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Part 1

Chapter 1

Summary:

The book opens on a cold April day with 39-year-old Winston Smith returning to his dilapidated flat in Victory Mansions. The hallway sports an enormous poster of a man known as _Big Brother_; the caption reads, "BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU." The eyes of the poster seem to follow Winston as he moves.

Upon entering his flat, Winston dims the telescreen (where someone is reading statistics about pig-iron production), which can never be turned off completely, and which both receives and transmits. Outside, Winston can see "BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU" posters, a poster with the word "INGSOC" on it, and the police patrol spying on people.

Winston is living in London, the predominant city of the province known as Airstrip One in Oceania. Bombed sites reveal that some sort of war is going on. Winston tries to recall his childhood, to see if things have always been like this, but cannot.

Outside his window stands the Ministry of Truth (a.k.a. "Minitrue" in Newspeak, the official language of Oceania), an enormous structure displaying the three slogans of _the Party_: WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. There are four Ministries: the Ministry of Truth concerns itself with the spread of information through news, entertainment, education and the arts; the Ministry of Peace (Minipax) deals with war; the Ministry of Love (Miniluv) administers law and order; and the Ministry of Plenty (Miniplenty) handles economic affairs.

After swallowing some shocking Victory Gin and plying himself with a cheap Victory cigarette, Winston carefully tucks himself out of the telescreen's visual range with an old book, an old pen and an ink-bottle. These are compromising possessions, acquired through various means; Winston is secretly something of a rebel, unhappy with the status quo. What he is about to do--start a diary--is not "illegal" (since, we discover, there are no laws anymore), but is certainly life-threatening.

Unused to writing by hand, Winston falters momentarily before writing "April 4th, 1984." He sits back, uncertain whether it actually is 1984, and he suddenly wonders for whom he is writing. Here the concept of _doublethink_ (see Analysis) hits him; his attempt to communicate with the future is impossible, futile. He is no longer sure what he wanted to write; the moment has been building for weeks and suddenly he finds himself wordless. Even when he tries to write, he finds he is not recording the incident which had inspired him to begin the diary on this day .

This incident took place during that morning's "Two Minutes Hate," a daily, almost orgiastic ritual of propaganda. Winston recalls noticing two people: a girl whose name he does not know but whom he recognizes as working in the Fiction Department, and _O'Brien_, an imposing man and member of the Inner Party. Winston feels a dislike for the girl, whose youth gives him the sense that she is a dangerous Party zealot; by contrast, he feels drawn to O'Brien in a way almost resembling trust, because he hopes that O'Brien is secretly politically unorthodox.

The "Two Minutes Hate" begins with footage of _Emmanuel Goldstein_, "the Enemy of the People," castigating the Party. Apparently, Goldstein had once been a leading Party member who rebelled, was condemned to death, and disappeared to form the underground _Brotherhood_. The symbol of ultimate treachery, Goldstein is featured in every Hate as the source of all crimes against the Party. [Through Winston's reaction, we begin to get the sense that the image and persona of Goldstein are actually completely manufactured, hinting at the possibility that he is in fact a propagandistic creation of the Party. This is reinforced by the observation that there are always new spies, new Brotherhood members, being exposed every day, despite the Party's brutal efficiency in creating universal hatred for Goldstein.]

As the Hate goes on, people get increasingly worked up, shouting and throwing things at the screen. [It is, Winston notes, impossible to avoid joining in.] The Hate overwhelms the members, sweeping them into a blind ecstasy of hatred. Winston directs his hatred at the girl, because, he realizes, he wants to sleep with her.

The Hate reaches its climax when the terrifying images melt into the face of Big Brother, who utters soothing words before fading away into the three Party slogans. The crowd, passionately relieved at the appearance of their "savior" starts to chant, "B-B! . . . B-B!" Here Winston catches O'Brien's eye. In an instant, Winston feels that O'Brien is communicating to him that he is on his side; this is the moment which brings him to his diary.

After some reflection, Winston looks again at his page and finds he has been writing automatically:

DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER

Suddenly there is a knock at the door. Winston is terrified by this, but knows that to delay would be worse than anything, so he gets up to answer it.

Analysis:

Orwell, in this extensive first chapter, begins to unfold the nightmarish society in which Winston lives. Throughout, Orwell writes from Winston's perspective (though not in the first person per se), a device which enables him to convey to the reader the necessary information about this society while simultaneously creating an atmosphere of claustrophobia and oppression. Orwell's painstakingly detailed description of Winston's actions, thoughts and surroundings heightens the protagonist's (and, by extension, the reader's) sense of paranoia.

This is an unfamiliar London, part of a new world where three powers, Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, are constantly entangled in a confusing eternal war where alliances shift every few years. Oceania is divided into provinces, one of which is Airstrip One, formerly known as England. Through allusive details, we can see that this society is an _allegory_ for Communist societies, specifically Stalin's USSR: the omnipotent, menacing, yet never-fully-explained "Party," and the reference to the "Three-Year Plan" (an allusion to Stalin's "Five-Year Plans"), are among these.

Irony abounds in Orwell's description of Party institutions, notably the four Ministries of Truth, Peace, Love and Plenty. First, there is the fact that their names run counter to their functions: as he explains, "The Ministry of Peace...concerned itself with war." (Similarly, the three slogans of the Party reconcile opposites.) Second, their names in Newspeak are "Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv and Miniplenty"--a joke on just how much truth, peace, love and plenty they actually provide. Finally, there is the quietly chilling statement that the Ministry of Love is the most terrifying of all, giving us an inkling that "love" in this society holds something of a different meaning than we are accustomed to. All of this plays into a major theme of _1984_: the _manipulation of language_. Over and over again, we see how the Party controls language in order to control thought.

Although not initially introduced as such, the three Party slogans most clearly exemplify the Newspeak concept of _doublethink_, which is the process whereby a person can fool himself into accepting contradictions. Doublethink is the cornerstone of the Party's power, because it links control of language with control of thought.

Repetition is another device used both by Orwell and by the Party. The Party uses repetition of rituals, slogans and ideas to lull its members into a state of hypnosis wherein they find comfort and solace with the Party. Orwell uses repetition more obliquely--repeating the Party slogans in the course of the narrative, repeating the eerie caption "BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU" twice over the first two pages of the chapter--to reinforce the terror of institutionalized mass brainwashing. It even comes out in Winston's panicked diary entries, where he finds himself unconsciously writing "DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER" over and over again.

This particular entry provides an intriguing contrast to the Two Minutes Hate, a daily ritual which introduces the theme of the _Party as religion_. Emmanuel Goldstein clearly represents Satan, while Big Brother is the Christ-like savior (to whom one woman even prays). The ritual ends with the chanting of "B-B! ... B-B!"--a "hymn" to Big Brother, an example of the power of repetition, and a contrast to Winston's "DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER."

Chapter 2

Summary:

Winston finds Mrs. Parsons, his neighbor, at his door, asking him if he can help repair her kitchen sink. Mrs. Parsons is a rather helpless, dusty-looking woman; her husband Tom works with Winston at the Ministry of Truth. Tom is something of an imbecile, slavishly devoted to the Party and quite active in its social workings.

As Winston clears the blockage from the pipe, the Parsons children come out and start dancing around him, calling him a "traitor" and a "thought-criminal." These children, like many others, are horrid little savages being trained to be good Party members through systematic brainwashing; many denounce their own parents to the Thought Police.

Winston returns to his diary and starts thinking of O'Brien. About seven years ago he had had a dream where he had been walking through a dark room and someone had said to him, "We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness." At some point, Winston identified the voice as O'Brien's. Whether or not O'Brien is a friend or an enemy--and Winston still isn't sure--they are connected by an understanding.

Winston feels isolated, yet pursued, everywhere faced (literally) by Big Brother. He knows his thoughtcrime--his diary--will result only in annihilation. Yet somehow, he takes heart in the idea that in the very act of recording truths he is keeping himself sane and carrying on humanity. He returns to his diary and starts to write "to the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free."

"Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death," Winston writes, and in doing so recognizes himself as already dead. He now must simply stay alive as long as possible.

Winston carefully washes the ink from his hands and puts the diary away before going back to work.

Analysis:

In this chapter, Orwell continues to build upon the extensive foundations laid in the previous chapter. This chapter begins with a terrifying knock on the door--testament to the psychological state in which Winston is living--and makes use of a rather trite situation (a neighbor asking for help with her sink) to further nuance the picture of Winston's world. The allusions to Communism are clear--people calling each other "comrade" and living in dilapidated flats. Orwell's use of detailed sensory description, particularly olfactory, highlights the disgusting quality of life in the so-called "Victory Mansions" (again, an exceedingly ironic title).

The brief episode with the Parsons children serves to demonstrate the Party's brainwashing of children into instrument of terror to their own parents (not to mention their neighbors). The fact that children regularly denounce their parents is frightening enough, but Orwell's tone--a matter-of-fact acceptance that this is how things are--is far more horrifying because it indicates that family disloyalty is routine in 1984.

In the latter part of this chapter, Orwell begins to delve into an exploration of _memory_ and its importance. Winston's dream is symbolic both in that he is walking in darkness and that he identifies the voice that speaks to him as O'Brien's. Somehow, we know that this dream will return later in the book. Importantly, the existence of the dream in his recollection demonstrates the persistence of Winston's memory, itself the only rebuttal to the Party's control of the past, which consists of not only an iron grip on what information is disseminated but a firm control of what evidence exists--namely, a thorough obliteration of all proof. Winston has already committed thoughtcrime, and is therefore already dead; his act of writing in the subversive diary becomes a means for him to stay sane.

Chapter 3

Summary:

Winston dreams of his mother that she and his baby sister are sinking down away from him, having in some way given their lives so he could survive. He barely remembers his family, as they had likely fallen victim to a purge in the 1950s. His mother's death, he feels, was a particular tragedy, arising from a loyalty and complex emotion which are no longer possible.

The dream shifts suddenly to an idyllic spot Winston calls "the Golden Country," where the dark-haired girl comes to him and in one graceful, careless gesture, tears off her clothes and flings them aside. Winston feels no desire for her, but instead a strong admiration of the defiance of the gesture, which itself belongs to a previous time, just like Winston's mother's love. Winston wakes up saying the word "Shakespeare."

Winston is awakened by the telescreen. The Physical Jerks--morning exercises--begin, directed by a woman on the screen. As he exercises, Winston tries to remember the era of his childhood. He recalls an air raid which caught everyone off guard, and since which Oceania had been continuously at war. Currently, in 1984, Oceania is at war with Eurasia and allied with Eastasia. Although there are no records kept to contradict the given current alignment, Winston knows that four years ago the alliance was reversed; still, the present situation is always officially represented as though it has always been. Winston is terrified by the thought that by so thoroughly controlling history and information, the Party might actually be creating a new truth. He reflects that the past has been destroyed because it only exists in his own memory. Only once has Winston held proof that a historical fact had been officially falsified--but his thoughts are interrupted by the woman on screen shouting at him, Winston Smith, to try harder.

Analysis:

Continuing what was started in Chapter Two, dreams and memory are further interwoven in a powerfully poignant description of Winston's dream of his mother. Because the dream is about his mother--a _symbol_ of family loyalty long gone (especially in contrast to the Parsons children and what they represent)--Winston is led to trying to recall his family. This device allows Orwell to drop some hints as to the political events which swirled around families and swallowed them up completely as Ingsoc, or English Socialism, took over the nation. In addition, the dream reveals Winston's longing for another life, one where he is not eternally watched. The only other life he has known is the vague memory of pre-Ingsoc times, and onto these he fastens his longings.

The "Golden Country" clearly represents for Winston this ideal, where he can be at peace and not constantly dodging the Party and its tactics. The fact that Winston holds this place in his mind is significant because he believes (as stated in Chapter Two) that the only thing you own is your brain and your thoughts; however, the existence of the Thought Police is testament to the Party's determination to control people's thoughts as well.

The final symbol of Winston's longing for the past is his awakening saying the word "Shakespeare." His world of dreams and nostalgia contrasts sharply with the harsh reality in which he finds himself--symbolically, he is always being awakened or jolted out of a reverie by a shrill sound from the telescreen, in this case the alarm to wake up and prepare for morning exercises (appropriately entitled the Physical Jerks). This technique underscores the never-ending struggle between the Party and Winston's desire to control his own life.

During the Jerks, Winston's continued reflection elucidates more of recent history--that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Colchester, in apparent breach of some agreement with another country, and that since then England had undergone a revolution to reach its current status as Airstrip One, province of Oceania, alternately at war with Eurasia or Eastasia and allied with the other. But never does the Party admit an alliance other than the current one. The question is presented over and over again: Is the past *actually changed* if all external indicators of it are changed? Even if you know something is a lie, you can never prove it, since the Party controls all the evidence of historical "fact." Again, Winston's own memory runs counter to the official Party line, an opposition which continually highlights the difference between his inner and outer life, potentially foreshadowing a looming conflict.

Once again, Winston is jerked out of his reverie by the woman on the telescreen shouting at him. Orwell's tone changes correspondingly, from the fluid rambling of Winston's inner thoughts to the jerky alarm of his survival instincts. The fact that Winston himself has been picked out by the woman reminds us of the Party's eternal watching ... and the sense of danger.

Chapter 4

Summary:

Winston is at his job in the Records Department in the Ministry of Truth. He receives four assignments, tiny slips of paper on which are written (mostly in Newspeak) his instructions. As it turns out, these messages involve the "correction" of past issues of the Times, where a speech of Big Brother's is "misreported" ("malreported" in Newspeak) or statistics forecasting manufacturing output are "misprinted." The first three assignments are simple; the fourth one, which mentions "unpersons," is an enticingly elaborate task which involves some use of imagination, and Winston sets it aside to be dealt with last, almost like a dessert.

