Winston is obsessed by the past. He wants to know how life was before Big Brother came to power. He knows something is wrong now, that Big Brother hasn’t been here since the end of time. Although Big Brother is claiming to be present since the beginning of time and what Big Brother says is true. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right. I know, of course that the past is falsified, but it would never be possible for me to prove it, even when I did the falsification myself.(p. 148 / Ch. 5). Winston still has memories from the past and he knows that things were different around a hundred years ago. And yet to the people of only two generations ago, this would not have seemed all-important, because they were not attempting to alter history. (p. 157 / Ch. 7). The only thing he is not sure about, is his memory. Winston does not know if he can trust his mind. The only evidence is inside my own mind, and I don’t know with any certainty that any other human being shares my memories. (p. 148 / Ch. 5). Winston seeks desperately for someone who can acknowledge all the things he remembers. In the end of Part One he talks to an old man in a pub, and to Mr. Charrington, the owner of the old antique shop. He knows Julia is not the person to talk to. She had no memories of anything before the early ‘sixties (p. 125 / Ch. 3). So Winston is stuck with this feeling for reassurance of the different past. Winston still has a lot of memories. He thinks about his parents. In the dream he had remembered his last glimpse of his mother (p. 153 / Ch. 7) and His father had disappeared some time earlier. (p. 153 / Ch. 7). He also thinks about his wife, although this is a negative thought. Katherine, in any case, had long ceased to be a painful memory and become merely a distasteful one (p. 127 / Ch. 3). Winston has a strong feeling about his past. He still remembers there was not much to eat and he felt hungry all the time. He remembered (…) above all, the fact that there was never enough to eat. (p. 153 / Ch. 7). Winston even dreamed of his mother. He always thought he had murdered her, but know he knows that it’s not the truth. There was the dream itself, and there was a memory connected with it that had swum into his mind in a few seconds after waking. (p. 152 / Ch. 7).

At the sixth day during Hate Week, there was a sudden change of enemies and allies. At just this moment it had been anounced that Oceania was not after all at war with Eurasia. Oceania was at war with Eustasia. Eurasia was an ally. (p. 171 / Ch. 9). The people were confused and were even embarrassed that they made the wrong signs. After a few minutes of uproar, they just accepted the change of facts. The next moment there was a tremendous commotion. (…) But within two or three minutes it was all over (…) The Hate continued exactly as before, except that the target had been changed. (p. 172 / Ch. 9). Winston worked hard to rectify all the changes that had to be made in history. Oceania was at war with Eustasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eustacia. A large part of the political literature of five years was now completely obsolete. (p. 172 / Ch. 9). He knows that the history is altered and that Big Brother could wipe you out of existence. Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever heard of again. You were lifted clean out of the stream of history.(p. 157 / Ch. 7). Winston knows is, though there is nothing he can do about it.

The most striking memory is the one of the St. Clement’s rhyme. Julia still remembers the last two lines. I can’t remember how it goes on after that. But anyway I remember it ends up, “Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head” (p. 140 / Ch. 4). This is a foreshadowing to the last chapter of the second part, where Julia and Winston are caught by the Thoughtpolice. And then anothere quite different voice, a thin, cultivated voice which Winston had the impression of having heard before, struck in: ‘And by the way, while we are on the subject, “Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop of your head!” (p. 209 / Ch. 10). Memory and the history are very important to Winston. It reassures him that the things he remembers are true indeed and that he is not a lunatic.

