where Winston imagined he was safe, is shattered.

Winston is kicked; Julia is beaten and carried away, her face already yellow and
contorted. Winston is confused by the old-fashioned clock; because it's numbered
one to twelve, he doesn't know whether it's "twenty-thirty" that afternoon or
"nought eight-thirty" the next morning. The past has ceased to be of use to him.

Mr. Charrington now appears; it was his voice that completed the nursery rhyme.
He's no longer dear old Mr. Charrington; he has shed his disguise and revealed
himself as a member of the Thought Police.

NOTE: The purpose and effectiveness of the long extract from Goldstein's book at
this crucial point in the novel is going to be debated as long as 1984 is read. Now
is a good time to pinpoint your own responses to it. Many of you will defend it
hotly; others will argue, with justification, that it breaks the back of the novel.
Ask yourselves, did you:

1. Have an easy or a hard time following it?

2. Think it was the right length, or too long?

3. Need the political background to understand conditions in the novel?

4. Consider it an isolated sermon, or an essential part of the novel?

^^^^^^^^^^1984: SECTION I

Winston is in a cell. As you read about his imprisonment you may want to compare it
to current news reports about the plight of political prisoners in certain
countries in Latin America and Eastern Europe.

Winston's cell is bright and bare and monitored by four telescreens. Voices bark
instructions whenever he moves even when he puts his hand in his pocket for food.
He has lost track of time. He hasn't eaten. He has been moved from a filthy,
crowded holding cell where a huge wreck of a woman was hurled into his lap, hoisted
herself off and began vomiting. Her last name is Smith too, and in one of the
strangest moments in the book she says, "I might be your mother," and Winston
believes this may be the truth.

It's hard to know whether this is just a surreal touch or an attempt on Orwell's
part to acknowledge how close he (and Winston) may really be to the Low order. Does
he want us to believe that Party torture has reduced Winston's mother to this
terrible state? He does, at least, want us to believe such things are possible in
this nightmare world.

Winston can't concentrate. Beaten by his captors, he can't keep his mind on Julia.
He thinks of O'Brien with a flickering hope. The Brotherhood is supposed to send a
razor blade to members who are captured--this would let them escape through death.
He understands that in this place the lights are never turned out. So here at last
is the "place where there is no darkness!"

An officer hurls Ampleforth, a poet, into Winston's cell. He's imprisoned for
leaving the word "God" in a Newspeak translation of Kipling. Soon after, Ampleforth
is marched off to the dreaded room 101.

A procession of prisoners now passes through this cell, including Winston's tubby
neighbor Parsons, who is grimly proud that his daughter turned him in for
Thoughtcrime before he did anything worse. Parsons sits himself down on the toilet
and leaves behind a disgusting smell. This is one of a procession of gross physical
details Orwell uses to make us understand and sympathize with Winston's position.
We see a starving man; a chinless man spitting blood, saliva and false teeth after
being hit; guards breaking a man's fingers as they drag him off to Room 101.

Winston fears for Julia and believes but does not "feel" that he would double his
own pain to save her. "In this place," he realizes, "you could not feel anything,
except pain and the foreknowledge of pain."

The door opens and O'Brien enters. Winston assumes O'Brien has been caught, but
O'Brien says ironically, "They got me a long time ago." He isn't a prisoner, he's
one of the captors. "You knew this," he tells Winston. "Don't deceive yourself...
you have always known it."

Winston knows this is true.

When a guard smashes Winston's elbow, he realizes he could never wish more pain,
even to save Julia, because in the face of pain there are no heroes. He falls to
the floor.

NOTE: In these pages and the pages to come we'll see the strange fascination
Winston has for O'Brien, and we'll see how he behaves under torture. Look back at
the questions raised about both Winston and O'Brien in the CHARACTERS section of
this guide. Does Winston have a death wish that is at work here, or does he behave
like a man who would rather die than live under this kind of oppression? Either
point of view can be defended, even though the fact that Winston has always known
O'Brien was in the party indicates that he did bring his capture down upon himself.
What do you think his motives were?