Winston uses his speakwrite (a sort of dictaphone) to quickly deal with each of the first three assignments; he rewrites the articles, pushes his work through the pneumatic tube in his cubicle, and disposes of the original message and any notes through the "memory hole," which leads to a furnace. In this way, newspapers, books, cartoons, even films and photographs, are continually re-edited so as to conform with the current state of political and economic affairs, and to make it appear as though the Party has always been correct in its predictions or consistent in its alliances. Any and all prior editions are destroyed, no matter how many revisions are made.

Winston reflects that in many cases, what he is doing is not really forgery, because the original statistics or "facts" are made up to begin with. Nobody really knows anything except that on paper, millions of pairs of boots are being produced, while on the streets, half of Oceania's population runs barefoot.

Looking around, Winston notes that he hardly knows the people in his Department, or what they do exactly. Across the hall from him Tillotson, who flashes him a hostile look, sits with his speakwrite; a woman from the Two Minutes Hate, whose husband had been vaporized, works next to Winston at tracking down and eliminating references to "unpersons" (people whose existences had been obliterated); and the dreamy Ampleforth works a few cubicles away at rewriting poems so their ideologies will correspond with the dominant one. As Winston reflects on the Department as a whole, the staggering size of the operation becomes evident, especially as it is only one part of the Ministry of Truth, which not only supplies materials to Party members but to the "proles" (proletariat) as well.

At last, after disposing of some more messages and attending the Hate, Winston settles down to work away at his engaging assignment: rewriting a highly "unsatisfactory" article in an issue of the Times which references people who no longer exist. Winston reads the original article, where Big Brother's Order for the Day praises an organization called the FFCC and awards the Order of Conspicuous Merit, Second Class, to one Comrade Withers, a member of the Inner Party. Three months after this, however, the FFCC had been dissolved and its members presumably disgraced, though there was no report of this. Winston knows that this is the way it usually happens: people who somehow displease the Party simply vanish and are never heard from again. Although Winston does not know why Withers fell from grace, he does know that the man is most likely dead, since he is called an "unperson."

Winston decides to rewrite the speech entirely on a new topic: the commemoration of the exemplary life of Comrade Ogilvy. Ogilvy, of course, is purely Winston's invention, but he will be given life through a few lines and a faked photograph or two. Winston creates Ogilvy's life‹that of a textbook good Party member from the age of three‹and his heroic death with a zesty enjoyment of the process.

Although Winston is fairly certain that other people, including Tillotson, have been given the same assignment, he also believes that his own version will be the one that is chosen.

Analysis:

This chapter goes into great detail to complicate the theme‹already seen‹of erasure, the palimpsest, the continual rewriting of history. By placing his protagonist in the Department where such rewriting is carried out on a massive scale, Orwell is able to convey the Party's high degree of organization and thoroughness in pursuing its agenda. The ease with which facts are crumpled and tossed into "memory holes" is chilling to the reader; even more chilling is the idea that these are not "facts" at all. This resonates with Winston's even being uncertain that the year is 1984. No longer are there any solid truths outside of what the Party dictates as acceptable.

Not only is history (in the form of the existence of people and earlier versions of "fact") eliminated, it is also created. Witness the ease with which Winston creates Ogilvy: he requires only printed text and a manipulated photograph to bring this idea into existence. Winston's own level of brainwashing, of which he is presumably unconscious, comes through here: he accepts that he can create a person from scratch, and enjoys it.

The use of language in controlling thought is present both in the ability of language to create "fact" and in the Party's categorization of inaccurate statements or predictions as "errors" or "misprints." To a degree Winston exhibits how far this control has reached into his own mind, in his well-honed ability to imitate Big Brother and to enter into a strident, pedantic essay on the "life" of a perfect Party member. Orwell, through Winston, is ironically humorous here, imitating Big Brother's tone in a way that hints at its dry plodding, and proudly stating that Ogilvy "had no subjects of conversation except the principles of Ingsoc."

A further, more subtle irony lies in the fact that Winston's voice becomes Big Brother's ("an end, said Big Brother.... Big Brother added a few remarks on..."). This begins to give the sense that Big Brother is as much a creation as everything else. The mastery of Orwell's writing comes through in the fact that Winston does not see that he himself is part of the creation of Big Brother and his voice.

Chapter 5

Summary:

Winston is in the rather unpleasant canteen, where he meets up with Syme‹not exactly his "friend" (since you have comrades rather than friends), but one whose society is more pleasant to Winston than that of others. Syme, a philologist, works in the Research Department and is one of a team of experts who are compiling the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary. (See Appendix for an in-depth discussion of Newspeak and points relevant to this chapter.)

Syme asks Winston if he has any razor blades‹there is currently a shortage, as there always is of one item or another. Winston lies that he hasn't, though he has been saving two unused ones against the razor blade famine. As he and Syme go through the queue, Syme discusses yesterday's public hanging of prisoners with a relish that demonstrates his rabid yet somehow intellectual orthodoxy.

As they eat their disgusting and somewhat unidentifiable lunch, Winston gets Syme talking about the Dictionary's progress. Syme, immediately fired with enthusiasm and a strange love for Newspeak, goes into a panegyric about the destruction of words and the nature of Newspeak, which is, he points out, the only language which gets smaller every year. This limiting of vocabulary, Syme points out, is aimed at limiting thought so that unorthodoxy will become literally impossible, since there will no longer exist words to express or explain concepts that run counter to the accepted ideology.

Syme discourses so intelligently upon these topics that Winston suddenly thinks that Syme will certainly be vaporized someday, despite his political orthodoxy. He is too intelligent for the Party to allow him to stick around. In addition, he is somehow "shady"‹not subtle enough, too well-read, with a tendency to frequent the Chestnut Street Cafe, where long ago the old Party leaders would meet before they were discredited, and Goldstein was rumored to have spent time.

Parsons, Winston's neighbor, appears in the canteen and makes his way over to Winston and Syme (who takes out some work to avoid having to interact with Parsons). Parsons, a large man with a dumb devotion to the Party and its ideals, asks Winston for his subscription payment for the upcoming "Hate Week." Parsons talks proudly about his monstrous children, the younger of whom turned in a suspicious-looking person to the authorities.

Discussion is halted by an announcement from the Ministry of Plenty, describing how production is up and the standard of living has been raised. It is reported that a demonstration has been held to thank B.B. for raising the chocolate ration to 20 grams/week, and Winston wonders incredulously whether people can swallow this after having been told the day before that the ration was being reduced from 30 grams/week to 20. Yet the people around him, either through not thinking at all or through doublethink, do accept it, forcing him to wonder whether he is the only person around who has a memory.

Depressed, Winston looks around, at the horrid food, ugly clothes, and bleak surroundings. Somehow he feels that things should be better, even though he has never known a time when they were‹when food tasted pleasant and things worked as they were supposed to. Even the people look ugly to him, belying the Party's Aryan ideal.

The announcement ends, and Winston lapses into a reverie thinking about who he knows will likely be vaporized, and who will not‹namely, Parsons, the girl with the dark hair, and the man at a nearby table who has been speaking in a quack about the wonders and achievements of the Party.

Winston is startled out of his reverie by the awareness that the girl with the dark hair is sitting at the next table, and is looking at him. She turns away, but Winston is terrified because she has been turning up near him a good deal lately. He worries that she may be an amateur spy and that he may have committed facecrime, the unconscious betrayal of unorthodox opinions via facial expressions or tics.

Parsons tells Winston another horrid story about his disgusting children, and they are signalled to return to work.

Analysis:

This chapter delves into the consciousness of the inhabitants of this Party-dominated world both by having them speak and by showing their subtle reactions or acceptances to the status quo. The most overt instance of this is Syme's explanation of Newspeak, which is intended to be fully in use by 2050, when all Oldspeak should be phased out. The theme of destruction as control is thoroughly in evidence here, as when Syme speaks of the elimination of words with a glee theoretically antithetical to a philologist (literally, someone who loves words). Syme dreamily anticipates the day when the Revolution will be complete, i.e. when Oldspeak will be completely phased out and unintelligible. Winston starts to point out that the "proles" will be able to understand Oldspeak, but Syme dismisses this with the response that "The proles are not human beings," revealing a sort of caste system similar to the rigid one in Brave New World.

Syme also reproaches Winston for his lack of appreciation of Newspeak; he has read some of Winston's articles in the Times and tells him that he clearly prefers Oldspeak. Syme's words resonate more truly than he knows, given Winston's yearning for the past; and in this way Orwell re-emphasizes the link of language and literature to tradition and the past. It is this that Syme and his associates will abolish completely; "orthodoxy," he says, "is unconsciousness."

Though Winston doesn't know it, this process of replacing thought with blind acceptance has already begun to affect him. He has never known a time when things were better, but he wonders. The limitation of his conscious experience is similar to the limitation of thought aspired to by the Party; and it is a chilling measure of the success the Party has had within Winston's own lifetime, which spans the pre-Party era as well as the current one.

The theme of blindness crops up throughout the chapter. People's glasses seem to replace their eyes; and no one seems to see the blatant lies before them. A wonderfully ironic example of this is when Parsons comments on how well the Ministry of Plenty has done, and then immediately, and without seeming to realize the contradiction, asks Winston whether he has any spare razor blades.

Chapter 6

Summary:

Winston is writing in his diary about an encounter he had three years ago with a prostitute. The memory is embarrassing and difficult for him, and he feels an almost irresistible urge to scream obscenities or burst out into some violent action to relieve his tension.

Of course he doesn't give in to the urge, and steels himself to continue writing. His writing is interlaced with the memory of Katharine, his wife, to whom he would technically still be married‹unless she were dead‹although they are separated, because the Party does not permit divorce. Katharine was physically attractive but, Winston soon discovered, completely brainwashed by the Party, even in matters of sex. According to the Party, there should be no pleasure in sex, which was an act intended to beget children for the future of the Party. Katharine bought into this ideology to the point where sex was an outright unpleasant act for Winston; since no children were conceived, the couple were allowed to separate. Perhaps because of his experience with Katharine, Winston believes that none of the women in the Party have retained their natural sex drive.

Winston continues to write about his experience with the prostitute, who had led him into a dark room with a bed. When he turned up the light, he discovered to his horror that the woman was old, at least 50. But he proceeded anyway.

Despite having gotten it all out, Winston does not feel any less inclined to shout obscenities.

Analysis:

This chapter introduces the Party's approach to sex and marriage. (For an interesting comparison, see Brave New World, where sex is encouraged as a sort of drug.) Technically, consorting with prostitutes is forbidden, but it seems to be tacitly encouraged just the same, as a means of relieving natural tensions. The more serious crime involves relations between Party members. The Party does not wish to allow the development of loyalties to any other acts or persons than itself, so it tends to deny permission of marriage to couples who appear attracted to one another, and it campaigns actively against sex as anything other than a slightly disagreeable duty whose sole purpose is propagation of the species.

Again, through its control of marriages and sexual mores, the Party resembles a conservative religious institution. By attempting to control people's loyalties and loves, and redirect those towards itself, the Party posits itself as the end and the ultimate salvation. Katharine even calls sex "our duty to the Party," and it is a weekly ritual almost like a martyrdom, in which both she and Winston are uncomfortable but must suffer through it anyway.

Clearly, Winston's desire to have a woman of his own with whom sex could be pleasurable is yet another instance of his heretical tendencies. It does not seem something that he has experienced yet, since his encounter with the prostitute was somehow dirtying in every sense. His desire to evoke desire is itself thoughtcrime, and part of his overall rebellion against the world he lives in.

Chapter 7

Summary:

Once again Winston is writing in his diary. "If there is hope," he writes, "it lies in the proles." Winston reasons that the proles are so numerous that if they simply woke up they could bring down the Party. But would they ever wake up? He remembers a day when he had been walking and heard a great cry of anger; in hope, he hurried to the spot to see what was happening. As it turned out, a stall that had been selling saucepans had run out, and the disappointed women were momentarily united in their despair. But, to Winston's disgust, rather than remaining united and surging up against the source of their misery, they turned on each other instead, fighting over the pans.

Winston reflects on the Party's attitude toward the proles, itself an exercise in doublethink: while the Party claims to have liberated the proles from the horrendous bonds of capitalism, it also teaches that the proles are inferior and must be kept in line with a few simple rules. But in general, the Party leaves the proles alone, to live as they have always lived, outside of the Party's strict moral and behavioral dictates.

What Winston is not sure of is whether life before the Revolution was really that much worse than it is in 1984. He looks at a children's history book which he has borrowed from Mrs. Parsons, reading a passage about life before the Revolution, when most people were poor and miserable, and all money and power were concentrated into the hands of a very few evil persons known as capitalists. Yet he can never be sure how much of it is lies; he only has an instinctive feeling in his bones that life doesn't have to be as miserable as it is, and that there must have been something better at one time. Life, in fact, not only belies the constant stream of Party propaganda, it does not even approach the Party's avowed ideal of a militarily ordered society in which every moment of every day is a triumphant struggle for the principles of Ingsoc.

Considering the regular erasure of the past, Winston once again recalls the one time (mentioned earlier) when he had held concrete evidence of the falsification of history. In the mid-1960s, three of the last surviving original leaders of the Revolution, Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford, had been arrested, vanished temporarily, and then had returned to make spectacular confessions of treachery. Afterwards, they had been pardoned, reinstated in the Party and given hollow but important-sounding positions.

Winston had seen them in the Chestnut Street Cafe with a mixture of fascination at how they embodied history and terror at the certainty of their imminent destruction. No one sat near them; they sat alone at a table with an untouched chessboard and glasses of gin. Winston noticed that Rutherford, once a strong man, looked as though he were breaking up before his eyes.

