1: War is important for consuming the products of human labour, if this work would be used to increase the standard of living, the control of the party over the people would decrease. War is the economical basis for a hierarchical society.
2: There is an emotional need to believe in the ultimate victory of BigBrother.
3: In becoming continuous, war has stopped to exist. The continuity of the war guarantees the permanence of the current order. In other words “War is Peace”.
4: There have always been three main grades of society; the High, the Middle and the Low, and no change has brought human equality a millimetre nearer.
5: Collectivism doesn’t lead to socialism. In the event the wealth now belongs to the new “high-class”, the bureaucrats and administrators. Collectivism has ensured the permanence of economic inequality.
6: Wealth is not inherited from person to person, but it is kept within the ruling group.
7: The masses (proles) are given freedom of thought, because they don’t think! A Party member is not allowed the slightest deviation of thought, and there is an elaborate mental training to ensure this, a training that can be summarised in the concept of doublethink.
So far the book analyses how the Party works. It has not yet attempted to deal with why the Party has arisen. Before continuing with the next chapter Winston turns to Julia, and finds her asleep. He also falls asleep. The next morning when he awakes the sun is shining, and down in the yard a prole women is singing and working. Winston is again filled with the conviction that the future lies with the proles, that they will overthrow the greyness of the Party. But suddenly reality crashes in. “We are the DEAD”, he says to Julia. An iron voice behind them repeats the phrase, the picture on the wall falls to bits to reveal a telescreen behind it. Uniformed man thunder into the room and they carry Winston and Julia out.Winston is in a cell in what he presumes is the Ministry of Love. He is sick with hunger and fear, and when he makes a movement or a sound, a harsh voice will bawl at him from the four telescreens. A prisoner who is dying of starvation is brought in, his face is skull-like. Later the man is brought to “Room 101″ after screaming and struggling, and even offering his children’s sacrifices in his stead. O’Brien enters. Winston thinks that they must have got him too, but O’Brien says that they got him long time ago. A guard hits Winston, and he becomes unconscious. When he wakes up he is tied down to a kind of bed. O’Brien stands beside the bed, and Winston feels that O’Brien, who is the torturer, is also somehow a friend. The aim of O’Brien is to teach Winston the technique of Doublethink, and he does it by inflicting pain in ever-increasing intensity. He reminds Winston that he wrote the sentence:” Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four”. O’Brien holds up four fingers of his left hand, and he asks Winston how many there are. Winston answers four a couple of times, and each time the pain increases (this is not done to make Winston lie, but to make him really see five fingers instead of four). At the end of the session, under heavy influence of drugs and agony, Winston really seas five fingers. Now Winston is ready to enter the second stage of his integration (1. Learning, 2. Understanding, 3. Acceptance). O’Brien now explains why the Party works. The image he gives of the future is that of a boot stamping on a human face – for ever. Winston protests, because he thinks that there is something in the human nature that will not allow this, he calls it “The Spirit of Man”. O’Brien points out that Winston is the last humanist, he is the last guardian of the human spirit. Then O’Brien gets Winston to look at himself in the mirror, Winston is horrified what he sees. The unknown time of torture has changed him into a shapeless and battered wreck. This is what the last humanist looks like. The only degradation that Winston has not been trough, is that he has not betrayed Julia. He has said anything under torture, but inside he has remained true to her. Winston is much better now. For some time he has not been beaten and tortured, he has been fed quite well and allowed to wash. Winston realises that he now accepts all the lies of the Party, that for example Oceania was always at war with Eastasia, and that he never had the photograph of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford that disproved their guilty. Even gravity could be nonsense. But nevertheless Winston has some unorthodox thoughts that he cannot suppress. But now it is time for the last of the three steps, reintegration. Winston is taken to Room 101. O’Brien says that the room 101 is the worst thing in the world. For each person it is his own personal hell. For some it is death by fire or burial alive. For Winston it is a cage containing two rats, with a fixture like a fencing mask attached, into which the face of the victim is strapped. Then there is a lever, that opens the cage ,so that the rats can get to the face. O’Brien is approaching nearer with the cage ,and Winston gets the bad smell of the rats. He screams. The only way to get out of this is to put someone else between him and the horror.”Do it to Julia”, he screams in a final betrayal of himself. Winston is released, and he is often sitting in the Chestnut Tree Caf?, drinking Victory Gin and playing chess. He now has a job in a sub-committee , that is made up for others like himself. On a cold winter day he meets Julia, they speak briefly, but have little to say to each other, except that they have betrayed each other. A memory of a day in his childhood comes to Winstons’ mind; It is false, he is often troubled by false memories. He looks forward to the bullet, they will kill him some day. Now he realises how pointless it was to resist. He loves Big Brother!
