1984 Study Notes

The Setting
The setting of 1984 is a fictional, totalitarian world. Revolutions have occurred around the world after World War II to bring into existence three authoritarian states Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia who are in constant war with each other. According to Goldsteins book, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, these revolutions were a response to the industrialisation of the 19th and 20th centuries that meant that the standard of living for people generally increased it wasclear that an all round increase in wealth threatened the destructionof a hierarchical society. The aim of each state is to maintain a hierarchy. The point for each state of being in constant war with other states is twofold: a) to maintain a constant level of deprivation and hardship amongst its citizens that emphasizes the hierarchal difference between those who have things and those who dont; b) and to also keep the people in a constant state of fear which means they think it in their best interests for the state to have complete and utter control in order to fight the war and protect them. Specifically, the narrative is set in London, which belongs to the region of Airstrip 1 in the state of Oceania. Oceania is controlled by The Party and at the head of the party is Big Brother. Society is broken into three classes: 1) The Inner Party (2% of the population), who are like the upperclass; 2) The Outer Party, who are like the middle class; 3) The Proles (85% of the population) who are like the lower class. Big Brother operates constant surveillance on its people through telescreens, hidden microphones, thought police, encourage informers - in order to ensure that there is no thoughtcrime a belief that something Big Brother says is a lie. Oceania is a dystopia. A utopia is the perfect place we want to live. Dystopia is the opposite.

The Narrative
1984 is not meant to provide an uplifting read. We dont feel hopeful at the end. We dont see a story where one mans rebellion against an authoritarian state can set off a chain reaction that results in a better, freer country. Our belief in humanity that people will do what is right is not affirmed. What we are given, instead, is a very real human in Winston Smith. A character who has his good attributes, and his deeply flawed attributes. In the end he capitulates completely, unreservedly, to Big Brother. What is so frightening is that it could be any human who was Winston Smith. The story happens in three parts. Part 1:
Ticking Mind 1984 Study Notes 1

Ticking Mind 1984 Study Notes

This section orients us to the world of Big Brother. It describes for us the daily life of surveillance for the Outer Party citizens of Oceania You had to livein the assumption that every sound you made was overhead, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized - and the regimented life they lead the exercise program they have to participate in each morning, their controlled working lives, the expectation for their participation in after work Community activities. It also paints a picture of a society where children are encouraged to spy on older people and be informers. We learn that Winston works at the Ministry of Truth, where his job is to rewrite news articles from the past in order to ensure that they dont contradict what the party holds to be true now. But Winston is disenchanted with Big Brother. In a secret act of rebellion he begins writing in a journal to practice independent thought. He questions why the party does what it does: I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY Two of the other main characters from the novel are also introduced in this section. OBrien, a member of the Inner Party who Winston secretly suspects is against it. And Julia another worker at Ministry of Truth who appears as a complete party zealot. Winston hates her and thinks she is spying on him. He will be wrong about both people. Part 2: In Part 2, Winston is astonished to find that Julia is not in fact a party fanatic. She slips him a piece of paper stating I love you. From there they begin a series of secret meetings, each time having sex. Winston is also invited by OBrien to visit him at his house. He does so with Julia, and OBrien reveals that he is a member of The Brotherhood, an organization dedicated to the downfall of the party. Julia and Winston pledge allegiance to The Brotherhood. Winston rents a room in a Prole section of the city, where he and Julia can meet regularly and have their own private space. The section ends with Winston and Julia being arrested by the Thought Police. Part 3: The final section of the novel deals with Winstons interrogation in The Ministry of Love and his eventual complete conversion to loyalty for the Party. It is revealed that OBrien is not, in fact, a member of The Brotherhood, but a party fanatic. OBrien is responsible for the process of converting Winston to believe fully that, Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. Winston is endlessly tortured and physically abused until he is eventually broken. He submits completely to the authority of Big Brother. Once he is broken he is brought back to full health again. But OBrien makes him endure the worst torture once he is healthy room 101, because, You must love Big Brother. It is not enough to obey him: you must love him. Room 101 is where people face their worst fear. In Winstons case this is rats. While Winston is strapped to a chair, OBrien has a cage with two rats in brought close to Winstons face and

threatens to release them to gnaw away at his face or his cheeks. Winston frantically yells at OBrien to Do it to Julia! Not me! After this is the last chapter of the novel. Winston has been released. Physically, he has become more like OBrien His features had thickened, the skin on his nose and cheek bones was coarsely red. He has learnt now to love Big Brother, to know that Big Brother will keep him safe from what he fears.