A song came over the telescreen: "Under the spreading chestnut tree/ I sold you and you sold me:/ There lie they, and here lie we/ Under the spreading chestnut tree." The three men remained motionless, but Winston saw that Rutherford's eyes were full of tears, and suddenly noticed that both Aaronson and Rutherford had broken noses.

Shortly after this, they were re-arrested and executed after a second trial. Five years later, in about 1973, Winston was at his work when among his assignment-related documents he found part of a page from an earlier edition of the Times, dated about 10 years earlier, showing a photograph of Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford at a Party function in New York. At their trials, the men had confessed to have been in Eurasia consorting with the enemy on that very date. Clearly the confessions were untrue. Though this was not in itself surprising, the existence of this piece of paper was concrete evidence of the Party's action.

Winston carefully calmed himself, then disposed of the evidence through the memory hole. If it had happened today, he thinks, he would have kept the photograph; somehow the fact of its existence, the fact that he had held it in his hand, is reassuring to him. But he knows that because the past is continually rewritten, the photograph today might not even be evidence.

Winston does not understand why such an effort is being made to falsify the past (i.e. the long-term goal). Perhaps, he thinks, he is crazy; this does not scare him, though. What scares him is that he might be wrong in thinking the past unchangeable. He picks up the book and looks at the picture of B.B. on the frontispiece. In a sort of despairing fear, Winston thinks to himself that the Party will eventually claim that 2 + 2 = 5, and that you would have to believe it; and again he is tormented by the fear that they might, after all, be right.

But abruptly, his belief in common sense reasserts itself, and he somehow feels that he is writing his diary to O'Brien. Defiantly, he defends the truth of the obvious, writing, "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows."

Analysis:

This chapter continues to nuance the portrait of Winston's world by delving further into Winston's eternal struggle with wanting to know about the past, yet being unable to. Clearly the episode involving the physical evidence of historical falsification is significant both for Winston and for the ultimate picture it presents of the Party's systematic destruction of history. For Winston it seems to justify his sanity; but his quick realization that the photograph might not even be relevant today demonstrates the slipperiness (and, to a degree, the cleverness) of the Party's system.

Again the chapter is replete with instances of the rewriting of history, though this repetitiveness of theme is subtle because of how fully Orwell has conceptualized this world. His 1984 is so completely envisioned that the Party's operations and tactics seep through everything, without seeming to do so, and therefore being all the more insidious. There is some comedy in his portrayal of propaganda, though it is eerie; for instance, the "jus primae noctis"‹a medieval/feudal phenomenon‹is defined as the right any capitalist had to sleep with any woman working in one of his factories. First, this does not even follow the Latin (the "right of the first night"), and therefore subtly reinforces the theme of the loss of language; and second, it is a complete and utter distortion of history. In addition, the representation of feudal lords and religious leaders resembles Russian Communist propaganda of the early 20th century.

The theme of freedom is brought out in this chapter as well. There is a good deal of irony in the Party slogan, "Proles and animals are free," because while the Party regards freedom as slavery (recall the three slogans), the proles are truly free of fear from the Party such as Winston has to endure every day of his life. As such, they hold the instrument of freedom in their hands‹the ability to band together to overthrow the Party‹but, Winston fears, the awareness, education and organization to do so.

Finally, Orwell indulges in some foreshadowing here (as, in fact, he has done before, but perhaps to a lesser extent). The false equation "2+2=5" comes back later, as does the Chestnut Street Cafe scene, with particular relevance to Winston.

Chapter 8

Summary:

Winston is walking through the streets, taking a risk in missing his second evening at the Community Centre in three weeks, but having been unable to pass up the lovely evening air. He has been walking aimlessly through the streets, observing the people and their surroundings, which are equally dilapidated. Identifiable as a Party member by his blue overalls, he is watched warily by the inhabitants, and reflects that it would be dangerous to run into the patrols here, since it could draw you to the Thought Police's attention.

Suddenly there is a commotion and people start bolting indoors; Winston is warned by a passerby that a bomb is about to fall. He throws himself down to protect himself against the blast. The bomb falls 200 meters away on a group of houses. He approaches the site and comes upon a severed human hand, which he kicks into the gutter before turning into a side street to avoid the crowd.

Winston passes a group of men who are arguing about the Lottery, which is the one public event the proles really attend to and sink their energy and powers of calculation into. However, as Winston knows, the big prizes are awarded to fictitious persons, and only small sums are actually paid out by the Ministry of Plenty.

Winston walks into a neighborhood which seems familiar; after a short while he recognizes it as the area where he had purchased his diary, penholder and ink. He pauses, and sees an old man entering a pub across the alley. He is suddenly seized with the impulse to try and find out from this old man what life was like before the Revolution.

He hurries into the pub, creating a bit of a pause in activity, and, after witnessing an argument between the old man (who demands a pint) and the barman (who only deals in liters and half-liters), Winston buys the old man a beer. They sit in a noisy corner near a window and Winston tries to get the old man to tell him about the past. However, the man latches onto details that are too small to prove to Winston one way or another whether the Party histories are true or false.

Winston leaves, thinking sadly that even now, when there are survivors of the pre-Revolution days, it is impossible to find out whether the big picture had changed for better or worse. He walks on, not thinking where he is going, until he stops and realizes that he is outside the junk-shop where he had bought the diary.

After some hesitation, he judges it safer to enter the shop than loiter outside of it, and starts to talk with the proprietor, Mr. Charrington. Winston wanders through the shop, and his attention is caught by a glass paperweight with a coral inside. Captivated by its beauty, Winston buys it for $4.00 and puts it into his pocket. The man, cheered by the money, invites Winston to see an upstairs room. It is a bedroom furnished with old-fashioned furniture, but most importantly, with no telescreen. Winston feels a nostalgic security, almost a familiarity with the room, and the thought flashes through his mind that it might be possible to rent this room‹though he immediately abandons the notion.

The proprietor shows Winston an engraving of an old church which had been bombed long ago, St. Clement's Dane. He quotes an old nursery rhyme: "ŒOranges and lemons,' say the bells of St. Clement's, ŒYou owe me three farthings,' say the bells of St. Martin's"; he doesn't remember the rhyme in full, but he does recall the ending: "Here comes a candle to light you to bed, Here comes a chopper to chop off your head." He talks a little about the churches in the rhyme; Winston wonders when they had been built, to what era they belonged.

Winston doesn't buy the engraving, but stays to talk a bit with Mr. Charrington, seeming somehow to hear the bells of the nursery rhyme in his head (though he has never actually heard church bells ringing as far as he remembers). As he leaves, he decides to return to the shop after a month or so, to buy things and talk to Charrington and maybe rent the room...

He is roused horribly from his reverie by seeing the girl with dark hair walking towards him. She looks directly at him, then continues on her way. Paralyzed, Winston realizes that she must be spying on him‹why else should she be there? He walks in the wrong direction with a pain in his gut, then turns, and considers killing her with the paperweight. But he abandons the idea, as well as every other one he considers for trying to safeguard himself. He simply goes home.

Once there, he takes out his diary but doesn't write anything for a while as he struggles with his fear and the paralysis it has brought upon him. He tries to open the diary, to think of O'Brien, but his mind is on the torture that inevitably falls between capture by the Thought Police and death (both of which are certain once you have committed thoughtcrime).

He recalls his dream, where O'Brien said that they would meet "in the place where there is no darkness"; this place, he believes, is the imagined future. But the face of B.B. drifts into his mind, pushing out O'Brien. Winston takes a coin out of his pocket, and looks at it, trying to fathom B.B.'s smile; the three Party slogans ring through his head.

Analysis:

This chapter details Winston's search for the truth about the past through his attempted conversation with the old bar patron and his visit to the antique shop. It is interesting to note the love-hate nature of Winston's relationship with the proletariat: while he firmly clings to the belief that the only hope lies in them, he also is frustrated with them (as with the elderly man who cannot answer his questions about the past) and treats them lightly, as in the striking image where he kicks the severed hand into the gutter.

In some way, Winston's search for truth is a blind one. He is disappointed with the old man who seems not to answer his questions; yet, if he would listen to what the man said, he could learn something about the flavor of life which might give him clues to the truth. This is not entirely Winston's fault, however; he has been brainwashed more than he knows, his knowledge has been limited, and so he does not know when he comes across a clue that could lead to further information. The invisible hand of the Party is at work in Winston though he does not realize it. His ignorance is also evident in his discussion with Mr. Charrington.

Again, as in previous chapters, Orwell uses the device of interrupting peaceful moments with horrible realizations‹in this case, Winston's blissful dreams about the antique shop are cruelly thrown off by the appearance of the girl with dark hair. Winston never fully recovers; his fear is proportionate to his transgression, and he spends the remainder of the chapter struggling against it, in vain.

Symbolism abounds in this chapter. There is a sharp contrast between the description of the buildings, the world the proles live in, and Winston's world as described in previous chapters, and the description of the coral-in-glass paperweight. The paperweight signifies beauty, the past, and redemption to Winston. It is in itself a rebellion, as he notes that "anything old, and for that matter anything beautiful, was always vaguely suspect" to the Party. Significantly, when he considers murdering the dark-haired girl, it would be with the paperweight; he would symbolically be smashing the Party with the past.

Orwell uses sound, particularly the image of the bell, to create a notable contrast between Winston's inner ideal and the harsh reality surrounding him. The nursery rhyme about the church bells somehow attaches itself to a beautiful sound, although Winston has never to his knowledge actually heard church bells. At the end of the chapter, the three Party slogans are compared to a "leaden knell," a heavy sound associated with death. In some way, this may resonate with the end of the nursery rhyme, "Here comes a chopper to chop off your head."

Part 2

Chapter 1

Summary:

On his way to the lavatory one morning, Winston encounters the girl with dark hair in the corridor. Her right arm is in a sling. As she approaches, she suddenly trips and falls on her arm, and cries out in pain. Although Winston regards her as a dangerous enemy, he also feels sorry for her and helps her up. As he does so, she very discreetly slips a small piece of paper into his hand, surprising him greatly.

Though he is fired with curiosity, Winston knows he cannot look at the piece of paper for a while. He goes back to his desk and tosses the slip casually among the other papers there. As he works, he speculates that the note could either be some sort of threat or summons or trap from the Thought Police, or‹and this excites him‹a message from some sort of underground organization like the Brotherhood.

When he finally gets the chance to look at the note, he is astounded, because it reads "I love you."

This naturally throws him into an agitation for the rest of the morning. During lunch he is not even allowed the luxury of temporary solitude, as Parsons immediately shows up to bore him with details of Hate Week preparations. After lunch, Winston immerses himself in his work, and goes to the Community Centre in the evening; he is waiting to be alone in bed to think.

At last he is alone, and he begins to think about how to meet her. It would be impossible to repeat that morning's method. He cannot follow her home because it would entail waiting around outside the Ministry, which would be bound to be noticed. Sending a letter would be impossible as mail is routinely opened. The only solution is to sit at a table with her in the canteen, somewhere in the middle of the room as far as possible from the telescreens, amidst a buzz of conversation in which the brief exchange of a few words could go unnoticed.

The next week is torture for Winston: the girl disappears for three days, during which time he cannot stop thinking about her and worrying that she has been vaporized or that she has changed her mind. She reappears, but Winston is unable to sit with her in the canteen, though he tries. The next day he succeeds, and they form a plan to meet that evening in Victory Square.

In the Square, Winston sees the girl but must wait until more people have gathered so as to speak with her unnoticed. Fortunately, the passing of a convoy of Eurasian prisoners allows Winston and the girl to lose themselves in a massive crowd of onlookers. They squeeze next to one another to watch, and the girl subtly gives Winston detailed directions to a place where they can meet on Sunday afternoon.

They continue to watch the prisoners, and right before they must part, the girl squeezes Winston's hand.

Analysis:

In this chapter emerges more directly what has been a subtle theme throughout: the universal deception of appearances. The girl is not who she had seemed to be: Winston had assumed her to be a spy, frozen into fanatic chastity and rabid devotion to the Party. She proves herself not to be with the symbolically daring step of declaring her love for Winston. She does not write a note asking him to meet her anywhere, or giving him a password to a secret underground society; neither of these things is nearly as subversive as the simple act of declaring love for someone as an individual, someone as a being separate from the Party.

It may seem surprising that Winston, who is so predisposed to disbelieve appearances, should be startled that the girl is not who he had thought. But his general distrust in appearances is stilted because it presupposes that he is alone in his rebellious tendencies. This is why the girl is so important to him: she shows him he is not alone, and she vindicates his reason‹which has told him that there must be women out there with feelings, that there must be people out there who also trust their senses above what the Party tells them. Significantly, when she temporarily disappears, Winston's greatest fear is not that she has been vaporized but that she has changed her mind about him.

The Eurasian prisoners which appear at the end of the chapter are symbolic both in what they reflect regarding Winston and the girl and what they say about the society of Oceania. When Winston realizes he does not know what color the girl's eyes are, he cannot look at her and instead must gaze into the eyes of a grizzled prisoner. This subtlety hints at the greater truth: the girl is a prisoner, of the same stifling system which imprisons Winston himself. In addition, the Eurasians reflect the imprisonment of Oceania's society as a whole, because they evoke not so much hostility among the proles as curiosity, for foreigners are rarely seen and not much is known of them.

Chapter 2

Summary:

It is Sunday afternoon. Winston is out in the country after what sounds like an almost pleasant journey by train. He is early, and comes across a thick patch of bluebells; he stoops to pick some, and the girl arrives. She leads him expertly through the woods to a hidden clearing. They talk a little, then start to kiss, but Winston feels no physical desire yet because his disbelief and proud joy are too strong.