There are three stages for Winston’s re-integration; there is learning, there is understanding, and there is acceptance. Winston now enters upon the second stage: understanding. In his diary, he had said: ‘I understand how: I do not understand why.’ So he does understand how the Party maintains itself in power. But why? On page 249 O’Brien gives the answer to his own question: ‘The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites.’ The whole idea of the Party is power. According to O’Brien, Winston doesn’t know what power is so he keeps on explaining: page 250, ‘It is time for you to gather some idea of what power means. The first thing you must realize is that power is collective. (…) The second thing for you to realize is that power is power over human beings. Over the body – but, above all, over the mind.’ Winston doesn’t buy it. He doesn’t believe you can control matter if you can’t even control the climate or the law of gravity. But O’Brien says that there is nothing that they can’t do. He even claims he could float off the floor like a soap bubble if he would have wished to. But he doesn’t wish to do that, for the Party doesn’t wish him to. ‘We make the laws of Nature’. Winston doesn’t agree to this either and tries every possible thing to prove it to O’Brien, but he has a counter argument to everything. It was no use. Whatever he said, the swift answer crushed him like a bludgeon. O’Brien proceeds. The way one man asserts his power over another is by making him suffer. Page 252: ‘Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of you own choosing.’ This is also what they are doing to Winston. They are brainwashing him totally and tearing his mind to pieces. O’Brien is now trying to put it back together in a new shape of his own choosing. He must make Winston understand what power is everything. O’Brien also describes Oceania, of what it would be like in the future, the world they are now creating: page 252 and 253, ‘A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will e no emotions accept fear, rage, triumph and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy – everything.’ (…) ‘There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science.’ (…) ‘But always – do not forget this, Winston – always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler.’ ‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.’ That is what the world looks like, which the Party is trying to make. Winston doesn’t believe they will be capable of that though. He has no idea why not, but he just doesn’t believe in it. According to the Party, there is also not such a thing as human beings. The mankind is extinct, for Winston claims himself to be one. So when Winston says he considers himself a man he is asked to undress and take a look at himself. When Winston does he is really shocked, for he looks awful. He feels like he has lost everything. The idea that he hadn’t betrayed Julia yet, makes him feel better though. Though he knows that he has been beaten.

ESSAY chapter 5 - Falling
From the beginning of the chapter onward, you know something terrible is going to happen. Page 267: ‘The cells where the guards had beaten him were below ground level. This place was many meters underground, as deep down as it was possible to go.’ This shows Winston is buried in a place far underground. This doesn’t predict a positive thing. In this part of the book, Winston is falling in different ways. As soon as he gets to see the rats he gets frantic and therefore falling away from the real world. He is really terrified. However, he is also falling for he betrayed Julia. At the end of chapter 3 of part 3, the only thing he could still be happy about, was that he hadn’t betrayed Julia. Though now, that was gone as well, and in a way he had betrayed himself too. Betraying Julia was the thing O’Brien wanted from Winston. That was the only thing left he hadn’t reached yet. He knew how much Winston dreaded rats and took advantage of that. Page 268: ‘If you are falling from a height it is no cowardly to clutch at a rope. It is merely an instinct which cannot be disobeyed. It is the same with the rats. For you, they are unendurable. They are a form of pressure that you cannot withstand, even if you wished to. You will do what is required of you.’ Not very long after having seen the creatures in the cage, he almost loses consciousness because of his instinctive behavior. Orwell has written a few passages in which Winston is so frightened that he is not aware of his surroundings anymore. Page 269: ‘He was in the middle of a great empty plain, a flat desert drenched with sunlight, across which all sounds came to him out of immense distances.’ ‘It seemed to reach Winston from far away.’ Page 270: ‘There was a violent convulsion of nausea inside him, and he almost lost consciousness. Everything had gone black. For an instant he was insane, a screaming animal.’ ‘Again the black panic took hold of him. He was blind, helpless, mindless.’By these examples, you can see there really wasn’t anything worse for him in the whole world. He would never have betrayed Julia, but now he feels there is no other option. If he would want to survive, he would have to deceive her. While screaming that they should do it to her, he really means it, from the bottom of his heart. He would have done anything to keep the rats away from his sight and that is what O’Brien wanted to achieve, to break Winston’s spirit. Page 271: ‘He was falling backwards, into enormous depths, away from the rats. He was still strapped in the chair, but he had fallen through the floor, through the walls of the building, through the earth, through the oceans, through the atmosphere, into outer space, into the gulfs between the starts – always away, away, away from the rats.’ So this is how he feels when there is still a possibility the rats are close. He doesn’t feel safe until he hears the click of the cage, which suggested that it had been closed. So the symbol falling comes back in the chapter in various ways. Though the most important way is the fact that he deceived Julia and thus letting her fall too.

Literary Journal Part One

Chapter 1

Summary:

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” Winston comes home ‘Victory Mansions’, walks up the stairs, there are posters with a man with a big moustache and the caption BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU at every floor. In his apartment is a ‘telescreen’, which is broadcasting someone reading a list of figures, the device can’t be switched off, and it receives and transmits at the same time. You don’t know if you’re being watched. There are police helicopters, but only the thought police matters. He’s in London, capital of the province Airstrip One in Oceania. Newspeak is to local official language. There are 4 big buildings in London, the 4 ministries: minitrue (ministry of truth: propaganda), miniluv (love: police, justice), miniplenty (plenty: economics), minipax (peace: war). These buildings are huge.

