1984 Summary Essay, Research Paper
Summary: The Story starts, as the title tells us, in the year of 1984, and it deals in England or how it is called at that time, Airstrip One. Airstrip One itself is a the mainland of a huge country, called Oceania, which contains North America, South Africa, and Australia. The country is ruled by the Party, which is led by a figure called Big Brother. The population itself is divided in three parts:
1.The Inner Party (app. 1% of the population)
2.The Outer Party (app. 18% of the population)
3.The Proles
The narrator of the book is all-knowing and he is not participating in the action of the book himself. The main figure is Winston Smith, a member of the Party.Winston works in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, rewriting records of the past. The action of the book starts when Winston develops critic thoughts against the ruling dictatorship of the party, for the first time. Doing so he buys himself a book, which were very rare these days, to use it as a diary. Because individual expression was forbidden by the Party, having a diary was a crime, which could be punished even with death. There were so-called telescreens in each room, which were showing propaganda and political pamphlets, and had a build in camera and microphone, in order to spy on the people. Therefore keeping a secret book was not only very dangerous, but also very difficult. When he makes the first entry in the diary ,Winston thinks about an experience he has made during the Two Minutes Hate, a propaganda film, that was repeated each day. During this Film he caught the eye of O’Brien, a member of the Inner Party, of whom he taught that he might stand also critic to the regime, or that at least there is a bond of some kind between them. After the reflection, he finds that he has written the sentence :”Down with Big Brother” all over the page. In the same night Winston dreams about, his mother and sister, who starved to death in the war, because he was so greedy. Then he dreams of having sex with a girl that he has seen in the Records Department, during the Two Minute Hate. Early in the morning Winston is waken up by the harsh voice from the telescreen. During the performance of the exercises, Winston’s thoughts move back to his childhood. The last thing he remembers clearly, is the World War. After the WW the party has taken control of the country, and from then on it was difficult to remember anything, because the party changed the history permanently to their own benefit (see Doublethink – Political System).After the exercises Winston goes to work, to the Minitrue (Ministry of Truth), where his job is to alter records, and once altered, to throw them into the Memory Hole where they are burnt. For example B.B. (Big Brother) has said that there will be no reduction of the chocolate ration, but there has been one, so Winston has to rewrite an old article, where the speech of B.B. is written down. At dinner Winston Smith meets Syme, a philologist, who is working on the 11 the edition of The Newspeak Dictionary (see Newspeak – Political System), and Syme explains the main character of their work on this dictionary. During their conversation the telescreen announces that the chocolate ration has been risen to 20 g a week, whereas yesterday it was cut down to 20 g a week.Winston wonders if he’s the only person with memory, that isn’t inflicted by Doublethink. As he looks around in the dining room , and he catches the eye of the dark-haired girl, he had dreamed the same night. Home again he makes an entry into his diary, of his meeting with a prostitute three years ago. He remembered her ugliness, but nevertheless he had sex with her. Winston had a wife, but she was very stupid and just following the orders of the Party, and this orders said that there may only be Sex to produce “new material” for the Party, and that sex for the personal pleasure is a crime. Then Winston thinks about the Party, and that the only hope lies in the Proles who pose over 80% of Oceanias population. Later he remembered another fact of his past, Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford the last three survivors of the original leaders of the Revolution. They were arrested in 1965, and on trial they confessed all kind of sabotage, they were pardoned, reinstated but not long after were arrested again, and executed. During the brief period Winston has seen them in the Chestnut Tree Cafe. In the same year a half page torn out of the times came to Winston trough the transport tube in the Minitrue. This page of The Times showed the three men in Eastasia on a certain day. But Winston remembered clearly that they have confessed being in Eurasia on that day (At this time Eurasia was at war with Oceania, and Eastasia was an allied). So Winston could proof that the confessions were lies. But Winston had sent this paper down to the Memory Hole ( a kind of paper basket ) The last entry that Winston writes in his diary is that freedom is to say that two and two makes four. If that is granted all else follows. The next day Winston decides not to participate in the community actions, and so he decides to take a walk in the quarters of the Proles, around St Pancras station. During the walk a Rocket-Bomb explodes nearby. After a while Winston finds himself in front of the junk-shop, where he has bought the diary. There he sees an old man just entering a pub. He decides to follow the man, and to ask him about the time before the revolution, but the old man has already forgotten nearly everything about this time, except for some useless personal things. Winston leaves the pub and goes to the Shop, where he finds a pink piece of glass with apiece of coral inside which he buys. Mr Carrington, the owner of the shop leads him upstairs to show him an old fashioned room. W. Smith likes the room because of its warmth and of course because there are no telescreens. After Winston