^^^^^^^^^^1984: SECTION II

Winston wakes up after a series of beatings and torture sessions in which he

confessed to crimes he never committed. His memories are confused with
hallucinations in which he confesses everything and is forgiven. O'Brien was with
him the whole time, directing everything, orchestrating the pain.

A voice--he thinks it's O'Brien's--has said, "Don't worry, Winston; you are in my
keeping. For seven years I have watched over you. Now the turning point has come. I
shall save you, I shall make you perfect." It is the same voice that told him they
would meet in the place where there is no darkness. Another of Winston's dreams is
coming true.

Now O'Brien is looking down at him. He told Winston they would meet here, he says,
and with a twist of a dial, floods Winston's body with pain. He intends to help
Winston remember events as the Party says they took place. This means he has to
forget about the about-face during Hate Week, when the Party suddenly changed
enemies from Eurasia to Eastasia; and he has to forget everything about Jones,
Aaronson and Rutherford. O'Brien himself already believes that Oceania has always
been at war with Eastasia, and that Jones and the others were always enemies of the
state.

This is doublethink.

O'Brien has Winston repeat the Party slogan: "Who controls the past controls the
future; who controls the present controls the past." The past, he explains, exists
only in written records controlled by the Party and in memories controlled by the
Party. This is the heart of doublethink.

Winston is being punished because, lacking humility and self-discipline, he did not
allow his memories to be controlled. "You would not make the act of submission,
which is the price of sanity," he is told. "Reality exists in the human mind, and
nowhere else." The mind, of course, is not the individual mind, but the mind of the
Party, "which is collective and immortal." The only truth is the Party's truth.
O'Brien reminds Winston of his fatal diary entry--that freedom means being able to
say two and two makes four. Using torture, he tries to get Winston to say that two
and two make five--because the Party says so.

Winston's resistance finally breaks down, and when he agrees that two plus two make
anything O'Brien wants them to make, O'Brien stops the pain and helps him sit up.
Winston now clings to O'Brien like a baby, allowing himself to be comforted by
O'Brien's strong arm. He has the idea that the pain is coming from somewhere else
and that O'Brien is going to save him.

Winston weeps. You'll have to try harder, O'Brien says, because it's not easy to
become sane. And so the torture begins again, the pain now even more intense as
O'Brien holds up his fingers, asking how many Winston sees. When Winston finally
admits he no longer knows, O'Brien is pleased, and the pain stops. Winston now
feels great love for O'Brien, partly because he stopped the pain, and partly
because O'Brien, whether friend or enemy, is "a person who could be talked to."
Being loved may not be the important thing, Winston thinks; what may be more
important is being understood. The last (thinking) man in Europe may at last have
what he has always wanted--somebody he can really talk to.

Winston behaves like the neglected child who does something naughty to get
attention. Some kids would rather be punished than ignored; Winston may be one of
them.

O'Brien verifies that Winston suspected, that they are deep inside the Ministry of
Love. The authorities have brought him here not only to make him confess and to
punish him, but to make him sane. What Goldstein's book called "controlled
insanity," the Party calls sanity. It does more than destroy its enemies, it
changes them.

For the first time, O'Brien seems ugly to Winston. O'Brien also looks mad.

In a long speech O'Brien explains that the Party has no room for martyrs. The
Inquisition in the Middle Ages was a failure because it killed its enemies
publicly. Resistance brought glory to the victims. O'Brien points out that the
Nazis and the Russian Communists were more cruel and efficient than the Inquisitors
because they knew martyrs only perpetuated a cause.

The Nazis and the Soviets did their best to discredit their victims before they
came to trial. Yet these victims still became martyrs in time when the public
realized that confessions were made under torture. As for confessions made to the
Party? "We make them true," says O'Brien. The future will not make a martyr of
Winston because the future will never hear of him. He will become an unperson.