The Characters Major Characters Winston Smith: Winston is not meant to be a heroic character, hes meant to be an ordinary character. Physically, this is certainly so. He has a smallish, frail figure and varicose veins on his legs. He is troubled by Big Brother for several reasons. Firstly, because he knows they lie. He has had evidence of that a picture of Aaronson, Jones and Rutherford, found guilty of treason, on a date and time when the picture shows them to be in a completely different place to where they were supposed to have committed the crime. He is also skeptical about whether the standard of living now, as the Party keeps saying, is higher than it was. He objects to the clean living, puritanism which the Party encourages, like the Junior Anti-Sex League I hate purity, I hate goodness! I dont want any virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones. Lastly, Winston has independent thoughts something the Party does not want to exist. Winston sees around him how the Party controls its people, but he wants to know why. Winston is a flawed character. He remembers as a child the deeply selfish way he behaved towards his mother and his sickly baby sister in demanding most of their limited share of food: He knew that he was starving the other two, but he could not help it; he even felt he had a right to. The repression of the state has made his thoughts violent. There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, the Party is sexually repressive its aim to remove all pleasure from the sexual act. Sexual deprivation will result in a hysteria that can be channeled into violent hatred of the enemy. This Winston participates in, his notes in his diary telling us the pleasure he took in seeing a film where there was a wonderful shot of a childs arm going up up up right up into the air The second reason is that the repression of the state generally, and its constant surveillance, produced a constant tension inside a person: At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible sympton. Violent fantasies become a way of dealing with this tension. Winstons violent thoughts arent just directed at the enemy. At one stage, when attempting to sit next to Julia in the canteen, and a worker accidentally obstructs this opportunity, Winston looks at the workers silly blond face and has a hallucination of himself smashing a pick-axe right into the middle of it. More than this, though, his fantasies mix violence with sex. During the two minutes hate, he transfers his hate from the enemy to Julia and imagines that He would
Ticking Mind 1984 Study Notes 3

Ticking Mind 1984 Study Notes

ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax. Later he says frankly to Julia that, I wanted to rape you then murder you afterwards. Sex is important for Winston what he wanted, more even than to be loved, was to break down that wall of virtue, even if it were only once in his whole life. The sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion. His wife, Katherine, even though she was disgusted by sex, insisted on them having weekly sexual intercourse because of their duty to produce children. Winston hated the way she had sex the way she went rigid. Julia is the opposite, someone who enjoys having sex. In this part of his relationship with Julia, Winston reverts to his selfishness as child. When she tells him, at one point, that she cant meet him, he becomes violently angryShe has become a physical necessity, something that he not only wanted but felt he had a right to. Winston is opposed Big Brother and believes that If there is hope it lies in the proles. When he joins OBriens fake Brotherhood, he agrees that he is prepared to: commit murder, commit acts of sobotage, cheat, forge, blackmail, corrupt the minds of children, distribute habit forming drugs, encourage prostitution and disseminate venereal diseases. On one hand this plays into Winstons existing fantasy about his opposition to the Party If he could have infected the whole lot of them with leprosy or sphyllis, how gladly he would have done so! he thinks to himself earlier in the novel. On the other hand, there is never really a sense that Winston is up to any opposition of Big Brother. Throughout the whole novel his belly is repeatedly referred to, as is his bowels turning to ice. He is an ordinary man, because in the end, his to live up to his aspirations, is not greater than the limits of his body: On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe When he meets Julia again at the end of the novel he repeats her words: All you care about is yourself. And that is true, through and through, for Winston. OBrien: OBrien was a large, burly man with a thick neck and a coarse, humorous, brutal face. Winston sees him initially as another opponent of the Party he felt deeply drawn to himbecause of a secretly held belief orhope that OBriens political orthodoxy was not perfect. OBrien sets out to deceive Winston into thinking that the Brotherhood exists, and that OBrien is a member of it. O Orwell depicts OBrien as having a prize fighters physique which is in contrast to his urbane manner. His body represents that he is better fed, better looked after than members of the Outer Party. But it represents more than this it represents the power that he has, and how well he can use it - In spite of the bulkiness of his body there was a remarkable grace in his movements. During his interrogation and conversion in the Ministry of Love, Winston realizes about OBrien that, He is not pretendinghe believes every word he says. OBrien truly is a party maniac. He believes in power and takes pleasure in the process through which that power is achieved: In our world there will be no

emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self abasement, and If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face for ever. This begins to answer the question why the charade of the Brotherhood? If OBrien knew Winston was guilty of thoughtcrime, why not arrest him long ago? Because the charade of the Brotherhood gives OBrien the opportunity to act out completely his power over Winston. The process of the conversion of Winston in Part 3, and in particular the chapter dealing with room 101, is the climax of power for OBrien, but it shows how completely the Party can control the mind. Julia: Julia describes herself as not clever and she didnt much care for reading. But she is practical. Winston works with his mind in the records department, Julia works with her hands on the novel writing machines in the fiction department. Her ability to plan the meetings between her and Winston, and the intricate routes Winston needs to take is impressive, as is her ability to keep up the enthusiastic faade of loyalty to the party through her membership of the Anti Sex League (she must also, though it is never discussed, be preventing herself from getting pregnant, admitting to having sex scores of times) and her performances during the Two Minutes Hate (During the Two Minutes Hate she always excelled all others in shouting insults at Goldstein). And although she describes herself as not clever In some ways she was far more acute than Winstonin her opinion the war was not happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, just to keep people frightened. Unlike Winston she is not interested in questions of why or the details - She hated the Party, and said so in the crudest words, but made no general criticism of it. And although she believed the war to be sham, she cant remember, as Winston urges her to, that Oceania was at was with Eastasia not Eurasia Who cares? she responds. She is not interested in the deconstructing the methods the Party uses to control its people as Winston is when he reads Goldsteins book. Except where it touched upon her own life she had no interest in Party doctrine. She sees life as simple. You wanted to have good time; they, meaning the Party, wanted to stop you having it. While Winston is interested in opposition to the Party, and tells Julia about the picture of Aaronson, Rutherford and Jones, and how collecting evidence of the Partys lies and passing them on to the next generation will be a way of growing resistance, Julia only responds with: Im not interested in the next generationIm interested in us. Julia is a character who has been shaped by the world of Big Brother. Her curiousity, her capacity for questioning, has become limited. She is deeply self interested, which is not an aim of the Party, but a byproduct of the deprived, colourless world they have created. If she was a member of Winstons generation, she probably would have thought like Winston wanted to know, like him. However, as a member of a younger generation, she represents how thoughts and ideas even among opponents of the Party will narrow.

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Ticking Mind 1984 Study Notes

Minor Characters There a several minor characters in 1984 here is a few of the more important ones: Syme: Syme works on the Newspeak dictionary, a book whose singular job it is to reduce to range of language Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Syme is true follower of the Party, arguing that there are hundreds of words that can be got rid of, and that the proles are not human beings. He also has a fetish for hangings: I like to see them kicking. And above all, at the end, the tongue sticking right out, and blue a quite bright blue. Thats the detail that appeals to me. He is intelligent, but too intelligent according to Winston. One of these daysSyme will be vaporized, because there was something subtly wong with Syme. There was something that he lacked: discretion, aloofness, a sort of saving stupidityHe had read too many books. Even though he venerates Big Brother, for an Outer Party Member, he thinks too much about how Big Brother goes about its control. Syme represents the fate of the intelligentsia in totalitarian societies thinkers cant exist. Parsons: Parsons is Winstons neighbour and works also at the Ministry of Truth. He is stupid but enthusiastic: At 35 he was already putting on rolls of fat at neck and waistline, but his movements were brisk and boyish. His whole appearance was that of a little boy grown large. He proud that his girl of 7, a member of Junior Spies, has already denounced someones as a foreign spy. Parson physically shows how stupid followers can flourish under totalitarian societies. He also shows, how those most ardently in favour of it, can be a victim of it, through the very means of control they support. Smith meets him the cells of the Ministry of Love in Part 3. He had been denounced by his daughter who had listened at his door at night and heard him say, Down with Big Brother in his sleep. Katherine: Katherine is Winstons wife. He thinks about her as having without exception the most stupid, vulgar, empty mind that he had every encountered. She had not a thought in her head that was not a slogan, and there was no imbecility, absolutely none that she was not capable of swallowing. Winston thinks that he could have endured life with her except for sex: As soon as he touched her, she seemed to wince and stiffen. And since, as a good party woman would, she insists on having weekly sex in order to have a baby, he begins to find the situation unbearable. Winston related to Julia how once, on a community hike, when he and his wife became separated from the other hikers, and she was looking over the edge of a cliff, far away from anyone in the world, he had the urge to push her over. Eventually, when they have no kids, Katherine and

Winston separate. Katherines purpose as a character is to show us what a real female citizen of Oceania is like.