The girl, Julia, doesn't seem to mind; she sits up and they start to talk some more. She is brassy and rebellious, even producing some wonderfully tasty black-market chocolate, though she goes out of her way to present a fanatically devout front in order to stay safe. She is young, and Winston doesn't understand why she should be attracted to him; she explains that it was something in his face, that she could tell he didn't belong, that he hated the Party.

They leave the clearing and walk around, coming finally to the edge of the wood. There, Winston has a gradual shock: he recognizes the landscape as the Golden Country of his dreams. As if to prove it, he asks Julia if there is a stream nearby, and she replies that there is.

A thrush lands nearby and starts to sing, its song startling in the stillness. The song is beautiful, original, never quite the same, and Winston watches and listens with awe. What, he asks himself, makes the bird sing, if there is no other bird around to listen or respond? Gradually, however, Winston stops thinking and simply feels the beauty of it. At this point he kisses Julia and feels that he is ready to make love.

They hasten back to the clearing. Julia turns to him, and just as in his dream, she defiantly tears off her clothes and flings them aside. Before doing anything, Winston takes her hands and asks her: has she done this before? Yes, quite a lot. With Party members? Always, though never with Inner Party members. Winston is filled with joy at the thought that the Party is at its foundation corrupt. He tells Julia that he hates purity and goodness and that he desires corruption; she responds that she ought to suit him just fine. His final question: does she enjoy the act of sex itself? When she replies, "I adore it," Winston's last hope is fulfilled, and they make love.

They fall asleep. Winston awakens first to reflect that their act has been a political one, "a blow struck against the Party."

Analysis:

This chapter is about dreams come true, not only figuratively but literally. The Golden Country really does exist, and Julia's defiant throwing off of clothes matches Winston's dream. Her enjoyment of sex is more of a figurative dream come true, as is the revelation that other Party members have indulged in corruption (i.e., sex for its own sake). (However, it is well to note that even Winston is not quite engaging in sex for its own sake: it is sex as an act of rebellion, as all enjoyable sex must be in a society where the act is supposed to be free of pleasure.)

In a more subtle way, Winston's memories and his future seem to get mixed up with his dreams as well. This theme has been echoed earlier in the chapter involving O'Brien and the voice in the darkness, and in this chapter it is not quite clear how Winston's dreams of the Golden Country and Julia bear upon the actuality he finds. In addition, the chocolate Julia gives him tastes somehow familiar, hinting at suppressed memories that may cast some light on Winston's past (as well as, perhaps, his future).

Nature is a presence in this chapter, not only as a stark contrast to bleak London, but as a symbol of the predicament of people like Winston and Julia caught in an artificial, tightly controlled world. The singing thrush is a powerful and significant symbol. Importantly, Winston wonders, "What made it sit at the edge of the lonely wood and pour its music into nothingness?" Though he may not realize it, Winston sees his own predicament in the bird's seemingly inexplicable act. His diary is analogous to the bird's song; he is impelled to write out his feelings and thoughts, though there may never be anyone to read them.

Clearly, Winston is driven by natural instinct, and he seeks it among others. The reason Winston is so glad to hear that Julia enjoys sex is because this establishes that other people possess instinctual desires. This means both that he is not alone, and that the force exists which can destroy the Party as antimatter cancels out matter: because the Party represents anti-natural forces, it cannot exist in the presence of overwhelming innate instinct.

Chapter 3

Summary:

Julia arranges the details of her and Winston's departures from the clearing, using her practical sense (which Winston feels he lacks) and her thorough knowledge of the countryside around London. They never return to the clearing, as it turns out, and only once more that month succeed in making love, inside the ruins of a church.

As they meet during the evenings, they "talk by instalments," as Julia puts it‹their conversation cuts in and out mid-sentence according to the relative levels of safety in their surroundings. Once during a walk, a bomb falls near them, and Winston, thinking the plaster-whitened Julia is dead, kisses her‹to discover that she is alive and he is coated in plaster too.

Meetings are dangerous and difficult to coordinate as their schedules rarely coincide. Julia is astonishingly busy with Party activities; her view is that as long as you keep up appearances and obey the small rules, you could transgress the bigger ones. She even convinces Winston to volunteer as a part-time munition worker.

Julia is 26, and works on the machinery in the Fiction Department, literally churning out novels like any other mass-produced commodity. She has established such a good character for herself that she had even been selected to work in Pornosec, the division of the department dedicated to producing cheap pornography for the proles. Her first affair was at age sixteen; her view of life is simply that it is an eternal struggle between you and the Party over whether or not you can have a good time.

She and Winston never discuss marriage, knowing it to be an impossibility; but they do discuss Katharine. Julia asks about her, but seems to know most of the essentials regarding Katharine's frigidity, even the fact that she called sex "our duty to the Party." Julia knows because she had undergone the same education as Katharine; intriguingly, and perhaps because she is more sexually liberated, Julia has a clearer comprehension than Winston of the Party's stance on sex.

Winston tells Julia about an incident early in his marriage to Katharine where they had gotten lost on a community hike. They ended up near the edge of a cliff. Katharine, uncomfortable, wanted to turn around and try to find their way back; Winston points out a plant with two different-colored flowers growing from the same root. As she unwillingly returned to look, Winston realized that they were completely alone, and if he chose to he could push her off the cliff. But he didn't.

He tells Julia he regrets that he didn't, although he knows it wouldn't have made a difference. He lapses into a typically cynical philosophical mood, which Julia, in her youthful and perhaps stubborn optimism, rejects.

Analysis:

Julia presents a striking contrast to Winston in many ways. She is young and healthy; he is old with a cough and varicose veins. She holds no memories of anything before the early 1960s, and doesn't seem to mind; Winston is continually groping after the shadowy echoes of his past. While Winston is something of an intellectual, debating the greater meaning of the Party and its doctrines, Julia is relatively down-to-earth, seeing the Party as a hateful entity designed solely to impede enjoyment of life.

She embodies a dualism strange to Winston, who passionately believes in the existence of a better world in the past or the future. Rather than spending time hankering after another world, Julia accepts the one she is in, and simply looks for ways to rebel against what she dislikes. Julia hates the Party, but holds no interest in criticizing its doctrine; she never uses Newspeak, but she doesn't believe in the existence of the Brotherhood (which she had never heard of before Winston mentioned it).

Despite her non-intellecualism, Julia has an innate intelligence which allows her to navigate the system and understand, with startling clarity, some of its inner motivations. Julia understands that the Party's aversion to sex is more than just a jealous rivalry with a potential competitor for human loyalty; it is a means of manipulating human energy. If that energy cannot be expended through sex, it must be channeled into something else‹ideally fanatical activity for the Party. The truth of her understanding can be seen in the fact that the Two Minutes Hate, described in the first chapter, is an orgiastic experience; also in that Winston himself has experienced nearly intolerable levels of inner tension, which have driven him to commit such thoughtcrimes as writing in his diary.

Chapter 4

Summary:

Winston has rented the upstairs room from Mr. Charrington, the antique shop owner, and is waiting for Julia to arrive. Outside, a prole woman is singing one of the drivelly songs churned out by a versificator in the Music Department‹a monstrosity to begin with, but somehow pleasant-sounding in the woman's rendering. The room feels curiously still to Winston because of the absence of a telescreen.

Though taking this room is a huge risk, the couple were unable to resist it after days and weeks of being unable to meet. Winston recalls how when they at last manage to set a day to go back to the clearing, Julia tells him the night before (once again through a meeting on the street) that she can't go because she is menstruating. Winston feels furious‹his feeling toward Julia and desire for her has changed from an act of rebellion to a sense of proprietary physical obligation, and he feels almost like she is cheating him. But at this point, she squeezes his hand with affection and prompts a sudden, new tenderness in him. He realizes that this sort of thing must be normal for couples who live together, and he is overwhelmed by the wish that he and Julia were a happily married couple with no cares and complete privacy to do as they wished. Quite soon after this they agree to rent the room.

Julia arrives, bearing real sugar, white bread, jam, milk, and real coffee and tea‹all Inner Party privileges which she has filched somehow. She then asks Winston to turn his back for a short while; when he is allowed to turn around again, he finds that she has put on makeup and perfume. Before they get into bed, she expresses her intention to find a real dress and high heels so that she can be "a woman, not a Party comrade."

Winston wakes up around 9:00 (21:00), and wonders whether the peace and freedom of lying in bed with your loved one on a cool summer evening were ever a normal thing in the past. Julia wakes up, and is talking to Winston when suddenly she spots a rat and hurls a shoe at it. Winston is startled at the presence of a rat in this idyllic room, and recalls a recurrent nightmare he has always had where he is standing in front of a wall and behind it is something horrifying. He would always know, in some deeply buried part of his mind, what was behind the wall, but he never allowed himself to acknowledge it and would wake up without discovering it.

Julia gets up, makes coffee, and wanders around the room. She asks about the engraving of St. Clement's Dane (which coincidentally hangs right above where the rat had poked out its head), and to Winston's surprise, adds a line to the nursery rhyme: "ŒWhen will you pay me?' say the bells of Old Bailey." Strangely, Julia too forgets the rest excepting the ominous ending, giving Winston a sense of fate. After observing that the picture likely has bugs behind it, and planning to clean it, Julia cleans herself, washing off the makeup, while Winston gazes at the paperweight.

Analysis:

An important change in Winston's relation to Julia is noted in this chapter. It is interesting that the change springs from a disappointment in their sexual life, but notable in this as well. It demonstrates that Winston has progressed from viewing Julia as an outlet for his political unorthodoxy and his sexual energy, to seeing her as a companion, part of his life, doomed with him but nevertheless linked with him. The closing image of the chapter, where he sees the room as analogous to the paperweight, enclosing his life with Julia, highlights this sense that they are connected by a marriage of love.

Yet, though this room represents an idyllic haven for Winston and Julia, it has its problems. The bed has bugs; Julia suspects that the engraving has bugs behind it too, and plans to take it down and clean it; and worst of all, a rat appears, touching off an unpleasant chain reaction in the darker recesses of Winston's consciousness. These flaws seem to foreshadow the death that will catch up with them sooner or later.

Winston's nightmare is also ominous. Orwell's emphasis on dreams and the symbols of the subconscious lends credibility to the idea that in this world, you can't get away from your nightmares. The dark wall with its unseen threat seems analogous to the unknown workings of the Party and the Thought Police; the threat itself is not quite clear, but its presence is definitely felt. Although Winston does not know how or when the Thought Police will catch him and Julia, he is utterly certain that they will.

Chapter 5

Summary:

The chapter opens with a brief paragraph on Syme's disappearance, but quickly moves on to the intense preparations for Hate Week that are sweeping through the city and swallowing up everyone's time. Huge posters depicting a Eurasian soldier aiming his sub-machine gun at you crop up everywhere, intended to stir the population into a patriotic frenzy; as though by design, more rocket bombs fall on the city, killing more people than usual.

Winston and Julia continue to meet in the upstairs room. Winston's health, both physical and mental, has improved due to the existence of the room. Occasionally he talks to Mr. Charrington, who seems to embody history.

Though Winston and Julia know that they are doomed, they sometimes yield to the illusion of permanence, and frequently talk about escaping some way or another‹though they know that they will never commit even the only feasible act among these options, which is suicide.

They talk about rebelling against the Party in a vague way; Winston tells her about his unspoken bond with O'Brien, which does not strike her as at all strange. Though Julia takes it for granted that everyone harbors hatred for the Party, she does not believe in an organized underground; in fact, she thinks that Goldstein and the tales about him were invented by the Party for their own ends.

Julia's intelligence is also shown by her casually offered opinion that the war with Eurasia is not actually happening‹that the government of Oceania was dropping the bombs on its own people for the purposes of keeping the population scared and emotionally subjected to the Party. Winston has never even thought of this possibility. But for the most part, Julia does not question Party doctrine unless it touches her own life in some way; she believes much of the false history she has been taught in school, and it doesn't seem important to her that this is untrue. Winston is shocked by this, as well as by the fact that she doesn't seem to recall that only four years ago Eastasia, and not Eurasia, was Oceania's enemy in war.

Julia also does not seem to grasp the importance of Winston's story of the photograph clearing Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford of wrongdoing. In general she is not interested when Winston starts to delve into the problems the Party presents. He realizes that people like Julia, who accept what they are taught because they don't fully understand it, are in a fair way to remain more sane than persons like himself.

Analysis:

By starting the chapter with Syme's disappearance, Orwell reminds us that every moment of idyllic freedom or pleasure is closely dogged by the destruction wrought by the Party. Once again, Winston‹last seen in the upstairs room with Julia‹is mired back in the world of eternal surveillance and fear. Syme's disappearance is treated with one paragraph, no more, mirroring the ease and silence with which he has slipped out of existence. This opening is chilling in both its abrupt intrusion on the reader's sympathetic sense of comfort in Winston's hideout, and in its distanced, clinical brevity in treating Syme's vaporization.

The rest of the chapter can be roughly split into two parts: one detailing the Party's outward preparations for Hate Week, and the other analyzing and exploring the differences between Winston's and Julia's respective interpretations of the Party and its acts.

The preparations for Hate Week take on a new meaning after Julia's astute observation that the war with Eurasia is probably not even happening. The huge posters and propaganda stem from the same source as the bombings; in fact, the bombings are just an extension of the campaign. Though this may seem shocking, it is not at all difficult to see why this is going on. War is clearly being used by the Party as a control device. It allows for an easy manipulation of feelings by keeping people in a constant state of emotional dependence upon the state. It can be used (and is used here) to summon up vast reserves of hatred against a non-existent enemy, thereby directing such feelings away from yourself. It gets people to accept low standards of living and poor rations by making them feel like they're doing their duty and can't accept more from their government at such a time. Overall, war against an external way is a time-honored device for deflecting criticism and discontent from one's own government.