Why then does the Party bother to interrogate him? Because, O'Brien explain, he's a
flaw in the pattern--something that has to be erased. First they will convert him
to their beliefs, make him one of them. They will wash him clean of rebellion and
they will dispose of him only after his mind is clean. He will be dead inside, so
completely destroyed that he could not recover in a thousand years. "We shall
squeeze you empty and fill you with ourselves."
At a signal from O'Brien, Winston is attached to a new instrument O'Brien says
isn't going to hurt. A devastating explosion fills his head instead: a blinding
light that flattens him and seems to take a large piece out of his brain.

NOTE: In the 1940s, when Orwell was writing, mental patients were given "shock
treatments" in which they were zapped with electricity to alter mental states;
Orwell may have had this in mind.

When O'Brien asks Winston what country Oceania is at war with, what happened to
Jones, etc., and how many fingers he is holding up, Winston says what O'Brien wants
him to say and sees what O'Brien wants him to see. He even sees five fingers
instead of four.

O'Brien is pleased that Winston is coming along, and praises him. Winston's mind
appeals to him; he enjoys talking to him because they are alike except, of course,
that Winston is insane. Does Winston have any questions?

Yes. He wants to know about Julia.

She betrayed you at once--wholeheartedly, O'Brien says. All her rebelliousness, her
folly, and "her dirty-mindedness" have been burned out of her.

Winston next wants to know if Big Brother exists, even as he, Winston, exists.
O'Brien points out coldly that Winston does not exist. What about the Brotherhood?
O'Brien tells him that's a riddle that will forever remain unsolved. What's in Room
101? O'Brien tells him that he already knows--everybody knows what's in Room 101--
and then he puts Winston to sleep.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: SECTION III

Winston has been interrogated for days, perhaps weeks. He has learned how to avoid
the pain by giving the right answers. O'Brien reminds him that he wrote in his
diary that he understood how the society worked, but not why. If phase one of his
brainwashing was learning, the next two are understanding and acceptance. O'Brien
is about to tell him why.

Nobody seems very surprised that O'Brien collaborated on Goldstein's book. Its
program, to educate the proles to overthrow the party, is nonsense. The rule of the
Party is forever, O'Brien says. Why? Winston says what he believes to be the Party
line--that the Party rules over people for their own good. It's the wrong answer.

O'Brien punishes him at once. The Party, he says, seeks power for its own sake.
Power is an end in itself. He notices that Winston is looking at his aging face and
admits that yes, he will get old and die, but he is only one cell in an organism
that will never die. Power is collective. Together, Party members can rule. They
control matter because they control the mind: "Reality is inside the skull.... We
make the laws of nature."

Winston takes the side of nature and argues that the age of the earth and the
existence of the stars prove that physical reality is beyond man's control. O'Brien
is indifferent. Stars are only bits of fire, he says; the Party could reach them if
it wanted to; it could blot them out. When it's convenient, the Party believes the
earth revolves around the sun. But at other times the earth becomes the center of
the universe. Doublethink makes it possible.

O'Brien points out that the Party's real power is not over things, but over men,
and that its power is both exercised and demonstrated by making them suffer.
O'Brien's theory of power is not based on happiness, as in most Utopian visions of
the perfect society. It is based on sadism. The Party will dissolve the family and
do away with sex, art, literature, and science. "If you want a picture of the
future," writes Orwell, "imagine a boot stamping on a human face--forever."

Some readers question whether the Party's motivation is strong or believable

enough. Many totalitarian governments use force to carry out their aims, but only
as a means to other ends? O'Brien claims Party members aren't interested in
pleasure, luxury, or privilege; all they want is to govern totally and inflict
pain. Is this convincing? You can argue either way.

Winston thinks it is not convincing. He says it's impossible for civilizations

founded on fear, hatred and cruelty to survive. He has to believe that something--
the human spirit, perhaps--will defeat them.

O'Brien tells Winston that his kind is extinct. He may be the "last" man, but he is
completely alone, and he is by no means superior. He makes Winston strip and then
leads him to a mirror. For the first time since his capture, Winston sees himself
naked and cries out.