Winston has a small alcove in his room in which he can’t be seen by the telescreen, he sits there and writes in his diary about a movie with lots of gore.

At Winston’s work, he has occasionally seen a dark haired girl, he dislikes her, as he does most women. He thinks she likes the regime and might even be part of the thought police. There is also a man, and during a ritual called the Two Minute Hate, Winston thinks he sees in this man, called O’Brien, his face, a sign that he doesn’t like the regime either. The 2 minute hate starts, there’s a crowd gathered in front of a big screen, and there’s lots of screaming, and the crowd is trained to hate a man, Emmanuel Goldstein, who’s face is displayed on the screen. He is supposedly part of an underground movement against Big Brother. The crowd is then subconsciously trained to be happy when they see BIG BROTHER, and they see the Party slogans: war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength. Winston catches O’Brien’s eye, and knows his previous thoughts to be true. He writes DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER in his diary. This was no more lethal then writing anything in the diary, and no more lethal then not writing anything down, because it’s all the same crime: thoughtcrime, and the thought police will undoubtedly get him. Winston realises this, because he writes down that they will shoot him.

Character Development:

Winston is ‘created’ in this chapter, we learn he has some form of memory, and knows ‘it’ wasn’t always like this. We learn he doesn’t like BIG BROTHER, and wants to rebel against the system, although probably not physically, because he is a weak man, but he writes his rebellious ideas down. The fact that he has those ideas will probably get him killed. He vaguely knows two other people, one is a dark haired girl whom he doesn’t like very much, because he thinks she might be with the thought police. There is also a man called O’Brien, and Winston thinks he also has certain rebellious ideas.

Chapter 2

Summary:

Winston opens the door, then realises his diary with all the dangerous texts is out in the open, and he fears whoever is at his door will see it, and he fears it’s the thought police, but it is just his neighbour, Mrs Parsons, who wants him to fix her sink. He helps out, her children are with the junior spies, an organisation encouraging children to monitor adults, and especially their parents, for thoughtcrime, and, if the find those adults guilty, to report them. They accuse him of thoughtcrime, Mrs Parsons is afraid of her own children, because they’re angry at her, for she won’t allow them to go to a public hanging of certain enemies of the state.

When Winston is back in his apartment he remembers a dream that he had 7 years ago about a voice, which he thinks is O’ Brian’s, saying they shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.

Character Development:

Mrs Parsons is introduced in this chapter, she is afraid of her own children, who accuse everyone of thoughtcrime.

Winston is very well aware of the fact that his thoughtcrime will kill him, he writes in his diary ‘thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death’.

Chapter 3

Summary:

Winston dreams of his mother. He does not know how she and his little sister disappeared, but he does know that their lives were sacrificed for his. He feels very guilty about this. He thinks her kind of suffering, tragedy, is no longer possible, because it requires privacy, love and friendship. Winston wakes up by a sharp whistle. He badly has to cough. The telescreen then forces him to do gymnastics. While he does these exercises he tries to remember his childhood, he recalls parts of the first air raid he experiences. He also knows that, although the government says Oceania is, and therefore always was, at war with Eurasia, this has not always been the case. All these thoughts cause him to not do his exercises properly, and the telescreen yells at him, using his name and number, to bend lower. He tries harder and gets complemented by the telescreen.

Character Development:

Winston is one of the few people in Oceania with any memory of the past. He knows history is changed by the Party, by changing anything that has recorded it; this is his job. Winston has (indirectly) caused his mother and sister’s death. He feels guilty about this. The state has not always been run by the Party, they came somewhere around 1960, but history makes it seem like they were there 30 years earlier already. Winston is made to look more sick and weak in this chapter.

Chapter 4

Summary:

Winston’s job is described in this chapter. Winston gets orders in newspeak, to modify ‘rectify’, certain data in the Times, the newspaper, which in it present form would be some form of evidence showing The Party has not succeeded in what they promised, so Winston modifies those promises, so the present achievements are much better then expected. He also gets some bigger assignments in which he has to rewrite an entire article, because it is about people who have been vaporised by The Party, and they want to remove any evidence that that person has ever existed. Winston makes up a person, and writes a small article about him.