The Themes
Authority & Power: Authority and power are the most dominant themes of the novel. All other themes spring from this. Winston asks at the start of the novel why? Who does the Party create an authoritarian state? What is the benefit of being relatively backward, of being relatively deprived. The answer is the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler, as OBrien puts it. OBrien represents the Inner Party and their intoxication of power. He explains to Winston that This drama that I have played with you during the seven years will be played out again and again, always in subtler forms.an endless pressing, pressing, pressing upon the nerve of power. In other words, the drama with heretics is strung out, the more subtle it becomes, the bigger intoxication of power it gives to people like OBrien. Sex: Authority and power is, in turn, linked to sex. Power, to be crass, is a turn on. The Party aims to eradicate the sex instinct, so that the sexual privation induced hysteria. Sexual relief for the Inner Party comes through intoxication of power. For the Outer Party it comes through their hatred of the enemy. The Two Minutes Hate is a sexual act, The Hate rose to its climax. Hate Week is described as, the great orgasmquivering to its climax In hangings and violence done to the enemy, the Outer Party also find sexual relief, Syme describing his fetish as, I like to see them kicking. And above all, at the end, the tongue sticking right out, and blue a quite bright blue. Thats the detail that appeals to me. Even the apparatus of control that Big Brother uses has sexual connotations Winstons desk being filled with orifices and slits. For the Proles sex isnt banned. Indeed there is a department of the Ministry of Truth called Pornosec dedicated to producing pornography for them. Because to ban sex amongst the Proles, may actually lead to an uprising. Fear: Mental control is established through physical control such as sexual deprivation, and, of course, physical fear. Winstons reaction to fear is always a physical reaction. His bowels turn to ice or water. The needs of the body are paramount: On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe OBrien lectures Winston that the torture of the Ministry of Love is not designed to destroy heretics, but to convert them. Room 101, the room where people face their ultimate fear, is the perfect lever for such a conversion.

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Ticking Mind 1984 Study Notes

Language, The Past & Knowledge: Totalitarian societies will attempt to control their citizens by controlling the way they perceive their government and their understanding of current or past events. This means re-writing history, controlling the media, constant propaganda, and, in the extreme case of Big Brother, the control of language. Newspeak is dedicated to the reduction of language to its barest necessities. By stripping language of its complexity, peoples ability to express ideas is also reduced, until finally discussion is only functional. There are no independent ideas.

Techniques
Narrative technique: One very important technique in the novel is the narrative style. It is written in third person, but always from Winstons perspective. It could have easily been written in first person by Winston, but then we wouldnt accurately, objectively guage his feelings. The novel then, reads in way like a legal testimony, recounting his countless thoughtcrimes without and prejudice, that might be read out in court (and OBrien does at one point play back what Winston willingly said about harming civilians.

Quotes
There seemed to be no colour in anything. P. 8 You had to livein the assumption that every sound you made was overhead, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized. P. 8 Nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws. P. 11 It was curious that he seemed not merely to have lost his power of expressing himself, but even to have forgotten what it was that he originally intended to say. P. 12 Then there was a wonderful shot of a childs arm going up up up right up into the airthere was a lot of applause from the party seatp. 13 He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. P. 14 OBrien was a large, burly man with a thick neck and a coarse, humorous, brutal face. P. 14 The little sandy haired woman had turned bright pink, and her mouth was opening and shutting like that of a landed fish. Even OBriens heavy face was flushed. He was sitting very straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling and quiveringp. 17