Some people have suggested that the description of Winston here-a bag of bones,
gray all over with dirt, with falling hair and teeth coming out--was influenced by
Orwell's own physical deterioration; he was dying of TB. Winston looks at himself
and weeps. He blames O'Brien for bringing him to this awful state.

No, O'Brien points out. Nothing has happened that Winston didn't foresee. When he
defied the Party by beginning the diary, he brought destruction upon himself.

Winston has been broken and humiliated, but he has not betrayed Julia. O'Brien
acknowledges this and Winston is overwhelmed with reverence for him--with gratitude
for his intelligence. In spite of all his confessions, he hasn't stopped loving
Julia. O'Brien admits that it may be a long time before they shoot Winston, since
he's such a difficult case. But everyone is "cured" sooner or later, he says
reassuringly; and in the end they will shoot him.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: SECTION IV

Weeks or months have passed. Winston is getting fatter, his room has been made more
comfortable. He dozes, dreaming happily of the Golden Country, of his mother, of
Julia and O'Brien. He is relatively content. Being fed, clean, and unmolested are
enough. As he gets better, he does a few pushups and begins to write on a slate.

At this point, he realized the foolishness of his single-handed attempt to oppose

the party, and thinks he has given up. He knows the Thought Police have watched him
for seven years, and that they have photographs and know everything about him. All
he has to do is learn how to think as they think. He writes:

^^^^^^^^^^1984: FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.

He writes:

^^^^^^^^^^1984: TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE.

But he can't keep from writing:

^^^^^^^^^^1984: GOD IS POWER.

He believes he has accepted everything, that the laws of nature are nonsense, that
everything the Party says is true. He tries to train himself to believe everything
the Party says, no matter how ridiculous. Yet he still has to exercise crimestop
and stop himself from asking treasonable questions.

In the meantime he wonders how soon they will shoot him. He daydreams about the
moment, about walking down the corridor, waiting for the bullet in his back. The
inevitability of death releases him from doubt, and makes him certain and strong.
He imagines himself walking into the Golden Country of his dreams and memories.
Before his capture, the Golden Country existed in the past for Winston; now it
belongs to the release of death; it is a vision perhaps of heaven. Suddenly he
shouts Julia's name. He loves her more than ever.

He has undone himself. The guards, knowing that, in spite of all his obedience, he
still hates the Party, will be at the door in seconds. He has surrendered with his
mind, but not his heart. The brainwashing will begin all over again, but he is
determined, no matter what they do, to keep his inner self alive. They will shoot
him one day but he will still hate them all.

To die hating them, he thinks, will be freedom.

O'Brien and the guards arrive. What does Winston think of Big Brother? Winston
confesses that he hates him. O'Brien says it's time for Winston to take the last
step. It is not enough to obey Big Brother, Winston must love him. O'Brien orders
Winston to Room 101. Winston's last dream is about to come true: for this is the
dark place with something terrible waiting for him, just out of sight.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: SECTION V

Here is where Winston has been heading all along: to the room that contains that
which he fears most. Remember how horrified he was at Mr. Charrington's, when Julia
chased a rat?

Ever since 1984 was published people have argued whether the horrors of Room 101
are really horrible or only anticlimactic. Orwell used what he thought was the
grossest and most disgusting image imaginable, because he was trying to communicate
Winston's state of mind, and the ultimate horror of totalitarian methods.

The experience in Room 101 is supposed to destroy Winston's last shred of

resistance. In trying to understand his reaction, it's useful for you to think how
you would respond to a similar kind of torture.

Winston is strapped in a chair with his head clamped so it can't move. O'Brien
comes in. On the table is a cage with a handle and a mask at one end. O'Brien knows
that Winston's worst fear is rats. He reminds Winston of his nightmare, in which
everything was black and there was something terrible on the other side of the
wall. Since pain alone has not done the job on Winston, O'Brien will rely on
Winston's instinct for survival. Faced with the rats, Winston will do what O'Brien
wants. He doesn't have to be told what that is.