We have seen Winston's perspective on the atrocities of the Party, but Julia embodies an interesting challenge to his ideas, because of the odd combination she represents of native intelligence and unquestioning acceptance of some of the Party's hogwash. (It is well to note that Winston embodies this combination as well, but with a different kind of intelligence, and different areas of susceptibility to propaganda.) Julia brings home for Winston the idea that not knowing what the Party stands for is somehow safer because it makes things easier. Julia has only dim notions of Goldstein and Party doctrine, and is bored when Winston talks about these things. Because she doesn't think about them, it is far easier for her to accept the ridiculous contradictions demanded of her to accept.

Chapter 6

Summary:

Winston, walking down the long corridor where he had first spoken to Julia, encounters O'Brien, who addresses him cordially regarding Newspeak and what he considers Winston's elegant use of it. O'Brien obliquely refers to Syme as someone who shares this opinion, to whom he had spoken recently; Winston takes this as some sort of signal.

O'Brien says that he had noticed that Winston had recently used two words now obsolete in the forthcoming Tenth Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary, which has not been issued yet but of which O'Brien has an advance copy. He offers Winston to visit him at his flat to take a look at the Dictionary; through this device he gives Winston his address.

This whole exchange‹which has taken place under the watchful eye of a telescreen‹takes only a couple of minutes, but it has sparked in Winston both a cautious joy in the existence of the conspiracy he had hoped for, and a dreadful certainty that it is the beginning of the end for him.

Analysis:

Once again, a dream of Winston's comes true: namely, an interaction with O'Brien that seems to establish a mutual "thoughtcrimeful" tendency. Winston regards the conversation as a summons for which he has been waiting for his whole life. His sense about O'Brien appears justified, and one can infer that his feelings about humankind as a whole‹given his relationship with Julia, and his bond with O'Brien‹are definitely improving.

It is interesting that the exchange should have come about through a discussion of Newspeak‹somehow, the language that is being created to quash rebellion has become a vehicle for organizing it. Yet in an odd way this makes sense, since appearance nearly always must contradict actuality, especially with regard to delicate matters of subterfuge. The whole act seems in line with the concept of "doublethink," and Orwell, as we have seen, quite frequently lays out contradictions like this, highlighting the fundamentally contradictory nature of the society.

Once again, however, Winston's happiness is mixed with fear, as he knows that he has started irreversibly down a path which will end in the Ministry of Love. He feels like he already has one foot in the grave; and though the reader would like to hope that Winston will never get caught, s/he has an uncomfortable sense of foreshadowing here.

Chapter 7

Summary:

Winston awakens from a dream crying. The dream took place inside the glass paperweight and somehow was about a protective gesture made by his mother 30 years ago, and repeated in the film he wrote about in his diary (where a helpless Jewish mother ineffectually tries to protect her child from the bullets that are about to be fired at them). Within a few seconds of waking, the memories surrounding this gesture flood back to Winston.

He had been a young boy, and London was a disaster area of starvation, violence and unrest. His father disappeared, taking his mother's spirit with him so that she moved through daily life waiting for her own disappearance. She, Winston, and his baby sister lived in poor quarters and had not enough to eat; despite his knowledge that the mother and sister were starving, Winston would demand more food even though his mother would automatically give him the biggest portion. One day there was a chocolate ration, and Winston, though he knew the chocolate should be equally divided between the three of them, found himself demanding the whole piece. After long argument, his mother gave him 3/4 of the piece and the rest to his sister. But Winston grabbed the piece from his sister and dashed for the door, where he stopped at his mother's cry to come back. She looked at him; the baby wailed; and she drew the baby closer to her, in some way that told Winston the child was dying. He fled. When he came back a few hours later, they both had disappeared.

This dream reminds him of the one he had had two months ago, where he saw his mother and sister sinking away from him. He wants to talk about his mother to Julia, but she is drifting in and out of sleep. Winston thinks about love, about the novelty of the past, where people would make an ineffectual gesture or act knowing that it was ineffectual but doing it just the same; this indicates to him that they acted of their own accord, out of their own private loyalties and standards. It strikes him that the proles had remained like this‹had remained human. For the first time in his life he feels no contempt or indifference toward the proles, but a strange sort of respect for them for remaining who they are.

Julia has awakened again, and they talk about their inevitable parting. Though they know they will be forced to confess and not be able to help one another, Winston says that the only important thing is that they should never betray one another, in the sense of being made to stop loving the other person. Julia considers this and opines that this would be impossible because they would never be able to get inside you and change what you think. Winston takes some hope from this, believing in Julia-esque fashion that you could beat them in the end because they couldn't change your feelings.

Analysis:

Again, dreams play an important role in unfolding Winston's needs and desires. The fact that the glass paperweight provides the setting for the dream, and his mother's gesture the event, indicates Winston's association of love with the past, which explains his longing for past times and attitudes. It is significant that he realizes that the proles‹hitherto regarded as contemptible and lowly‹are in some ways superior to himself and other Party members, because they have maintained their humanity and thus their fundamental dignity. He recalls his kicking of the severed human hand after the bomb blast with a new awareness of his own disrespect.

Winston's memory of the times right before he lost his mother act to elucidate the historical turbulence of the early Revolution as well as draw a line between past and present attitudes. A clearer picture of the dire economic situation of those days starts to emerge; Winston had suffered starvation and privation, and had lost his entire family unit, left to fend for himself at a very young age. This experience gives some clue to his desperate loneliness as an adult, and his perhaps contradictory survival instincts. In some way, his selfishness as a child can be seen as a symbol of the "ungrateful" revolutionaries rejecting the past, starving it. Additionally, the young Winston appears to embody the lack of love and human emotion that characterize 1984. The fact that later he yearns for these sensations of his past makes Winston a sort of bridge between the past and the present, one link in a chain being slowly destroyed by death as his generation and its memories die out.

Love, the clear antithesis to everything the Party stands for (witness the predominance of the word "Hate" in so many Party rituals), is almost a character of itself in the way it so thoroughly threads through the characters' lives. Winston's health, as has been noted, has improved since having someone to care for and talk to. Love binds him and Julia in a way that, as they discuss at the end of the chapter, cannot possibly be broken by the Party and its twisted, contrarily-named Ministry of Love. Winston equates the ability to feel love with the essence of being human, and believing this immutable and indeed untouchable, starts to feel more positively that in the end, he and Julia and anyone who loves will prevail.

Chapter 8

Summary:

Winston and Julia arrive together at O'Brien's flat. The neighborhood of Inner Party residences is a whole new world of wealth, cleanliness and luxury with which neither Winston nor Julia is familiar. O'Brien's servant Martin takes them in to O'Brien's office or drawing-room, where O'Brien is working. Winston, already afraid, feels suddenly embarrassed‹what if he has made a mistake and O'Brien is not sympathetic?

As O'Brien approaches, he astonishes the couple by shutting off the telescreen, which, he explains, is an Inner Party privilege. He stands sternly before them, waiting for a short while, before his face relaxes and he breaks the silence.

Winston explains that they are there because they believe that O'Brien works for an underground organization which they wish to belong to. Martin enters, but O'Brien says he is one of them, so they all sit down with a glass of wine (which neither Winston nor Julia has ever tasted) and talk about the Brotherhood. O'Brien asks a series of questions to test how far Winston and Julia will go to further the goals of the Brotherhood; when he asks whether they are willing to separate from one another, they both reply in the negative. O'Brien asks Julia whether she understands that even if Winston survives, he would be substantially altered both in physique and identity; she nods, pale.

O'Brien dismisses Martin, telling him to look carefully at Winston and Julia before he goes. Martin gives them a long look without any friendliness or emotion in it whatsoever, then leaves. O'Brien explains that the Brotherhood is unusual because each agent works alone, with no support, minimal information, and no link to one another except the common ideal they hold for the destruction of the Party. Matter-of-factly, he outlines their lives: they will work for a while, then be caught, forced to confess and executed. "We are the dead," he says, echoing Winston's words to Julia a couple of chapters ago.

O'Brien dismisses Julia, then settles some details with Winston about getting him a copy of the book, i.e. Goldstein's heretical text exposing the true nature of the current world and the methods by which the Brotherhood will destroy the Party. After working out these plans, O'Brien says to Winston, "We shall meet again . . . in the place where there is no darkness." Winston's last question to him regards the nursery rhyme of the bells, of which O'Brien knows the final line: "ŒWhen I grow rich,' say the bells of Shoreditch."

Analysis:

Clearly, a major step is taken in this chapter. Winston puts himself forward in a way he has not done before, stepping into risk just when he has so much to lose. But it is this very sense of having something to lose that prompts his bold action. It is disturbing to the reader that O'Brien starts off stern, giving Winston an uneasy feeling, and that Martin (the servant) appears less than friendly. Still, when O'Brien relaxes, Winston is emboldened enough to plunge into a firm avowal of his and Julia's criminal tendencies.

As they find out more about the Brotherhood, it turns out that Julia was right about it, to a degree. She had refused to believe that there was some sort of vast organized underground organization, and through O'Brien's description, it becomes apparent that this is true. The nature of the Brotherhood arises from the nature of Oceania's society: because the Party is so adept at weeding out dissenters and forcing confessions from them, the Brotherhood must operate by keeping its members almost completely in the dark about their fellow Brothers and the organization as a whole. (It is highly intriguing to note that although Orwell meant his book to be a condemnation of Communist systems, the McCarthy witchhunts‹involving extracted confessions and lesser penalties for those who named names‹were eerily similar to the Party's tactics, and occurred very shortly after the publication of 1984 in 1949.)

Who knows who is watching and who has been hearing? Words and phrases are starting to be repeated here. The nursery rhyme has taken on some sort of significance as a keyword; it seems to link people with an interest in the past, or at least, a dislike of current conditions. Each of these people who have contributed a line‹Mr. Charrington, Julia, and O'Brien‹plays an important role in Winston's rebellion against the Party. Intriguingly, though the first two have always recalled the ominous last lines of the rhyme, O'Brien does not mention them at all.

O'Brien repeats other words, significantly. "We are the dead," he says, quoting verbatim (and unprompted) Winston's words to Julia. He also (though with a little help from Winston) quotes from Winston's dream about meeting in the place with no darkness. Again, the Orwellian technique of repetition is coming into play; but here it gives an eerie, oneiric quality to Winston's experience (and the reader's). In addition, it adds to O'Brien's impressiveness. Not only is he strong, graceful, intelligent and determined, this seeming ability of his to read Winston's thoughts turns him into something of a superhuman figure, almost an alternate deity towards which Winston's admiration (called "worship") is directed. It seems fitting that Winston should love and esteem O'Brien as his personal god over Big Brother, as O'Brien somehow has a deeper bond with Winston that stretches into the realm of the unconscious and subconscious.

Chapter 9

Summary:

Winston, exhausted after five days of intense work, and carrying in his briefcase the book, goes to Mr. Charrington's shop.

The rush of work had begun on the sixth day of Hate Week, when‹at the climax of hatred directed at Eurasia‹suddenly Oceania's alliance switched, so that the enemy was now Eastasia and Eurasia was an ally. Remarkably, the change occurred without any admission that it had taken place; the anti-Eurasia posters and propaganda everywhere were suddenly deemed sabotage, the work of Goldstein and his agents, and promptly torn down, while the venomous speaker who had been castigating Eurasia shifted to vilifying Eastasia without losing a beat. During the confusion, Winston is handed a briefcase containing the book.

Winston and his fellow workers at the Ministry had spent 90 hours rewriting history so that no trace of the war with Eurasia could be found in the documents of the past 5 years. After the monumental task had been completed, every Ministry worker had been given the rest of the day off, so Winston had headed for the upstairs room.

As he waits for Julia to arrive, he starts to read the book, entitled The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism. He starts off looking at Chapter 1, entitled "Ignorance is Strength," but breaks off to enjoy the fact that he is reading, and takes up again with Chapter 3, "War is Peace."

This lengthy chapter discusses the history of events that led to the current state of the world with its three superpowers, Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia, and the territory they have theoretically been fighting over for a quarter-century (which comprises a wide swath of land across Africa, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, and Indonesia).

First, the nature of war has changed: it has become continuous, and therefore its aims are different. It is continuous because none of the superpowers could ever win, and unnecessary in the old sense because each could sustain itself materially and ideologically they're almost identical.

According to Goldstein, the aim of warfare is no longer conquest; it is to use up production surplus while not raising the standard of living at home. The reason for this is, essentially, that those in power wish to maintain a hierarchical society‹an aim that was threatened by scientific progress, whereby machines could raise the general standard of living to the point where wealth could theoretically be evenly distributed. Because hierarchy depends on poverty and ignorance, as well as keeping people too busy to complain about conditions, it became the goal of the ruling class to somehow maintain industry while not distributing goods. The only way to do so was continuous warfare, which addresses this need practically but also psychologically, by correctly maintaining the morale of the Party.

As long as they remain at war, the three superstates support one another. The standards of living in all three are actually the same, as are their socio-political systems. The techniques of warfare haven't really changed in 30-40 years, because they don't need to. None of the superstates ever undertakes a major risk, i.e. one that could lead to a serious defeat. Not much fighting really goes on and it never approaches the heartland of any of the three powers, because that would jeopardize cultural integrity and risk people finding that other humans are pretty much the same as they, which could prove the undoing of these governments. Whatever fighting or strategy there is is a dance of alliances, where each power tries to swallow up an ally and then do the same with its remaining opponent.

When war becomes continuous, it is no longer dangerous, therefore no recourse to the past and lessons learned then is necessary; neither is efficiency; neither is any need to even address reality. Reality can be shaped however the ruling class chooses.