Chapter 5

Summary:

At lunch, in a basement in the minitrue, Winston talks to Syme, a man who is concerned with the development of newspeak. He explains that the purpose of newspeak is to reduce the number of words available in a language, thereby reducing the ability to express one’s self, which is very much a purpose in itself for The Party. Eventually, it is supposed to make people unable to think anything negative about The Party, and Big Brother. Once everyone speaks newspeak, no one will be able to read anything written in old speak anymore, which is potential evidence against The Party, except for the proles, the lowest class in society, but when Winston says this, Syme replies that the proles aren’t people.

Mr Parsons, Winston’s neighbour comes and requests a ‘voluntary’ contribution from him for hate week. He apologises for the behaviour of his children, but he is proud of them.

Character Development:

Syme is introduced here. He works on updating newspeak. Unlike most languages this does not mean adding words, but removing them. Winston knows that Syme will eventually be killed, because he knows too much about oldspeak (traditional English).

Mr Parsons is introduced here. He apologises to Winston for his children accusing him of thought crime, but he is proud of them for being so alert, and talks proudly about an incident where they set someone who they believe to be a thought criminal on fire.

Chapter 6

Summary:

Winston remembers visiting a prole prostitute. We learn that The Party arranges marriages between people for whom it is impossible to like each other, to avoid having them form loyalties to anything other than The Party. Winston’s ex-wife Katharine hated sex, but he had to do it nonetheless, because, as she said, it was their ‘duty to the Party’ to reproduce. There are organizations encouraging both sexes to be completely celibate, and to have all children created by artificial insemination.

Character Development:

We learn that Winston has been married in this chapter. The chapter to some extent tries to make Winston’s dislike for women plausible.

Chapter 7

Summary:

“If there is hope, wrote Winston, it lies in the proles.”. The proles are about 85 percent of Oceania’s total population. As Syme pointed out earlier, they are considered by many of the inner and outer party members to be at the same level as animals. They are the poorest social-economic class in 1984’s society. Most of the laws The Party makes are not for the proles. Winston thinks that once the proles realize the bad position they are in, they will revolt, and be able to overturn the system. He believes that only the proles, so not ‘The Brotherhood’ which Emmanuel Goldstein is supposedly part of, are capable of that.

Winston copies part of a children’s textbook which he has borrowed from Mrs Parsons, and it is filled with propaganda saying that before The Party, London was not beautiful as it is now, but a dark and miserable place, and it explains, in a negative context, the feudal system. He has some thought in the back of his head complaining that it could not be true what they said here, but there was no way to prove that.

Winstons remembers seeing 3 (Rutherford, Aaronson, Jones: scientists, but Winston doesn’t know that) men, at the Chestnut Tree Café, who were once accused treason. They admitted, and wrote articles in Times promising to make amends. They were later re-arrested and admitted to committing their old crimes again, plus several new ones. They were executed. Winston accidentally got hold of a photograph, which showed those men to be at a conference in New York, while they were supposedly in Eurasia. This was the first time Winston had actual physical evidence of The Party’s lies.

Character Development:

Winston has some epiphanies in this chapter. He finds concrete evidence of The Party’s propaganda, and he writes in his diary that he “understands HOW, but doesn’t understand WHY” , and that “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”

Chapter 8

Summary:

Winston is walking down the street, through a prole district, when a prole yells ‘steamer!!!’, and Winston drops flat on the ground, because steamer is what the proles call rocket bombs, and the bomb explodes 200 meters up the street. He walks on. He enters a pub and wants to question an old prole about the past, but it is impossible to get a clear answer out of him because he keeps babbling on and on about certain irrelevant occasions which Winston’s questions make him think of. Winston goes to the store were he bought his diary, and buys a paperweight of glass with a bit of coral in it. Winston is also shown the room above the store, and he notices that there is no telescreen. The old shopkeeper then says that he never bought a telescreen because they were too expensive. The old man apparently considers telescreens a desirable object, while Winston is forced to have one, but would probably rather get rid of it.

When he walks home, Winston sees that the dark-haired girl is following. He is terrified because he thinks she’s with the though police, and he's not allowed to be there, and he imagines hitting, and thereby killing her, with his paperweight. He hurries home.