O'Brien is going to put the cage with the rats on Winston's head and let them eat
his face. He clicks the first lever. Winston fights panic and at the last minute
loses his reason in the desperate urge to save himself. He shouts, over and over:
"Do it to Julia! Not me!"

This is the final betrayal of self that O'Brien wants, and Winston is released.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: SECTION VI

Winston is at the Chestnut Tree, the haven for released political prisoners. He's
in his usual corner, getting drunk on Victory Gin and watching the news on the
telescreen. He can still smell the rats, although he doesn't name them even in his
thoughts.

This is a fatter, coarser-looking Winston, listless and so fuzzy-headed that

everything the Party says is fine with him. Note how different Winston's condition
is from that of Orwell, who put off going to the hospital when he was dying so that
he could finish his message of warning to the world.

Winston traces on the table: 2 + 2 = 5. The Party has finally won him--forever. The
most private and important part of himself has been destroyed.

The Party has destroyed Julia, too. The last time Winston saw her, on a miserable,
cold day, she too had changed. He had put his arm around her waist, knowing the
Party had stopped watching them. The idea of sex revolted him because her waist had
become thick and stiff as a corpse's. She looked at him with dislike, perhaps
because of their past, perhaps because he too had changed physically.

They sat down and exchanged confessions. Both had betrayed each other at the last
minute in order to save themselves from torture. They even wanted each other to be
tortured! "All you care about is yourself," Julia said, and Winston agreed.

After they parted, half-heartedly agreeing to meet again, Winston followed her for
a moment, but then returned anxiously to the warmth and safety of the Chestnut Tree
Cafe. He lost track of her quickly: "Perhaps her thickened, stiffened body was no
longer recognizable from behind." Yes, he had betrayed her; he had wished she would
be given to the--The telescreen cuts off this thought, as a voice sings the refrain
we remember:

Under the spreading chestnut tree

I sold you and you sold me-

It's the song they were playing the day he saw the three political prisoners here
in the Chestnut Tree Cafe. He weeps and has another gin, which is what he now needs
to get through the day. He is teased by a sudden memory of his mother just before
she disappeared; he and his sister are fussing, and his mother goes out to buy him
a toy. They laugh and are happy, playing Snakes and Ladders. This must be a false
memory, Winston tells himself, and he pushes it out of his mind.

The telescreen trumpets a victory in the unending war and Winston looks at the
picture of Big Brother. The portrait makes him feel glad. He has undergone great
changes since he first went to the Ministry of Love, but the final moment of
healing takes place at this moment.

As the war news continues Winston daydreams that he is back in the Ministry,
forgiven, his soul white as snow. He is traveling down the long white corridor of
his daydreams when the longawaited bullet enters his brain.

Back in the cafe, he looks up at Big Brother's face. It has taken him forty years
to get here, to learn how to win this victory over himself, but it is accomplished.

Winston has learned to love Big Brother.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: APPENDIX

This is a mock-scholarly article about the official language of Oceania, which was
expected to supersede standard English around 2050. It is designed to express the
proper thoughts necessary for Party members, and also to make all other modes of
thought impossible by depriving the language of certain words. The new language has
three vocabularies.
1. The A vocabulary includes words for everyday activities such as eating,
drinking, working. It contains simple nouns and verbs with unequivocal meanings,
like tree and hit. Any shades of meaning have been purged. The grammar is designed
so that any word can be used as a verb, noun, adjective or adverb. By adding
prefixes and suffixes, users can change a word's meaning. Uncold is warm;
doubleplus cold means extremely cold. Anything difficult to pronounce has been
eliminated.

2. The B vocabulary includes words deliberately constructed for political purposes.

They're designed to promote "right" thoughts. Words such as justice, democracy and
religion have been abolished, or reduced to either crimethink or oldthink. Names of
government organizations and arms of the state like thinkpol (Thought Police) fall
into this grouping. Words such as Communist International, Orwell felt, called up
thoughts of human brotherhood, and images of thinker Karl Marx, whereas the then
current word Comintern suggested a tightly knit organization with a precise
doctrine. The intention of Newspeak, he says, is to make speech, especially on any
subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly automatic and thoughtless as possible.