Thus war is waged by the state upon its own citizens, not for conquest but for maintaining the social structure. Because its nature has been so altered, and that the same effects can be achieved through a state of peace, "war is peace"‹the true meaning of the Party slogan.

Winston stops reading. The book is reassuring because it helps him to know he is not insane. Julia comes in, and is less interested in the book than in Winston.

Later, as they lie in bed, he starts to read it to her, from Chapter 1, which discusses class differences and the historical nature of the class struggle between High, Middle and Low.

Socialist movements aiming for liberty and equality were more and more openly abandoned over the first half of the twentieth century, until the three currently dominating world movements‹Ingsoc in Oceania, Neo-Bolshevism in Eurasia, and Death-Worship in Eastasia‹had emerged with their new aims of "unfreedom and inequality." Their intent: to become the High, and then freeze the cycle of class struggle so as to permanently maintain their status. To this end, technical advances were anathema because they promoted human equality, which was to be fought at all costs.

By the middle of the century, the new totalitarian forces had emerged from the Middle, but with a difference: they were less concerned with wealth than with power, and they had learned from history how they might maintain their power and stifle all opposition. Technologies enabled 24-hour surveillance and complete mind control; and the "abolition of private property" really meant the appropriation of all property by the Party as a group.

According to history, the new ruling class could only be toppled one of four ways. It could be conquered by an external power; this has effectually ceased to be a possibility with the mutual unconquerability of the three superstates. It could stimulate mass revolt due to its own inefficiency; but the masses have no standards of comparison to even show them the inefficiency or misery of Party rule. It could allow for the rise of a strong Middle class, or it could lose its confidence in itself and its ability to govern through the rise of certain attitudes in its own ranks. These last two comprise an educational problem, and are solved through the use of doublethink and the relative flexibility between the Outer Party and Inner Party. Because Party membership is not hereditary, the Party is not a class in the historical sense; it is concerned with propagating itself, rather than with putting forth its children.

There is a discussion of Oceanic society and a detailed description of the everyday life of a Party member, which delves into the mental disciplines of "crimestop" (the ability to protect yourself from committing thoughtcrime using stupidity), "blackwhite" (either an opponent's insolent claim that black is white, or a Party member's laudable willingness to claim black is white for the Party's sake), and doublethink (which in reality encompasses all).

The alteration of history is explained as having two reasons: to prevent Party members from having a standard of comparison, and to protect the Party's supposed infallibility. "The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc," Goldstein writes, starting to touch upon the issue that haunts Winston. According to Ingsoc, the past is defined by record and memory; and since the Party creates and controls both of those, it creates the past.

Here Goldstein comes to the practice of doublethink, and after a detailed discussion of it (though nothing Winston doesn't already know), claims that ultimately it is doublethink which has allowed the Party to freeze the pendulum of social class struggle, because through doublethink the Party is able to learn from past errors while maintaining the illusion of its infallibility. Through the use of doublethink, the Party is able to create an atmosphere of "controlled insanity," which is the ideal for permanently keeping human equality at bay.

But when Goldstein comes to the central question‹i.e., why is it necessary to forever avoid human equality?‹Winston stops reading, aware that Julia has fallen asleep. He closes the book and reflects that he still doesn't understand why (his question from a previous chapter). He knew everything in those chapters already. But he derives comfort from the feeling that he is not mad, and falls asleep with a feeling that he is safe.

Analysis:

This chapter itself consists almost entirely of an in-depth analysis of Oceanic society. Though it tells us (like Winston) some things we already know, it also fills us in on the historical events that led to the evolution of Orwell's nightmarish world. As before, Julia had been essentially correct in her instinct that the war was not really going on and that the government was waging it upon its own citizens. Clearly, this is why it is so simple for the Party to suddenly change alliances in the middle of Hate Week. Such a maneuver, however, does not seem readily explicable, unless it were purely a drill in doublethink for the entire population (which, after reading Goldstein's explanation of the deliberate uses of doublethink, is quite possible).

What is new to the reader is the information regarding the actual nature of the war between the powers. First, we have not seen any evidence that mass slaughter has not been occurring, until this chapter. In a sense, we have been duped by the closed information in Airstrip One; all we have seen are hate films, posters, and continual reports of the victorious carnage inflicted by Oceania upon whichever enemy she happens to be fighting at the moment. The revelation that not much fighting is actually taking place, and that it never occurs anywhere near the heartland of any of the superstates, is shocking to us because it reveals the depth of the deception, as well as the inhumanity of governments which, rather than protecting their citizens, drop bombs on them to maintain a certain hierarchical social order.

Though they are not surprising, the two aims of the Party are laid out in startlingly stark terms: all research is aimed at discovering how to discover someone's private thoughts, and how to kill hundreds of millions of people instantaneously with no warning. Perhaps no other statement in the book to this point so clearly lays out the Party's calculating destruction of personal freedom and its utter disregard for human rights (despite the fact that it calls itself Socialism). The first part of this speaks to Winston and Julia's earlier conversation about the Party's inability to really get inside a person and find out what s/he thinks. The second hovers as more of a damning political statement by Orwell, warning against totalitarian systems and the dangers of allowing those with little respect for human life to obtain power. Surely Orwell had both Stalin and Hitler, and the knowledge of their horrific slaughter of millions, in mind.

Finally, it may be that it is part of the "controlled insanity" of this world which forms the great sense of irony throughout this chapter. At the start of the chapter, the theoretically rebellious Winston gets caught up in the massive historical correction prompted by Oceania's change of alliances; despite his disbelief in and hatred for the Party, he is just as anxious as the next man to create a really good falsification. At the end of the chapter, it is exceedingly ironic that just as Winston is about to uncover the "central secret" at the heart of Ingsoc, he closes the book and thinks fretfully that he still doesn't understand why everything is happening.

Chapter 10

Summary:

Winston awakens, feeling like he has slept for a long time; but the old-fashioned clock says 8:30, i.e. 20:30. The woman outside starts singing the love song she always sings, waking Julia, who gets up to light the stove. Oddly, there is no oil left, although she had made sure it was full. Remarking that it is colder, she gets dressed; Winston follows suit. He goes to the window and looks out‹no sun. As he watches the prole woman, Julia joins him, and he is surprised to find that he thinks the huge lady beautiful. She must have had many children, he reflects, noting also that he and Julia can never do that; but with hope he thinks about the millions of people like that woman, who live their lives and will eventually rise up to construct a new world. He knows that while he and Julia are dead, they can yet share in the future by somehow passing along the secret that "2 + 2 = 4."

He says, "We are the dead." Julia echoes him.

And then they are startled by a voice from the wall echoing them. "You are the dead."

At last, they have been caught. There had been a telescreen behind the picture. Winston and Julia are ordered to remain still and untouching, in the middle of the room, hands behind their heads, while storm troopers surround the house and burst in through a window.

Winston remains as still as he can, trying to avoid being struck. One of the storm troopers smashes the paperweight. Another hits Julia in the solar plexus, knocking the wind out of her and sending her to the floor. She is picked up and ignominiously carried out as Winston watches helplessly.

Various uninteresting thoughts begin to hit Winston. It becomes apparent that he and Julia have overslept‹that it is now 9:00 in the morning, rather than in the evening. But he does not pursue this train of thought.

Mr. Charrington enters, but he is altered in accent and appearance. Winston realizes that he is a member of the Thought Police.

Analysis:

This chapter embodies within itself an enormous contrast which is very delicately woven. At the start of the chapter is a meditation on life and beauty. The woman hanging diapers on her clothesline represents both; she is beautiful because she is strong, and because in her lie the seeds for a future better existence. Along the same lines, Winston meditates on her probable fecundity and the likely enormity of her family; so many children and grandchildren, again representing life, the future, a trend that has gone on forever and will outlast the Party. As it turns out, the chapter also begins in the morning, and after a rain, though Winston and Julia do not realize this at the time; both the dawn and rain are common symbols of life and rebirth. After drinking hope from the book, Winston is ready to believe in a new beginning.

The grotesque and tragic irony, of course, is that it is in fact the end of Winston and Julia's lives‹both their life together, as lovers, and their physical lives, which will certainly be terminated within a year or two. The end is perhaps hinted at by the chill in the air, which serves the dual purpose of indicating that it is morning and hinting at something unpleasant to come. Appropriately, the end begins with Winston stating, "We are the dead," words previously spoken by himself and O'Brien, and repeated here by Julia and the Thought Policeman behind the telescreen. The process continues, laden with the symbols that have trailed Winston through previous chapters. The glass paperweight, which represented Winston's idyllic world with Julia, is smashed and the coral (once referred to as a symbol of their life together) lost. The new and improved Mr. Charrington quotes the ending of the church bells nursery rhyme, "Here comes a chopper, to chop off your head!", just as the ladder head smashes through the window.

Repetition comes back in a strange and ominous way as the voice from the telescreen repeats what Winston and Julia say almost word for word. In addition, Mr. Charrington's mocking quote of the nursery rhyme seems to bring the inevitable closure to the path Winston started on when he first met Charrington. Repetition has existed as a mind-control device throughout the book; here it takes on the dimension of a threat, as it is used to sow fear and destroy confidence in the thoughtcriminals.

The fundamental battle in this book, which comes out with great clarity here, is the struggle between love and hate. Hate is, as noted previously, the staple of the Party and its nourishment; love, as embodied by Julia and Winston's mother and the prole woman outside the window, is the nourishment of humanity and sanity. At the beginning of the chapter, Winston notes that among the proles the love song has outlived the Hate Song‹perhaps from his hope that love will conquer hate. But by the end, the song is silenced as the Thought Police storm through the woman's yard, and love is banished as Winston and Julia are ordered not to touch one another, and are removed separately.

Part 3

Chapter 1

Summary:

Winston is in the Ministry of Love (he presumes), in a high-ceilinged bare white cell with a telescreen in each wall and a bench running along the perimeter. He has not eaten since he was arrested, and he has no conception of how long ago that was.

Before being brought to this place he had been taken to a prison full of both "common criminals" (i.e. prole gangsters, thieves, prostitutes, etc.) and political prisoners like himself. He notes that the common criminals comport themselves with almost no fear of consequences, in direct contrast to the political prisoners, and that they have set up a sort of hierarchical social order within the prison.

One huge, drunken woman is brought in kicking and screaming and dumped on Winston's lap. She seems to take a liking to him, asks his name, and is surprised to find that it is the same as hers. She speculates that she might be his mother; he reflects that it is possible, given her age and the potential changes time may have wrought.

In this prison, Winston hears for the first time a reference to "Room 101," which he does not understand.

In the cell in the Ministry of Love, Winston has nothing to do except sit still and think. He is so paralyzed by hunger and fear that he cannot even feel for Julia. Dreading torture, he thinks hopefully of the razor blade O'Brien might send.

People start to come into the cell. The first is Ampleforth, the poet from Winston's department. They talk briefly before the telescreen shouts at them to be quiet. After a while, Ampleforth is taken out to Room 101.

The next person to enter is, to Winston's utter surprise, Parsons, whose daughter denounced him to the Thought Police for saying "Down with Big Brother" over and over again in his sleep.

After Parsons is removed, various other prisoners are brought in and taken out. Again, someone is assigned to be taken to Room 101, and Winston observes her fear without comprehending it. A starving man is brought in; everyone in the cell seems to realize at once that he is dying of starvation. Another prisoner, a chinless man, gets up to offer him a crust of bread. The telescreen roars at him to freeze and drop the bread. An officer and a guard enter; the guard smashes the man in the mouth, sending him across the cell and breaking his dental plate.

After this, the starving man is summoned to Room 101. In mortal terror, he flings himself into a posture of supplication, begging them not to send him there. The officer is implacable. The prisoner begs them to do anything to him, anything else but Room 101; still no relenting. Desperately, he tries to point the finger at the chinless man, shrieking that they should be taking him instead; the guards move forward to remove him by force. He grabs one of the iron legs supporting the bench and puts up a surprisingly good fight before his fingers are broken by a vicious kick and he is dragged away.

An unknown amount of time passes, and Winston is alone. He is tortured by hunger, thirst, and panic; he still hopes for the razor blade; his thoughts of Julia are distant and cannot compete with his fright of the pain he knows he will be suffering.

The door opens again, and O'Brien enters. Winston is shocked into forgetting the telescreen for the first time in years. "They've got you too!" he exclaims, to which O'Brien replies, "They got me a long time ago," and steps aside to reveal a guard with a truncheon. O'Brien was not, after all, the co-conspirator Winston had thought; but somehow, now, he sees that he has always known this was the case. This thought flits through his mind almost unnoticed as he watches the guard's truncheon..

The blow falls on Winston's elbow and he is blinded by pain. Writhing on the floor, he cannot think of anything except that there are no heroes in the face of pain.

Analysis:

It is not surprising that from the moment of his discovery, Winston's existence has circled around pain and suffering. Part III of 1984 makes no bones about beginning with misery and even moving from one type to another.

The first degradation is the filthy common prison into which Winston is initially thrown. The difference between common criminals and "polits" is marked and continues to reflect the different status held by proles and Party members in Oceania. The worst the proles have to fear is five years in a forced labor camp, where vice runs free and the experience can be improved with good contacts and savvy. The Party members, on the other hand, are haunted by an unknown uncontrollable‹notably the mysterious and faintly terrifying "Room 101"‹and the knowledge that there is nothing they can do to make what lies ahead bearable. The fact that they are called "political prisoners" of their own government prompts shock in the reader accustomed to political freedom and the right to free speech, but in so doing underscores the brutal truth that the Oceanic government is working against its citizens, not for them.