Symbolism
George Orwell wrote this book in the years 1946 to 1949, just after the Second World War. In “1984″ he describes a Communist system, but it could also be Fascist one – it is a general description of a totalitarian system. Because of that, many parallels to other systems, especially to Nazi-Germany, can be seen: one leader who is mystified ; the Inner Party members, who have a lot of privileges ; the Thought Police – the GESTAPO ; the telescreen – the Volksempf?nger ; the Spies – the HJ or BDM ; and many more. A very interesting fact is also the existence of one enemy who is blamed for everything. Orwell chose the name Goldstein for his enemy which is a Jewish name because of the fact that Jews were ?the? enemy in Nazi-Germany and they were also prosecuted in Communist -Russia.
c) The Road To Wigan Pier
Summary
In the first part of this book Orwell tries to give the reader a detailed view of the conditions of the poor and unemployed. In the first chapter of the first part, Orwell describes the Brooker family. They belong to the so called “wealthy” among the poor ones. In their house, they have installed a cheap lodging-house and a tiny shop. Both, Mr and Mrs Brooker are already pensioners, and with the rent they get for the rooms, they can afford at least enough to eat. The people who live in this lodging house are unmarried or very old and also pensioners. Orwell himself spends a couple of weeks in this house during his researches. In the second chapter he describes the life of miners. Their working conditions are very bad, for they work underground, where it is very hot, dusty, and where the miners have just the minimum of space. The work is also very dangerous, the coal-miners are often handling with dynamite and the tunnels aren’t very stable. Here Orwell describes how he went down to see the working conditions down there. He describes that the place where the coal is dismantled is not just right at the elevator, but often lies some miles away from it. And the tunnel is often only three to four feet high. This means that the miners not only have to work under the hardest conditions, but also have to “travel”, this means going to the working place in the miners-jargon, for about half an hour. Orwell who is not trained needed about one hour to get there (”After half a mile it gets an unbearable agony”, 1/2 P 23). In the next chapter Orwell takes a look at the social situation of an average miner. First of all he looks at the hygienicall situation of the miners, for many people believe that miners generally do not wash. But in fact only every third has a bath or shower for the miners. The situation in the homes of the miners is even worse. Only a couple of houses in the industrial region have bathrooms. The rest of the coal-workers have to wash in little basin. The miners also have very little time, although they work only seven hours a day. But actually getting to the pit, and the travelling underground can make up to three hours. So the average miner has about four hours leisure time, including washing dressing and eating. Then there is the common believe that miners get comparatively well paid , about ten to eleven shillings a week. But this is very misleading, because only the ” coal getter” is paid at this rate, whereas for example the “dattler” is paid at eight to nine shilling per shift. But one also has to look at the conditions the miners are paid at. So the “getter” is paid for the tons he extracts. On the one hand he is dependent on the quality of the coal, and when the machinery breaks down it may rob him a days or two earnings. Another fact is that miners certainly do not work six days a week. In 1936 the average earning of the miners per shift actually was 9s 1?d. But even this sum is just a gross earning, there are all kind of stoppages which are deducted from the miners wage every week. Totally this stoppages make around 4s 5d per week.
The next chapter deals about the housing situation in those districts. Generally all the houses look all the same. The main problem, is the housing shortage in this region. So people are ready to accept any dirty hole, bugs, blackmailing agents and bad landlord, just to get a roof over ones head. And as long as the housing shortage exists the local authorities cannot do anything to make the existing houses more liveable. The authorities can condemn a house, but they cannot pull it down till the tenant has no other house to live in. But there is another problem that results from this one. The landlord will surely not invest more money that he can help in a house that is going to be pulled down in the future. Orwell has made notes to a dozens of houses in this region, and here are twoexamples: House in Wigan, near Scholesquarter: Condemned house, four rooms (two up two down) +coal hole, walls falling to pieces, water comes into upstairs rooms in quantities, downstairs windows will not open. Rent 6s, Rates 3s 6d tota 9s 6d. House in Barnsley, PeelStreet: Back to back (front house facing street, back house facing yard),two up and two down + large cellar, all rooms have about 10 feet square, living room very dark, gaslight at 4 ?d a day, distance to the lavatory 70 yards (lies in the yard), four beds for eight persons (parents, two girls one 27, young man, and three children), bugs very bad, smell upstairs almost unbearable. Rent 5s 7?d including rates.
Another problem in these regions is, that whole rows of houses are undermined, and the windows often are ten to twenty degrees out of the horizontal. Because of the bad housing situation there are also so-called “caravan dwellers”. Only in Wigan, which has a population of 85.000, there are about 200 caravans, that are inhabited by about 700 people. In whole Britain there might be around ten thousand families living in caravans. The worst thing about those caravans is that the people who live in such a place don’t even save money, because the rent can make up to ten shillings! Despite this problems the city of Barnsley for example built a new town hall for 150.000 ? although there is a need for over 2000 houses, not mention pubic baths (the public baths in Barnsley contain nineteen men’s slipper baths-in a town with 70.000 inhabitants, largely miners who have not a bath at home).
The next chapter of The Road To Wigan Pier deals about unemployment. In 1937 there were about two million unemployed persons. But this number only shows how many persons are receiving the dole. One has to take this number and multiply it with at least three, to get the number of persons actually living on the dole. But there is a large number of people that have a work, but from financial point of view, might as well be unemployed, because they are not drawing anything that can be described as a living wage. Together with the pensioners in the industrial regions that makes around fifteen million poor and underfed people. Only in Wigan there are around 30.000 drawing or living on the dole. So every third person in Wigan is dependent on social help. The money that the families get varies from twenty-five to thirty shillings per week. One organisation that helps the unemployed is the NUWM (National Unemployed Workers Movement). This organisation helps the unemployed to spent their time.