Symbols:

The paperweight is a symbol of Winston’s dreams of freedom. The coral is trapped in the glass, but is also protected by the glass.

Character Development:

Winston becomes less confident in the proles revolting, after his conversation with one of them. He is surer than ever that the dark haired girl is with the thoughtpolice, and he hates her enough to kill her.

Questions Part One

Chapter One

1. Familiar:

* almost everything is familiar, except all the points mentioned beneath.

Unfamiliar:

* ‘and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of he economy drive in preparation for Hate Week.’

* the telescreens

* posters with BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU

* uniforms of the Party

* police patrol circling over the roofs in helicopters

* Thought Police

* Ninth Three-Year Plan

* Ministry of Truth – Minitrue (and all the other ministries)

* Victory products

* Newspeak

* Hate Week

* gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms, armed with jointed truncheons

2. vile wind, gritty dust, boiled cabbage and old rag mats, Hate Week, the world looked cold, dust and torn paper, no colour in anything, snooping.

3. He had to use the stairs instead of the lift, for it didn’t work.

He had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle.

He can hardly remember anything about his childhood.

He sacrificed his lunch in the canteen in order to go home.

The tobacco of his Victory cigarettes fell out onto the floor.

He didn’t know how to begin his diary for he wasn’t sure of the year he was living in. He also didn’t really know how to proceed.

He felt very uneasy during the Two Minutes Hate and kicked his heel violently against the rung of his chair.

He knew he would never be able to sleep with the pretty dark haired girl.

He had committed Thoughtcrime.

4. There is one great leader whom everybody had to listen to. His name is Big Brother. Almost everybody is working for him. There is the Inner Party, which are the most important and best off Party members. The Outer Party is less important, but also works for Big Brother. The Proles are workers, who are not of any importance what so ever. The Thought Police are people who make sure you don’t commit any thoughtcrimes. If they catch you, you’ll vanish, probably never to return. Spies are mostly children who will arrest anybody (even their parents). Oceania is at war with Eastasia and their enemy is Goldstein.

There are four Ministries where the Party members work. Winston works in the Ministry of Truth.

5. Winston wants to regain control of his life. Therefore he opens the diary. This way he can jot down everything he thinks and feels. He is not sure of the society he lives in, something is wrong. He thinks about that a lot and can’t digest it.

6. Winston Smith: thirty-nine years old, a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, he has a smallish, frail figure, the meagerness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls which were the uniform of the Party. His hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended. He works in the Ministry of Truth.

Big Brother: a man of about fourty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features, leader of the party.

Julia: works in the Fiction Department, since Winston had sometimes seen her with oily hands and carrying a spanner. She was a bold-looking girl, of about twenty-seven, with thick dark hair, a freckled face and swift, athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her hips.

O’Brien: member of the Inner Party. A large, burly man with a thick neck and a coarse, humorous, brutal face. A formidable appearance and a certain charm of manner.

Goldstein: the Enemy of the People, a renegade and backslider, the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party’s purity. He had a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard, a clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile silliness in the long thin nose near the end of which a pair of spectacles was perched. It resembled the face of a sheep, and the voice, too, had a sheeplike quality.

Everybody is portrayed as an individual, but it is made very clear who belongs to which group in the society.

7. Minitrue is the Ministry of Truth, Winston’s place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. It was startlingly different from anyu other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, three hundred metres into the air. It contained, or so it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below.

8. The diary was not allowed, for you were not allowed to show your feelings. So it didn’t really matter what he wrote in it, for if the Thought Police would find it, he would be killed anyways. He did hesitate though, before writing all his thoughts down. The diary was there, so that maybe later, people might read it, and know what the society was really like, or it was just for himself to make up his mind and write down all his thoughts and feelings.

9. Winston had disliked Julia from the very first moment of seeing her because of the atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes and general clean-mindedness, which she managed to carry about with her. She gave him the impression of being more dangerous than most girls.

Winston felt deeply drawn to O’Brien because of a secretly-held belief, or perhaps not even a belief, merely a hop,e that O’Brien’s political orthodoxy was not perfect. Something in his face suggested it irresistibly.