leaves the shop he suddenly meets the dark-haired girl in the street. He now believes that this girl is an amateur spy or even a member of the Thought Police, spying on him. The next morning he meets the girl in the Ministry of Truth, and in the moment when she passes, she fall down and cries out in pain. Winston helps her up, and finds that she has pressed a piece of paper into his hand. Later, at the first opportunity he opens it and finds that on it is written the startling message: “I love you”. For a week he waits for an opportunity to speak with her. Finally he is successful, and he meets her in the canteen where they fix a meeting. Again some time later they meet on the fixed place, there the girl gives Winston precise instructions how to get to a secret place on Sunday. It is Sunday and Winston is following the girl’s direction. On the way he picks some bluebells for her. And then finally she comes up behind him, telling him to be quiet because there might be some microphones hidden somewhere. They kiss and he learns her name: Julia. She leads him to another place where they cannot be observed. Before she takes off her blue party-overall, Julia tells Winston that she is attracted to him by something in his face which showed that he was against the party. Winston is surprised and asks Julia if she has done such thing already before. To his delight she tells him that she has done it scores of times, which fills him with a great hope. Evidence of corruption and abandon always fills him with hope. Perhaps the whole system is rotten, and that it simply will crumb to pieces one day. The more men she had, the more he loves her, and later as he looks at her sleeping body, he thinks that now even sex is a political act, a blow against the falseness of the Party. Winston and Julia arrange to meet again. Winston has rented a room above Mr Carringtons junk shop ,a place where they can meet and talk without the fear of being observed. It is summer, and the preparation for “Hate Week” ,a enormous propaganda event, are well forthcoming, and in this time Winston meets Julia more often than ever before. Julia makes him feel more alive, she makes him feel healthier, and he even puts on weight. One day O’Brien speaks to Winston in the Ministry of Truth. He refers, obliquely to Syme, the philologist, who has vanished a couple of days before, an is now, as it is called in Newspeak an unperson. In doing so O’Brien is committing a little act of thoughtcrime. O’Brien invites Winston to his flat, to see the latest edition of the Newspeak dictionary. Winston now feels sure that the conspiracy against the Party he had longed to know about – the Brotherhood, as it is called – does exist, and that in the encounter with O’Brien he has come into contact with its outer edge. He knows he has embarked on a course of action which will lead , in one way or another, to the cells of the Ministry of Love. Some days later Winston and Julia meet each other to go to the flat of O’Brien, which lies in the district of the Inner Party. They are admitted to a richly furnitured room by a servant. To their astonishment O’Brien switches off the Telescreen in the room.(Normally it is impossible to turn it off) Winston blurts out why they have come: they want to work against the Party, they believe in the existence of the Brotherhood, and that O’Brien is involved with it. Martin, O’Brien servant brings real red vine, and they drink a toast to Emanuel Goldstein, leader of the Brotherhood. O’Brien asks them a series of questions about their willingness to commit various atrocities on behalf of the Brotherhood and gets their assent. They leave, and again some days later Winston gets a copy of “The Book”, a book written by Emanuel Goldstein, about his political ideas. Now it was Hate Week, and suddenly the war with Eurasia has stopped, and a war with Eastasia has started. This of course meant a lot of work for Winston. He had to change dozens of articles which were about the war with Eurasia. But nevertheless Winston has found time to read the book. The book has three chapters titled, “War is Peace”, “Ignorance is Strength” and “Freedom is Slavery”, which were also the main phrases of the party. The main ideas of the book are:
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 economy basis for a hierarchical society.
2: There is an emotional need to believe in the ultimate victory of Big Brother.
3: In becoming continuous war has ceased 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 has analysed 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 too 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 again is 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 death”, 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 if he makes a movement or a sound, a harsh voice will bawl at him from the four telescreens. A prisoner is brought in that is dying of starvation, 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 comes in. Winston thinks that they must have got him too, but O’Brien says that they got him long time ago. A guard his Winston, and he becomes unconscious. As 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 protest, because he thinks that there is something in the human nature that will not allow this to be so, what he can call “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, and 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 will have 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 torture, 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 coming 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, the spoke briefly, and had little to say to each other, except that they have betrayed each other. A memory comes to his mind, of a day in his childhood, It is false, he is often troubled by false memories. He looks forward to the bullet they will kill him some day, and now he realises how pointless it was to resist. He loves Big Brother!