A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current. P. 17 He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax. P. 18 The Hate rose to its climax. P. 18 There was a sort of calculating ferocity in the boys eye, a quite evident desire to hit or kick Winston and a consciousness of being very nearly big enough to do so. P. 24 Some Eurasian prisonerswere to be hanged in the parkThis happened about once a month, and was a popular spectacle. Children always clamoured to be taken to see it. P. 25 Who controls the past, ran the Party slogan, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past. p. 34 In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. P. 37 Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. P. 39 I like to see them kicking. And above all, at the end, the tongue sticking right out, and blue a quite bright blue. Thats the detail that appeals to me. P. 47 Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. P. 49 Orthodoxy is unconsciousness. P. 50 This was not a real human being but some kind of dummy. P. 51 He had an almost overwhelming temptation to shout a string of filthy wordsto do any violent or noisy or painful thing that might black out the memory that was tormenting him. P. 59 At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible sympton. P. 59 Its real, undeclared purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act. P. 60 The junior Anti-Sex Leagueadvocated complete celibacy for both sexes. P. 61 And what he wanted, more even than to be loved, was to break down that wall of virtue, even if it were only once in his whole life. The sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion. P. 62
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Ticking Mind 1984 Study Notes

If there is hope, wrote Winston, it lies in the proles. Proles and animals are free. P. 66 How could you tell how much of it was lies. P. 67 Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth. P. 68 I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY. P. 72 If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable what then? P. 73 Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows. P. 73 He kicked the thing into the gutterp. 76 The old mans memory was nothing but a rubbish heap of details. P. 82 What appealed to him was not so much its beauty as the air it seemed to possess of belonging to an age quite different from the present one. P. 85 The room had awakened in him a sort of nostalgia, a sort of ancestral memory. P. 86 Anything large and impressive, if it was reasonably new in appearance, was automatically claimed as having been built since the revolution. P. 88 Suddenly his heart seemed to turn to ice and his bowels to water. P. 89 The worst thing was the pain in his belly. P. 90 He could keep on her track till they were in some quiet place, and then smash her skull in with a cobblestone. P. 90 On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universep. 91 He felt as though a fire was burning in his belly. P. 97 At the sight of the words I love you the desire to stay alive had welled up inside him. P. 98 His whole mind and body seemed to be afflicted with an unbearable sensitivity. P. 99

Winston had a hallucination of himself smashing a pick-axe right into the middle of it. P. 100 I wanted to rape you then murder you afterwards. P. 108 He pushed it away from him, aware only that it was the memory of some action which he would have liked to undo but could not. P. 109 Anything that hinted at corruption always filled him with wild hope. P. 111 I hate purity, I hate goodness! I dont want any virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones. P. 112 She was not clever. P. 115 She didnt much care for reading, she said. P. 115 She hated the Party, and said so in the crudest words, but made no general criticism of it. P. 116. With Julia, everything came back to her own sexuality. P. 118 What was more important was the sexual privation induced hysteriap. 118 In a way she realized that she herself was doomed, that sooner or later the Thought Police would catch her. P. 120 He was standing in front of a wall of darkness, and on the other side of it there was something unendurable. P. 128 The room was a world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk. P. 133 Im not interested in the next generationIm interested in us. P. 138 He knew that he was starving the other two, but he could not help it; he even felt he had a right to. P. 144 But they cant make you believe it. They cant get inside you. P. 147 When the great orgasm was quivering to its climaxp. 159 In the centres of civilization war means no more than a continuous shortage of consumption goodsp. 164 The primary aim of modern warfare is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. P. 166
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Ticking Mind 1984 Study Notes

But it was also clear that an all round increase in wealth threatened the destructionof a hierarchical society. P. 166 The consciousness of being at warmakes the handing over of all power seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival. P. 168 The two aims of the party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought. P. 169 The war is waged by each ruling group against its subjects. P. 173. Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in ones mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. P. 183 In this place you could not feel anything except pain and foreknowledge of pain. 205. I shall save you, I shall make you perfect. P. 210 Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. P. 214 The old feeling, that at bottom it did not matter whether OBrien was a friend or an enemy, had come back. P. 217 We convert him, we capture his inner mindp. 219 He is not pretendinghe believes every word he says. P. 220 But somewhere or other there was a large patch of emptiness, as though a piece has been taken out of his brain. P. 221 We control matter because we control the mind. P. 229 Outside man there is nothing. P. 229 In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self abasement. P. 230 If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face for ever. P. 230 In reality, as he saw now, he had been reading to capitulate long before he had taken the decision. P. 238 God is power. P. 239.

He had fallen through the floor, through the walls of the building, through the earth, through the oceans, through the atmospherep. 247 His features had thickened, the skin on his nose and cheek bones was coarsely red. P. 249 There were things, your own acts, from which you could never recover. Something was killed in your breastp. 250 All you care about is yourself. P. 252 He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother. P. 256.

Ticking Mind 1984 Study Notes

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