10. He sat still as a mouse and his heart was thumping like a drum.

Chapter Two

11. Comrade: you were supposed to call everybody a comrade

Victory…: the name of the products for Outer Party members

Youth League: there were several organizations such as the Junior Anti-Sex League, which were organizations trying to entertain people in a way Big Brother agreed

Spies: a group of spies working for BB, you can join them at the age of eight.

Traitor: spy, double agent, Thought Police, people you can’t trust

Hanging: there are hangings of Eurasian prisoners, to show the people they should obey Big Brother, for otherwise that might also happen to them

Unorthodoxy: you are no true believer of Big Brother

12. The boy is handsome ad tough-looking at the age of nine, his sister was two years younger. They were both wearing blue shorts, grey shirts and red neckerchiefs which were the uniform of the Spies. They were both really into Big Brother and want to go to the hanging: ‘‘Why can’t we go and see the hanging?’ roared the boy in his huge voice.’

13. The chocolate ration is lowered from 30 to 20 grams.

14. The future will be the same or better. They change the past because the present requires it.

15. You can never know whether someone is dead or not, for they all vanish.

Chapter Three

16. About his parents, Winston says: ‘The two of them must evidently have been swallowed up in one of the first great purges of the ‘fifties.’ They had disappeared. His mother and little sister had disappeared at the same time, his father before that.

17. There is no communication and he doesn’t know how they died. There is no clear image of that.

18. Everybody had to live in a certain pattern, which begins in the morning till the evening. You can’t do everything you want to do. The Party decides that for you.

19. To know is not to know

To be conscious of the complete truthfulness is to be aware of the entire truth

To use logic is logicful

20. This proofs that the telescreen is working. Winston hadn’t been able to touch his toes for years, so Winston is rejuvenated. He has refound his zest for life. It shows vitality.

Chapter Four

21. Memory hole: a hole you can throw all your paperwork in. There it will be burned, so destroyed, in order not to be able to read it ever again.

Categorical pledge: this is a promise you may never change

The chocolate ration: this is changed into a warning

Statistics: they are changed all the time, so there aren’t any

22. He has to rectify, rewrite, re-inscribe certain documents, so he has to take out the slip, error, misprint, misquotations and put it right, re-adjust, substitute. This has to be done to change the past.

23. They are described as workers, cell, and swarms. This is also the description of bees.

24. There is the Party and the Proles. The Party Members have better paid jobs, are watched better (more telescreens) and have no freedom. The Proles have a lot of freedom but are poor.

They are both under control of Big Brother.

25. Comrade Ogilvy was made up by Winston.

Comrade Withers was praised in a speech by Big Brother, but later he turned out to be against him and was vaporized. So the speech had either to be turned into a negative speech, or the same speech, but then about a different person (Ogilvy).

Chapter Five

26. Friend: comrade

Philologist: an expert in language

‘free’ market: going to ordinary shops, that was not allowed

Chestnut Tree Café: it is suspicious to sit there

Sub: subscription. You had to give money for good purposes (voluntarily) but if you didn’t you would be punished.

Ear trumpet: a tool for spies. To be inserted in a keyhole to listen.

27. Workers are unskilled and the work is not divided well. There is a war going on (to create hate) which costs a lot of money so there are shortages. There are shortages of about everything such as razor blades.

28. Syme: takes away words from the Newspeak Dictionary for the final edition for the 11th and final edition should be smaller than the others.

Parsons: he works together with Winston and is very loyal to the Party.

Parson’s children: they are spies and really into Big Brother.

Orthodoxy in general: you had to accept the information provided. You had to believe and listen to everything Big Brother said.

29. It was a low-ceilinged canteen, deep under ground. On the far side of the room there was a small bar, a mere hole in the wall, where gin could be bought. They had a grille at a counter on the other side of the room, where everybody had to queue in order to get their stew.

30. Language: ‘we are cutting the language down to the bone’

Newspeak: the official language of Oceania. The words we know are made as easy as possible. There is no such thing as ‘bad’, there is ‘ungood’. Everything is made very simple.

The Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary: the latest edition of the dictionary, which is still being made. Every time, the language contains fewer words, so a new dictionary has to be made.

Literature: there are no original pieces of literature left, for everything is destroyed and re-written.

Slogans: ‘Freedom is Slavery’ will become ‘Freedom is Unfreedom’

Thoughtcrime: ‘it was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in ant public place or within the range of a telescreen.’ This wouldn’t be able anymore once the language was completed.