Characters Winston Smith: Orwell named his hero after Winston Churchill, England’s great leader during World War II. He added a common last name: Smith. The action of this novel is build around the main person, Winston Smith, and therefore the understanding of his personality, and his character is important for the understanding of the whole book. Winston was born before the Second World War. In the War, there was a lack of food, and Winston has taken nearly all of the food that was allocated to the family, although his younger sister was starving to death. In 1984 Winston often dreams of this time, and he often remembers how he has stolen the whole chocolate, that was one day given to the family. I think that Winston now (1984) somehow regrets his egoistic behaviour. He also sees a kind of link between his behaviour, and the behaviour of the children that are educated by the Party. These children prosecute their own family (Parsons). He finally realises his and the Party’s guilt. To my mind Winston is a sort of hero, because he is aware of the danger that he has encountered. So for example he knew it from the very beginning of that his diary would be found. And as one can see the things that are written in this book (that freedom is to say that two and two makes four) are later used against him. He also knew that his illegal love affair, that was an act of revolution, would be disclosed by the Thought Police. But nevertheless he is some kind of naive. He opened his mind to O’Brien before he was sure that he is also against the Party. Julia: Julia is a women around 25, and she works in a special department of the Minitrue, producing cheap Pornography for the proles. She had already a couple of illegal love affairs. Unlike Winston, she basically a simple woman, something of a lightweight who loves her man and uses sex for fun as well as for rebellion. She is perfectly willing to accept the overnight changes in Oceania’s history and doesn’t trouble her pretty head about it. If Big Brother says black is white, fine. If he says two and two make five, no problem. She may not buy the Party line, but it doesn’t trouble her. She falls asleep over Winston’s reading of the treasured book by Goldstein. Orwell draws Winston’s love object lovingly. Julia is all woman, sharp and funny as she is attractive, but she may also be a reflection of the author’s somewhat limited view of the opposite sex. O’Brien: Probably the most interesting thing about O’Brien is that we have only Winston’s opinion of him. This burly but sophisticated leader of the Inner Party is supposed to be head of the secret Brotherhood dedicated to the overthrow of Big Brother. In his black coverall, he haunts both Winston’s dreams and his waking moments to the very end of the novel. Another very interesting thing about O’Brien is that the reader doesn’t precisely know if he is a friend or an enemy of Winston. Yet even Winston himself doesn’t know it precisely. I would say that O’Brien, the powerful and mighty Party member, is a kind of father for Winston. Before the capture of Winston, O’Brien “helps” Winston to make contact with the Brotherhood, and he teaches him about the Ideology and the rules of this secret Organisation. After the capture O’Brien gives Winston the feeling, that he is somehow protecting him. The relation between O’Brien and Winston has all attributes of a typical relation between a father and a child: The father is all knowing, all mighty; he teaches, punishes and educates his child, and he is protecting it, from anything that could harm the child. But I think that O’Brien is only playing his role, due to reintegrate Winston. Big Brother: Big Brother is not a real person. All-present as he is, all-powerful and forever watching, he is seen only on TV. Although his picture glares out from huge posters that shout, BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, nobody sees Big Brother in person. Orwell had several things in mind when he created Big Brother. He was certainly thinking of Russian leader Joseph Stalin; the pictures of Big Brother even look like him. He was also thinking of Nazi leader Adolph Hitler and Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. Big Brother stands for all dictators everywhere. Orwell may have been thinking about figures in certain religious faiths when he drew Big Brother. the mysterious, powerful, God-like figure who sees and knows everything- but never appears in person. For Inner Party members, Big Brother is a leader, a bogeyman they can use to scare the people, and their authorisation for doing whatever they want. If anybody asks, they can say they are under orders from Big Brother. For the unthinking proles, Big Brother is a distant authority figure. For Winston, Big Brother is an inspiration. Big Brother excites and energises Winston, who hates him. He is also fascinated by Big Brother and drawn to him in some of the same ways that he is drawn to O’Brien, developing a love-hate response to both of them that leads to his downfall.