3. The C vocabulary includes scientific and technical terms, purged of any

ideological meaning. The aim was to keep knowledge specialized and
compartmentalized so nobody would know too much.

Once Oldspeak is altogether superseded, the last link with the history and
literature of the past will be broken. The Declaration of Independence, for
instance, would be untranslatable. The closest translation would be one word:
crimethink.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: GLOSSARY

DOUBLETHINK To hold two contradictory opinions, knowing they are contradictory and
believing in both.

EASTASIA One of the three superpowers in the world, consisting of China, Japan,
Manchuria, Mongolia and Tibet. Sometimes at war with Oceania.

EURASIA Another superpower, made up of all northern Europe and western Asia.
Sometimes at war with Oceania, where Winston Smith lives.

HATE WEEK Week in which Oceanian citizens all attend rallies and parades to
inflame hatred of Party enemies and heighten their efforts on behalf of Oceania.

INGSOC The name of the Party that rules Oceania, where Winston lives. Name taken
from English Socialism, a form of government in England, which Orwell exaggerated
and pushed to the limits of his imagination. Writing the novel, Orwell made it
plain he was not attacking English Socialism as it existed in 1948-9.

JULIA The dark-haired rebellious Party member Winston loves.

NEWSPEAK Official language of the Party.

O'BRIEN A powerful Inner Party member who is either Winston's best friend, worst
enemy or both.

OCEANIA Superstate in which Winston Smith lives. Made up of the Americas and the
Atlantic islands, including the British Isles, Australia, and the southern portion
of Africa. Always at war with one or both of the other superstates.

OWNLIFE Individuality or eccentricity.

PROLES Short for proletarians, the uneducated common people.

TELESCREEN Giant screen in every public and private place that both transmits
Party propaganda and entertainment, and keeps an eye on Party members, looking for
traces of Thoughtcrime.

THOUGHTCRIME Thinking anything not approved by the Party. Anyone apprehended for
thoughtcrime will be vaporized.

THOUGHT POLICE Corps assigned to arresting people guilty of Thoughtcrime.

UNPERSON A criminal who has been purged and therefore ceases to exist. The person
has been removed from the Party and perhaps even vaporized and removed from history
through changes in written records.

VAPORIZED Fate of enemies of the Party. The person disappears, only Big Brother
knows how.

VICTORY CIGARETTES/GIN/MANSIONS The Party gives these names to inferior products

to make them seem more attractive.

^^^^^^^^^^1984: ORWELL AND ERIC BLAIR

The creation of George Orwell was an act of will by Eric Blair, and it was carried
on at almost every level of his existence, affecting not only his prose style but
also the style of his daily life. Becoming George Orwell was his way of making
himself into a writer, at which he brilliantly succeeded, and of unmaking himself
as a gentleman, of opting out of the genteel lower-upper middle class into which he
was born, at which he had only an equivocal success... it allowed Eric Blair to
come to terms with his world.

-Peter Stansky and William Abrahams,

Orwell: The Transformation, 1979-80

^^^^^^^^^^1984: A WARNING AGAINST TOTALITARIANISM

Nineteen Eighty-Four is a long premeditated, rational warning against totalitarian

tendencies in societies like our own rather than a sick and sudden prophecy about a
Soviet or neo-Nazi takeover, still less a scream of despair and recantation of his
democratic Socialism. Its harsh style created as authentic a picture of a state
turned by men themselves into hell as the lyrical passages of Animal Farm give a
picture of a natural, pastoral and egalitarian Utopia.... Nineteen Eighty-Four may
show sociological rather than psychological imagination, but imagination of a high
order none the less.

-Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life, 1980

If Nineteen Eighty-Four is treated as a warning rather than a prophecy, as a satire

on present tendencies rather than a forecast of the future, it can be seen that its
effect has been totally salutary. Today such terms as 'doublethink' 'newspeak' and
'thoughtcrime' have passed into accepted usage and for a generation of readers the
book has come to be regarded as a standard treatise on the growth and influence of
totalitarian trends....