The second, in some ways more sanitary but far more damaging torture is the suspense in the Ministry of Love. Winston is starved of food, water, sleep, and the possibility of doing anything other than ruminating on the pain that awaits him. His fear of physical pain is prodigious; the fact that it overwhelms his feeling for Julia is ominous and foreboding. As part of his mental torture, his apprehension is allowed to build, so that the chapter's ending with pain is almost a nightmare come true, because though he has been fearing it he has known it would happen.

The chapter is shot through with instances of betrayal. The first instance‹Parsons' daughter's betrayal‹surprises Winston and signifies that things may be worse than he thought, if a loyal Party dupe like Parsons can end up in the Ministry of Love. Although Parsons is convinced he must be guilty (or at least appears convinced, and horrified at his own thoughtcrime), it seems likely to the reader (and probably to Winston as well, given his skeptical "Are you guilty?") that Parsons committed no such deed, and that his daughter simply made it up as part of the greater trend of children betraying their own parents.

The episode involving the starving man trying to escape going to Room 101 demonstrates just how thoroughly the Party has broken all bonds of loyalty and love. At first, the man begs to be allowed to betray himself, i.e. sign any confession no matter whether or not it is true (as it certainly will not be). Then he turns on his own family, telling the officer to go ahead and kill them all right in front of him; again, the family unit is no longer sacrosanct. Finally, and in some way even more awful, the man desperately attempts to implicate the chinless man who had earlier tried to give him bread. The one human act in this horrid place‹the offer of food to a starving fellow‹is completely trampled in the face of personal risk. This incident may hold some sort of vague religious significance: the chinless man offers a sacrifice, his own crust of bread, to one who turns on him and tries to denounce him to the authorities.

O'Brien's betrayal, of course, is the one which perhaps most strongly signifies the beginning of the end. Yet it remains in keeping with a theme of the book, namely, that appearances and realities always clash, and indeed, are usually opposite. O'Brien has achieved something of a double-doublethink: he appears a good Inner Party member who is in fact a member of the Brotherhood, but then his assumed identity as an underground rebel also turns out to be false, merely a trap for landing Winston in the Ministry of Love. However, the intriguing exchange right before Winston is struck with the truncheon begs the question: is it really a betrayal if Winston knew all along? Again, there is a sort of echo of religious tradition: Jesus knew that Judas would betray him "with a kiss." In this case, the kiss may be read as something much more complex, an emotional and intellectual bond between the two men which seems to create fraternity even when one is inflicting the worst humiliation upon the other.

Chapter 2

Summary:

For an indeterminate amount of time, Winston has been tortured, first with frequent and vicious beatings, then with extensive interrogations where the nagging of his questioners wore him down even more than the beatings. He has confessed all manner of impossible crimes and implicated everybody he knows. His memories are discontinuous and in some cases hallucinatory. Through it all he has the sense that O'Brien has been in charge of his life in the Ministry of Love‹that O'Brien dictates when Winston shall be tortured and fed. Winston is not sure when it was, but he recalls hearing a voice telling him not to worry, because "I shall save you, I shall make you perfect." Winston is not certain whether it is O'Brien's voice, but it is the same voice he heard in his old dream.

Winston drifts into a consciousness that he is in a room with O'Brien, strapped to a bed. O'Brien is in control of some sort of pain-generating device which will play a part in the current interrogation.

O'Brien begins by telling Winston that he is insane because he does not have control of his memory, and that he recalls false events. He mentions the photograph of Jones, Rutherford and Aaronson as a hallucination Winston has had‹and then holds up the very photograph. Before Winston's eyes, O'Brien proceeds to dispose of the photograph through a memory hole and immediately deny that it ever existed. Winston feels helpless because he realizes it is quite possible that O'Brien is not lying, that he in fact believes that the photograph never existed.

They talk about the nature of the past and reality; O'Brien tells Winston that reality exists only in the mind of the Party, and that Winston has got to make an effort to destroy himself in order to become "sane." He then asks Winston if he recalls writing in his diary that "Freedom is the freedom to say that 2 + 2 =4," and this touches off a whole round of torture. O'Brien holds up four fingers and asks Winston how many there are, if the Party says there are five. Winston, for a long while, can only see four, and suffers increasing levels of pain for it. O'Brien does not accept Winston merely saying that he sees five; he has to actually believe it. At last, Winston's senses are so dazed by pain that he is no longer sure how many fingers there are.

O'Brien allows him a respite (for which Winston is lovingly grateful), and asks him why he thinks people are brought to the Ministry of Love. When Winston guesses that it is to make people confess or to punish them, O'Brien suddenly becomes quite animated, and almost indignant in his explanation. The point is not to hear about or punish petty crimes; it is to actually change the Party's enemy, i.e. to empty him of himself and his dangerous individualistic ideas, and to fill that void with the Party. This precludes the possibility of martyrdom and the subsequent threat of people rising up against the Party later. Even Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford, O'Brien tells Winston, were in the end filled only with penitence and adoration of Big Brother.

Winston feels that O'Brien's mind contains his own, and is not quite sure which one of them is mad, though he thinks it must be himself since it doesn't seem likely that O'Brien is.

O'Brien looks down at him sternly. He tells him, "What happens to you here is for ever. . . . Things will happen to you from which you could not recover, if you lived a thousand years." These things, notably, will wipe out all human feeling from Winston‹in other words, they will take away his humanity, and he will be nothing but a shell filled with the Party.

At this point, Winston is hooked up to another device which does not pain him but seems to knock out some part of his brain, so that for a short while he can remember nothing of his own accord but merely takes, and believes, whatever O'Brien tells him to be truth. The effect wears off, but it has made its point: that it is, in fact, possible for the Party to get inside him and make him believe its truth.

The session is drawing to its close, and O'Brien mentions how he agrees with Winston's diary entry about how it doesn't matter whether O'Brien was an enemy or a friend because he could be talked to. Magnanimously, he allows Winston to ask any question he desires; but his answers are yet cruel, "truthful" only in the sense that they reference the Party's truth.

Winston realizes suddenly that O'Brien knows what he is going to ask, and he does: "What is in Room 101?" But O'Brien merely responds that everyone knows what is in Room 101, and Winston is put to sleep.

Analysis:

The torture Winston suffers, and the manner in which it is recounted, indicates that they are breaking him in a more subtle way than he is aware of. Because we are given the description through Winston's memories, and his memories are both dreamlike and discontinuous, we can tell that his links to reality are being weakened. He is, again, anchored to a physical reality by pain‹that has not been a dream‹but it is also the means of weaning him from his mental perception of reality. The very process is, yet again, like an exercise in doublethink and contradiction.

O'Brien himself embodies a highly puzzling contradiction. He is an odd sort of father-figure, both a stern disciplinarian and a protector. His tone towards Winston vacillates between an almost tender gentleness, the patient persistence of a mentor, and the sternness of a stormy, displeased god. When he relieves Winston's physical pain, Winston feels an instinctual love for O'Brien as though he were his father; but Winston knows that O'Brien is also the administrator of the pain. It seems that the only way this can be possible is if O'Brien is truly convinced that he is "saving" Winston and that pain and humiliation are the only way to do so.

Eerily, O'Brien seems a mix of the medieval Inquisitor and the modern man of science, using advanced technology to "treat" his "patient," yet echoing the medieval practice of torturing those deemed mentally insane. O'Brien's own intellect must be highly honed in order to doublethink, i.e. in order to believe what his own senses tell him to be false; yet his methods and what he believes are primeval and brutally inhuman.

Perhaps because of this strange mix, Winston views O'Brien in the light of a deity, reflecting the "worship" he felt for him in earlier chapters. O'Brien's godlike persona is given added aura by the fact that he seems to know what is on Winston's mind: knowing what he is feeling and what he wants to ask. Yet this power hints horrifyingly at the possibility that Winston and Julia were wrong to assume that the Party is unable to penetrate a person's mind. Indeed, the whole chapter points in this direction (especially with the use of the machine that knocks out a part of Winston's memory), spelling doom for Winston and Julia.

Chapter 3

Summary:

Some time has passed. After innumerable sessions with O'Brien, Winston has completed the first "stage in his re-integration"‹learning‹and O'Brien judges that it is time for him to move on to the second, understanding.

O'Brien quotes Winston's diary entry about understanding "how" but not "why." He mentions Goldstein's book, informing Winston that he was one of the people who wrote it, and that it is true as a description of the world but that its discussion of insurrection is nonsense and impossible; the Party, he says, will rule forever, and Winston must get that into his head.

That said, he turns to the question of why the Party holds onto its power. Winston answers incorrectly and suffers for it. O'Brien answers his own question: "The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake." Power is defined as something that must be collective, and as power over human beings. Almost as an aside, O'Brien says the Party already controls matter. Winston, roused, argues that they do not, but O'Brien silences him using plenty of doublethink, and returns to the idea of holding power over men.

Since power over others depends on making the subject suffer, the Party's view of the future is a world based upon hatred, fear, and destruction. All instincts of love and beauty will be eradicated and only power, ever more refined and absolute, will remain.

Winston, horrified, again attempts to argue against the possibility that such a world could ever last eternally. When O'Brien asks why Winston thinks it should fail, he cites his belief that the spirit of man will prevail. Ironically, O'Brien asks Winston if he thinks he is a man. Winston replies that he does. O'Brien tells him that he must be the last man, and bids him take off his clothes and go look in the mirror at the end of the room.

When Winston sees himself, he has a nasty shock. He is a skeleton, dirty, broken, disgusting. He is, as O'Brien cruelly emphasizes, falling apart. He breaks down into tears. Once again, O'Brien's manner changes to near-kindness, as he tells Winston that he can get himself out of this state because he got himself into it. He lists the humiliations Winston has suffered, and asks him whether there is a single degradation he has not experienced. Winston looks up and replies that he has not betrayed Julia.

O'Brien seems to understand this, and agrees, looking at Winston thoughtfully. Far from taking this as any sort of hint, Winston is flooded with his old worship of O'Brien, almost grateful that he has understood without explanation.

Analysis:

Almost immediately at the start of the chapter, Winston is once again hit with the overwhelming lack of truth inherent in his society, in the discovery that O'Brien is one of the authors of "Goldstein's book." Even the book is not really a subversive text, but a creation of the Party and a tool to catch dissidents. Previously it has been mentioned that O'Brien has been watching Winston for seven years, and the revelation of the book's inauthenticity in addition to other small facts leads us to the conclusion that Winston's downfall has been in the making for much longer than even he realized, and that outside help prodded it along. Everything has been geared to Winston's arrest and "re-integration," showing us just how claustrophobic and closely-watched Winston's world has been.

Repeatedly, O'Brien strikes Winston as a lunatic, but one particularly dangerous because of his powerful intellect. For example, Winston had assumed the Party would claim to hold onto its power because that was what was best for the majority. O'Brien's frankness is startling, and his wild enthusiasm for the idea is disturbing. His discussion of desiring power for its own sake is at once incisive in its penetration of human motive and nonsensical in its lack of perspective. To a degree, O'Brien's fanaticism is even reflected in his indifference toward his own death; he believes so fully in the Party and the propagation of its power that he can look on his own demise with no feeling.

The theme of the Party as a religion, seen in the very first chapter, takes on heightened importance through what is revealed by O'Brien's discussion of power. "We are the priests of power," O'Brien says. "God is power." The Party, in effect, wants to become God. In the previous chapter, during the discussion about changing enemies, he said, "our command is, ŒThou art.'" It is the power of creation and utter control over creation that the Party desires. The claim of being able to control matter‹a claim made almost in passing‹exemplifies the Party's aspirations to achieve deification. (The imposingly tall Ministry of Love can even be seen as symbolic of the Tower of Babel, through which people had attempted to reach heaven and "sit with God.")

The chapter closes with a curious exchange about death, which reveals something about their respective understandings of the current situation. Winston asks when he will be shot; O'Brien replies that it may be a long time, but not to worry, because he will definitely be shot in the end. Both men view death as a redemption, but in different ways. Winston wants to die to escape from his pain and the lunacy of the world surrounding him; O'Brien views it as something that will only happen once Winston has been "cured," something devoutly to be wished as protection against further corruption once the mind has been cleared of all anti-Party sentiment.

Chapter 4

Summary:

More time has passed, and Winston is no longer being tortured. In fact, he is being fed and kept clean and allowed to sleep. At first he is only interested in sleep and no conscious mental activity; he dreams abundantly, always happy peaceful dreams, with Julia, his mother, or O'Brien‹the three people he cares about.

Gradually he grows stronger, though he is shocked at how weak he had become. Correspondingly, his mind becomes more active, and he sits down to try and re-educate himself. He reviews everything he has been told, writes down Party slogans and falsities such as "2 + 2 = 5," all the while reflecting how easy it has been to mentally surrender, to "think as they think."

Still, he is troubled by some mental objections, and tries to practice crimestop, which is the conscious stopping of thought before it leads you into thoughtcrime. He finds that it is difficult to attain the stupidity necessary to avoid seeing blatant logical flaws. At the back of his mind, he wonders how soon he will be shot. The only thing he knows is that they always shoot you in the back of the head.

Winston has a dream or reverie in which he is walking down the corridor, waiting to be shot, feeling happy and at peace. He walks into the Golden Country..

Suddenly he bolts awake, having heard himself cry out longingly for Julia.

He had had a fleeting sensation of her being inside him, and at that moment had loved her more than at any previous moment. Somehow he feels she is still alive and that she needs his help.

Despairing, Winston lies back, waiting for the tramp of boots in the corridor. His thoughtcrime sprang from the fact that while he has tamed his mind to the Party, he has tried to keep his innermost self‹his heart‹away from them. He wonders how much time he has added to his torment by the cry.