31. doubleplusungood – plusungood – ungood – good – plusgood – doubleplusgood

Duckspeak: ‘to quack like a duck. It is one of those interesting words that have two contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it is abuse; applied to someone you agree with, it is praise.’

Face crime: ‘to wear an improper expression on your face’

32. Syme: he will be vaporized

The Parson family: father; won’t be vaporized for he is hardly ever at home, so not seen often by his children, who are spies. Mother; probably will turned in by her children and vaporized. Children; they are good spies and will probably be Party members.

O’Brien: would probably be vaporized too.

33. They are both hard workers, but Syme works for the Party and is very interested in the language he is working on. Parsons is working more for his leisure. He is also not as intelligent as Syme is.

34. Chocolate ration: the tickets you get from the authorities to buy food and goods. You can’t pay with anything else. The chocolate ration was 30 and it went down to 20, but on the telescreen it is said that it used to be 15 and went up to 20. People believe this, and are satisfied with the new changes. Even if people wouldn’t believe this, they wouldn’t be able to proof it, and that would be dangerous too.

35. The ideal physical type as set up by the 1984 Inner Party had to be a tall and muscular person, intelligence is also quite important.

Chapter Six

36. Dollars: Winston was writing in his diary about three years ago when he met a women. So there were probably still dollars at that time, for he wrote about them.

Enemy: ‘Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system’.

37. He writes about a woman he admires (worships). It is a memory he has about her, how he met her and what they had done together.

38. Katherine was Winston’s wife. They had been married, but they separated again because she couldn’t get a baby (which they wanted to show their loyalty to the Party). She is very stiff, for she is very orthodox as well. She wanted to baby to grow up as a Spy and work for Big Brother.

39. Sex was meant for making children, and no other reason. Big Brother didn’t want people to have pleasures. The children would be for the future of the Party. Going to a prostitute therefore was very dangerous, for if you would be caught, you would be in serious trouble. Winston could hardly have sex with Katherine because she didn’t want that and she was too stiff for that.

40. He writes to express his emotions. He needs to put them down somewhere. People might read the diary in the future, so then they would know what he had done and how he thinks the world is managing. If he would be caught, it didn’t matter what he wrote down, for he would be killed anyways.

Chapter Seven

41. Winston doesn’t have much hope of being saved himself. But he does believe that the Proles might take action against Big Brother. ‘If there is hope, wrote Winston, it lies in the Proles.’ They are the only one’s Big Brother is not paying much attention to.

42. This was to show what the Proles are like. Winston’s belief in them immediately faded when he saw this. They were just simple citizens living together and fighting for saucepans.

43. In order to be able to rebel against the Party, they would have to ‘rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies.’

The faces of the women were ‘as though they had been the doomed passengers on a sinking ship.’

44. For the Proles, everything was allowed, for they were free. ‘Proles and animals are free’ is one of the Party slogans.

The Party members on the other side are very much restricted. Especially Inner Party members can hardly do anything and other Party members plan their lives. These can do almost everything, for they make up the rules.

45. Page 71: ‘Winston reached down and cautiously scratched his varicose ulcer. It had begun itching again.’

Page 73: ‘He reached down and scratched his ankle again.’

46. ‘It struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness. Life, if you looked about you, bore no resemblance not only to the lies that streamed out of the telescreens, but even to the ideals that the Party was trying to achieve.’

‘The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible and glittering – a world of steel and concrete of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons – a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting – three hundred million people all with the same face.’

47. While he was working, he came across a newspaper article he was not supposed to have. It was about the three Party members: Rutherford, Aaronson and Jones who had confessed of having had contact with the enemy, but these confessions were lies. Winston threw the paper away though, for it would be dangerous to keep it for it was evidence against the Party.

48. ‘He let what he judged to be ten minutes go by, tormented all the while by the fear that some accident – a sudden draught blowing across his desk, for instance – would betray him. It was really dangerous to keep it.

49. For O’Brien, for he was very sure, that he was on his side.

50. Five: ‘Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.’

Chapter Eight

51. Page 79: ‘He had walked several kilometers over pavements, and his varicose ulcer was throbbing.’

52. It means: individualism and eccentricity.

53. The part of London where Winston wanders: ‘He was somewhere in the vague, brown-coloured slums to the north and east of what had once been Saint Pancras Station. He was walking up a cobbled street of little two-storey houses with battered doorways which gave straight on the pavement and which were somehow curiously suggestive of rat-holes.’