-J.R. Hammond, A George Orwell Companion, 1982

In previous writings he had stressed that bourgeois individuality was going, the
bonds of family, locality, religion, craft and profession were going. In their
place a new collectivism was spreading in society.... But it also appeared to
Orwell in 1948 that the new collective did not bring the earthly paradise any
nearer. Not only that, it appeared to him that under the threat of violence and
nuclear terror, the new collective could become grotesquely dehumanized. It is as a
permanent warning against the danger of the dehumanized collective in our society
that Nineteen Eighty-Four has survived...

-T. R. Fyvel, George Orwell, 1982

^^^^^^^^^^1984: ORWELL AND THE LOWER CLASSES

Winston Smith holds up the Proles, not too convincingly, as 'the only hope' for the
future. But Orwell, even in tramp's clothing, never pretended to be a Prole. He
remained always aware of the gulf between him and the class he envied. Did he like
them? It is hard to be sure he did. His aim was to be personally as classless as
possible.

-Peter Lewis, George Orwell: The Road to 1984

^^^^^^^^^^1984: ORWELL AND WINSTON SMITH

Winston Smith's sensibility, then, can be seen as representing a constellation of

special intellectual, aesthetic, and literary values. There is the love of what
Newspeak calls oldthink, that is, the ideas grouped round the equally outmoded
concepts of 'objectivity and rationalism' and of old folk rhymes. There is,
further, his love of the particular and the detailed in other things.... Behind
these aspects of Winston's inner sense of values is the larger idea that individual
feeling is the most essential and desirable reality available.

-Ian Watt, "Winston Smith: The Last Humanist," in

On Nineteen Eighty-Four, ed. Peter Stansky, 1983

Throughout his career, Orwell had two themes that he made particularly his own:
first, the experience of impoverishment--not of poverty; to which many are born,
but of the fall into poverty by those not bred to cope with it--and second, the
political obligation of the intellectual class to maintain steadfast loyalty to the
cause of truth. The figure of Winston Smith combines both these themes. He is one
with a number of earlier figures in Orwell's novels who have their economic pins
knocked out and become conscious of the slummy underside of industrial
civilization.... He lives in an imaginary world, in which the 'middling'
intellectual class has been stripped of the protection of money by a stroke of
their author's pen.

-Alvin C. Kibel, Papers, International Orwell Conference

^^^^^^^^^^1984: ORWELL ON WOMEN

We have seen that the roles assigned to women in Oceania and in Winston Smith's
mind fall into very limited stereotypes: the pure self-sacrificing mother, the
frigid wife, the sexually aggressive and emotionally supportive mate. We must now
ask whether there is a 'hidden agenda' for women in this anti-Utopian book. Does
George Orwell in any way imply that women in an ideal world should be different?
The answer I fear is No. From the perspective of a feminist living in 1984,
Orwell's attitude toward women and the family is discouragingly conservative and
repressive. However brilliantly Orwell foretold the horrors of totalitarian
thinking and political control, he failed to see that embedded in his own attitudes
toward women was an ideology almost as oppressive to the female as the Party is to
Smith.

-Anne Mellor, "'You're Only a Rebel from the Waist Downwards':

Orwell's View of Women," in Nineteen Eighty-Four,

ed. Peter Stansky, 1983

^^^^^^^^^^1984: ORWELL AND O'BRIEN

O'Brien's explanation of his conduct and that of the other members of the Inner
Party is not irrational; it is the conduct that is irrational, and his creator knew
it was. That an insane murderer may understand why he murders neither prevents what
he does nor makes the crime less horrifying. It is too bad that Orwell's beliefs
have at times been confused with O'Brien's, for this has prevented some readers
from seeing how profoundly Orwell understood totalitarianism.... The long dialogue
between O'Brien and Smith demonstrates Orwell's awareness that implicit in
totalitarianism is a desire for expansion--physical, intellectual, spiritual--
that... recognizes no limits.

-William Steinhoff, George Orwell and the Origins of 1984

THE END