Rebelliously, he decides to lock his hatred of the Party so far inside him that it is even a secret from himself, and envisions the final moment where, just before the bullet hits him, all his hatred would explode. This, he feels, is the last avenue of freedom open to him: to have his final heretical thought right before their bullet reached him.

But this will be difficult. He thinks of Big Brother and wonders what he really feels toward him.

O'Brien enters at that moment with an officer and guards. He orders Winston to stand up and examines him. He asks Winston what he feels towards Big Brother. Winston replies that he hates him. The last step, O'Brien tells him, is to learn to love Big Brother, and he orders Winston to be taken to Room 101.

Analysis:

During his self-re-education, we see the somewhat pathetic tragedy of what Winston has become. He tells himself things in direct rebuttal to previous thoughts‹for example, "Sanity [is] statistical," the exact opposite to what he had thought the evening before his capture. Like the other Outer Party sheep, he repeats slogans to himself, emphasizing the privileging of rote over thought. However, despite his efforts, Winston's thoughts keep getting interrupted with "only‹!" and "except‹!" This technique shows the inner struggle taking place in Winston's mind. These may be examples of attempts at crimestop. But importantly, it shows that Winston is still not converted to the Party. This is also shown by the more extensive objection his mind presents to the argument that O'Brien could float off the floor if both he and Winston believe it.

Winston fights a desperate inner battle during this chapter, because he begins with an earnest effort to bend his mind to the Party's. He thinks about how he knows now that they have been watching him for seven years, and that it was futile to try and stand against them. However, his cry for Julia (discussed in more detail below) reignites his desire to fight against them using their own despicable weapon of hatred, and all pretense of accepting the Party line is dropped. He has been fighting himself and his own tendencies, and in the end finds he cannot.

The climax of this chapter, when Winston cries aloud for Julia, is in a sense the climax of the book. It is the most insidious instance of thoughtcrime because it emerges beyond Winston's conscious control, revealing his true feelings. Only after this moment does Winston think much more candidly about his hates and his loves. He admits to himself that he does not really buy into the Party's doctrines and slogans, that he hates the Party, that he still wishes to be free from it. Unfortunately, although the incident brings Winston to a truth about himself, it is his undoing and leads him to the final stage where he does in fact betray Julia.

Chapter 5

Summary:

Winston has been taken to Room 101 and strapped into a chair. O'Brien enters and tells him what is in Room 101: the worst thing in the world, which varies between individuals but is always something unendurable to the person in the chair. For Winston, it is rats.

A mask with a cage attached to it is brought in. From its construction, it is clear that the mask is designed to fit over Winston's face, and at the pulling of a lever, the rats inside the cage‹enormous, ravenous brutes‹will be free to attack him.

O'Brien casually mentions Winston's recurring nightmare, and tells him what he already knows: that behind the dark wall of his nightmare were rats. Winston, beyond panic, begs O'Brien to tell him what he wishes him to do. O'Brien does not answer, but engages in a sort of ponderous mental torture by bringing the contraption closer and pedantically musing on rats.

Winston's terror increases, but at the last moment it occurs to him what must be done, and that is to beg that this be done to Julia rather than to him.

He has saved himself; O'Brien shuts the cage door rather than opens it.

Analysis:

Winston is broken only in this, the second-to-last chapter, by being forced into the final betrayal of Julia. Julia is the only person in the world whom Winston could have thrust between himself and the rats because she is the only person standing between him and love of Big Brother. As long as Winston loved Julia, and what she represented to him, he was able to believe in himself and his humanity enough to hate Big Brother. Once he betrays that love, he violates his own humanity and can no longer love another human. And in Oceanic society, the only entity it is acceptable to love is Big Brother, the "face" of the Party.

Orwell makes masterful use of contrast to heighten the suspense and terror of the scene. First, he alternates between the calm O'Brien and the mortally terrified Winston in a slow, tortured buildup where every sound and every smell is meticulously described. Second, O'Brien as usual presents a contrast in himself: his tone is calm, distanced, yet his actions are calculatedly merciless and the content of his speech is brutal. He sends chills down the reader's spine as well as Winston's with his displaced tranquility.

The entire Room 101 episode begs the question: How does O'Brien know about Winston's recurring rat nightmares? Indeed, how does the Party know what the worst thing in the world is for anyone who is summoned to Room 101? The fact that somehow they do prompts the suggestion that perhaps the Party has planted nightmares of various kinds in people's consciousness. Whose consciousness, whose memories are they after all? Winston's mind no longer seems to be his own. It might never have been, if the Party has shaped his entire life experience, planting dreams, memories and nightmares in him from an early age. The strange coincidences of earlier chapters‹the existence of the Golden Country, the ubiquitousness of the nursery rhyme, O'Brien knowing about Winston's dreams‹would be explained if they were not coincidences at all, but calculated. If this is the case, then once again, the Party is revealed to have far deeper control over its members than we have yet imagined. And in this case, Julia would be wrong: they can get inside you.

Chapter 6

Summary:

It is 15:00 and Winston sits alone in the Chestnut Tree Cafe. He is anxiously listening for news of the war with Eurasia.

However, Winston is not able to keep his mind on one topic for very long these days, and he gulps down his glass of clove-flavored gin. He is fatter and pinker now‹to the point of looking unhealthy. Without being asked, a waiter brings him the current issue of the Times, opened to the chess problem, and a chessboard; he sees that Winston's glass is empty and refills it. The waiters know Winston's habits and bill him irregularly (and, he suspects, they undercharge him), though with his new higher-paying job this wouldn't have presented a problem either way.

An announcement from the Ministry of Plenty reveals that Oceania is in the midst of the Tenth Three-Year Plan. Winston starts to attack the chess problem. The telescreen announcer advises everyone to listen for an important announcement at 15:30, which Winston knows must be about the fighting in Africa. He has the sinking feeling that it will be bad news; the thought that this could lead to the end of the Party triggers a powerful but unclear reaction in him. He imagines a mysterious force assembling to the rear of the Eurasian army, cutting off its communications, and feels that by willing it he can bring that force into existence.

His thoughts wander; almost unconsciously he traces the equation "2 + 2 = 5" on the table. He recalls Julia saying "They can't get inside you," but knows she is wrong; he remembers O'Brien saying "What happens to you here is for ever," and knows he is right.

He had encountered Julia one freezing, dead March day in the Park. Knowing that the Party no longer cared about what he did, he had followed her, but not very eagerly. Something about her had changed. She had not been particularly excited about having him around, but resigned herself. They walked. He had put his arm around her waist; she did not respond. He had realized that the change in her was not so much the scar across her face or her pallor, but that her waist had thickened and stiffened into something like a corpse or marble.

They did not speak or kiss. When Julia looked at him, it was with contempt and dislike. They seated themselves on a bench and finally Julia had said, "I betrayed you." He told her he had betrayed her as well. From her explanation‹that they threaten you with the unendurable and you place your loved one inside it instead of yourself, thereby changing forever how you feel about the person‹it seems apparent that she, too, had been taken to Room 101.

There was nothing more to say, and they had parted uncomfortably, with empty words about meeting again, but really only the desire to get away from one another.

Recalling Julia's words about betrayal, Winston reflects that he had really wished for her to be devoured by the rats instead of himself‹but before he can even get to the word "rats" in his thoughts (which we know he will never do anyway), a voice from the telescreen starts to sing, "Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me . . ."

Winston's eyes fill with tears. A waiter passes by and refills his glass; he thinks about how dependent he has become on gin, drinking it every hour of the day. No one cares how he spends his days. His "job" involves dealing with trivialities that arise from the current work being done on the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary. His sub-sub-committee consists of four other people like himself.

He thinks briefly again about the struggle in Africa, then picks up a chess piece, and somehow triggers a memory of his childhood. His mother, after entreating him to be good, had bought him the game Snakes and Ladders, and although he had not been interested in it at first, he was soon captivated, and the three of them had a happy, enjoyable afternoon.

Recalling himself, Winston shakes this off as a false memory, and is picking up the chess piece again when a trumpet-call from the telescreen startles him. The trumpet-call always signifies a victory, and excitement spreads through the cafe and the streets like wildfire. The announcement is that the very strategy Winston had imagined has taken place, utterly defeating Eurasia and giving Oceania control of all of Africa.

Caught up in the excitement of this news, Winston looks up at the portrait of Big Brother, overwhelmed, and feels the "final, healing change":

He loves Big Brother.

Analysis:

Early on in the chapter, we know Winston has changed beyond recognition, because he is actively listening to the telescreen. He is worried about the news, his mind is fretfully unable to dwell on any subject for more than a few minutes, and he is constantly reminding himself of how the Party is right. He still has memories, though he doesn't listen to them: the smell of gin reminds him of the smell of the rats when they were near to his face, but he doesn't even name the rats in his thoughts (testament to the unspeakable and lasting trauma of his experience in Room 101). He recalls his mother's buying him Snakes and Ladders, but pushes it aside as a false memory. In short, he has been broken.

Winston ends just as Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford did, in the same cafe, with the same habits and even the same experience. History is repeating itself because no one has the past to refer to and learn from. Some of the passage is even quoted word for word from Part I, Chapter 7, when Winston recalls seeing Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford in the Chestnut Tree Cafe: "It was the lonely hour of fifteen. A tinny music trickled [was trickling] from the telescreens." Perhaps the most poignant moment (and a direct repetition of the past) is when, after thinking about his betrayal of Julia, he hears the "chestnut tree" song and his eyes well up. For what is he weeping? It seems most likely to be for his lost humanity‹he has betrayed himself as well as Julia by betraying his love for her.

Both he and Julia are permanently debilitated, as O'Brien had said they would be, after their time in the Ministry of Love. It appears likely that love becomes impossible after Room 101 because it causes the victim to hate him- or herself. It forces the person to betray those whom s/he loves, and in doing so incur self-despisement and contempt, for having sunken so far beneath humanity as to lose one's own. And once a person has lost his/her ability to love him/herself, s/he has lost the ability to love anyone else. Hence the chill between Winston and Julia.

When Winston thinks that a defeat in Africa might mean the end of the Party, his reaction is strong but ambiguous: "An extraordinary medley of feelings . . . [or] rather . . . successive layers of feeling . . . struggled inside him." The very next sentence, "The spasm passed," seems to indicate the possibility that the feeling‹like the rats, unnamed by Winston‹is an undesirable one, i.e. unorthodox and therefore categorized as a spasm rather than a positive and conscious thought. But even so, it is by no means logical to conclude that if the Party were defeated, Winston would be in any sort of position to accept it; he has been so indoctrinated and "filled" with the Party that he might not be able to take the shock of its sudden destruction. He has become an extension of the Party.

This seems to be borne out by a small but significant and strange episode in this chapter. The fact that the winning maneuver is something that Winston had envisioned a half-hour before the announcement re-opens the puzzling questions of consciousness and mind-reading that have cropped up earlier in the book. Previously, we have seen how O'Brien has somehow anticipated not only Winston's actions, but his thoughts, and also how O'Brien has an inexplicable knowledge of Winston's dreams and inner life. Now it is Winston who seems to be able to will a successful war strategy into existence. It remains unclear whether Winston has heard what he has wanted to hear, i.e. something in tune with his own thoughts, or whether the Party planted the thought in his head in the first place, or whether he has somehow influenced the course of events simply by his own willpower. While this may never be resolved, it seems at any rate to underscore Winston's complete re-integration into the Party.

Winston feels oddly free at the end, in an ironic fantasy where he is back in the Ministry of Love, confessing everything and being forgiven, being executed with the "long-hoped-for bullet." His vision of his death now reconciles with O'Brien's as a final, joyous release. In fact, he has capitulated completely to O'Brien's demands: he has "won the victory over himself" and learned to love Big Brother. The Ministry of Love has, in fact, been rightly named. It is not hard to conjecture that the "long-hoped-for bullet" will not be much longer in coming.

Appendix

Summary:

The Appendix details the underlying principles of Newspeak (essentially that it was designed to limit the range of thought), and details the word classes as follows:

The A vocabulary consisted of everyday words used in the expression of simple thoughts, usually involving concrete objects or physical actions.

The B vocabulary consisted of words created to hold political connotations and impose a politically desirable state of mind upon the user. These were all compound words, like "Ingsoc" or "doublethink." Many meant the opposite of what they really were, in keeping with the concept of doublethink.

The C vocabulary consisted of scientific and technical terms which it behooved no one but scientists and technicians to use.

The grammar of Newspeak had two notable characteristics:

1. There was an almost complete interchangeability between different parts of speech. A noun and verb were basically the same, and formed the root for all other forms of the word. Adjectives were formed by tacking "-ful" onto the end of the word; adverbs, by adding the suffix "-wise." Any word could be negated by the prefix "un-," and other prefixes like "plus-" and "doubleplus-" could strengthen the word.
   
2. The grammar was exceedingly regular, with very few exceptions. All past tenses were formed using "-ed," all plurals with "-s" or "-es," and comparatives with "-er" and "-est."

Euphony was privileged above everything, including grammatical regularity, except precision of meaning. This is because the end goal was to produce words that could be spoken so quickly that they would not have the time to prompt thought; in other words, so that people could speak without thinking at all.

The meanings of Newspeak words were carefully controlled so that in many cases most connotations were destroyed. For instance, the word "free" still existed, but only in the sense of something being "free from" something else, e.g. "This field is free from weeds." It could not be used with reference to political freedom, as this meaning had been drilled out of the word.

This also precluded the ability to argue heretical opinions. Though, for instance, it would have been possible to say "Big Brother is ungood," there were not the words necessary to defend or argue this assertion. Through this process, Oldspeak would become not only obsolete but impossible to understand or translate, since its words hold meanings and can express ideas that would be inexpressible in Newspeak (except using the single word "crimethink").

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