This is supposed to be a scary place, for it are the slums of London where all the poor people live.

The Proles: ‘If there is hope, it lies in the Proles.’ But ‘it was when you looked at the human beings passing you on the pavement that it became an act of faith.’

They are workers, but you hardly know anything about them.

The proprietor of the junk shop: ‘He was a man of perhaps sixty, frail and bowed, with a long, benevolent nose, and mild eyes distorted by thick spectacles. His hair was almost white, but his eyebrows were bushy and still black. His spectacles, his gentle, fussy movements and the fact that he was wearing an aged jacket of black velvet, gave him a vague air of intellectuality, as though he had been some kind of literary man, or perhaps a musician. His voice was soft, as though faded, and his accent less debased than that of the majority of Proles.’

He is probably to be trusted, he is described as an old loving man.

The paperweight: ‘It was a heavy lump of glass, curved on one side, flat on the other, making almost a hemisphere. There was a peculiar softness, as of rain-water, in both the colour and the texture of the glass. At the heart of it, magnified by the curved surface, there was a strange, pink, convoluted object that recalled a rose or a sea anemone.’ The shop owner said it was a coral.

The room on the first floor of the junk shop: ‘It looked out on a cobbled yard and a forest of chimney posts. Winston noticed that the furniture was still arranged as though the room were meant to be lived in. There was a strip of carpet on the floor, a picture or two on the walls, and a deep, slatternly armchair drawn up to the fireplace. An old-fashioned glass clock with a twelve-hour face was ticking away on the mantelpiece. Under the window, and occupying nearly a quarter of the room, was an enormous bed with the mattress still on it.’

Winston immediately thought of the possibility of renting the place, for he thought it would be a perfect hiding place for him and Julia, and the owner would be pleased to earn something extra.

The picture on the wall in this room: ‘It was a steel engraving of an oval building with rectangular windows, and a small tower in front. There was a railing running round the building, and at the rear end there was what appeared to be a statue.’ Winston recognized it, and thought of buying it though he would do that later.

54. This is just included to remind the reader of what the Proles are like. They are still the simple human beings living in slums, and of no importance to the Party.

55. The old man wants a pint, but the bartender doesn’t know what that is so isn’t able to give it to him.

Winston offered the man a drink. The old man immediately like Winston and they start talking. Winston tries to figure out if the man still remembers anything of the world, how it used to be when he was still young, but not any relevant information is given.

56. The old man remembered that the beer used to be cheaper and better. He also still remembered the ‘lackeys’.

57. ‘There was no doubting any longer that the girl was spying on him. She must have followed him here, because it was not credible that by pure chance she should have happened to be walking on the same evening up the same obscure backstreet, kilometers distant from any quarter where Party members lived. It was too great a coincidence. Whether she was really an agent of the Thought Police, or simply an amateur spy actuated by officiousness, hardly mattered. It was enough that she was watching him.’

58. Winston never expected to escape. At the moment he began writing in the diary, he was very aware of that. ‘When once you had succumbed to thoughtcrime it was certain that by a given date you would be dead.’

58. Winston never expected to escape. At the moment he began writing in the diary, he was very aware of that. ‘When once you had succumbed to thoughtcrime it was certain that by a given date you would be dead.’

59. You might expect the Proles to be able to overthrow the Party or at least weaken it. Winston is so fixated on Big Brother and against him, that he probably won’t remain. You wouldn’t expect Julia to play an important role. She might do something against Winston, for she probably is a spy, but that won’t be anything massive. O’Brien will co-operate with Winston, and the two of them will try to find a way to overthrow Big Brother. Syme will vanish, Winston had said that from the beginning onwards, he was too smart. The Parsons will probably be vaporized too, for their children are too attentive. Mr. Charington will probably rent the room to Winston and nothing more will be heard of him again.

The whole system is likely to collapse, so there won’t be a Inner or Outer Party anymore. The Proles will be regarded as normal people and there won’t be any enemies such as Eurasia or Eastasia anymore.

The Brotherhood might indeed have existed, and might have helped overthrowing Big Brother.