1984 summary 1

PART 1 ~ chapter 2

• The person knocking at his door is actually his neighbour, Mrs Parsons, who asks him to unblock her kitchen sink.
• While helping her, he is thinking about her husband, Tom, who is an enthusiastic supporter of Party, and their children, an unruly boy and girl who terrorize their mother
• Winston predicts that they will one day turn their mother in for some supposed deviation from orthodoxy.
• The children are particularly restless as they could not attend the public hanging of some Eurasian prisoners, supposedly guilty of war crimes.
• As Winston leaves, the boy fires a catapult at him and calls him Goldstein.
• Returning to his flat, Winston recalls a strange dream in which a voice (later to be identified as O’Brien) said to him, “We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness” (p.27)
• Cannot be sure whether O’Brien is a friend or an enemy, and he is not even sure that it matters as long as O’Brien is someone who understands his feelings.
• He hears a report on the telescreen that the chocolate ration has been reduced, accompanied by a counterbalancing claim of victory
• System is enforced through the “sacred principles” of “Ingsoc”. These principles are “Newspeak” (development of a simplified language which makes it hard to think unorthodox thoughts)
• “Doublethink” – holding onto an official belief while acting on a more realistic unofficial one which contradicts it
• “The mutability of the past” – believing that it is possible to change history by re-writing it
• The state seems all-powerful and Winston’s diary-writing futile.

PART 1 – chapter 3

• Winston dreams of the death of his mother and sister, whom he pictures looking up at him from inside a sinking ship.
• Conceives of his mother’s death as self-sacrifice on his behalf, and feels that it was tragic in a way that is now no longer possible because private motivations such as family loyalty have been destroyed by the state.
• Then he has a contrasting dream of being in the countryside on a sunny day (in what his waking hours he thinks of as “the Golden Country” – p.33), watching the girl from Fiction Dep. walking towards him stripping.
• His sleep is broken by morning alarm whistle from telescreen, followed by a programme of compulsory physical exercises.
• While exercising, he struggles to recall details of his childhood, particularly his experience of an air raid and reflects upon the way that since then things have been distorted.
• Oceania is supposed to have been at war with Eurasia and allied to Eastasia for a long period, but Winston knows that 4 years ago Eastasia was the enemy and Eurasia the ally.
• Similarly BB’s leadership of the Party has been backdated by decades and the Party falsely credits itself with the invention of the aeroplane.
• Winston’s thoughts are interrupted by the instructor on the telescreen, who singles him out so aggressively for slacking for once that he does succeed in touching his toes.

PART 1 – chapter 4

• Winston’s job at the co-called Ministry of Truth is to rewrite past issues of the Times in order to bring them into line with the most recent version of history approved by Party.
• All records, from novels to cartoons, have to be falsified this way.
• Elsewhere in the building, newspapers, literature, pornography and popular songs are being produced to meet the Party’s requirements, ensuring that all sections of the population receive only the ideas and information which the Party authorizes.
• Changes have been made today to a prediction about military events, to a forecast about production figures and to a pledge to increase chocolate ration which now becomes a warning that the ration may have to be reduced.
• Winston’s most challenging task however, is to rewrite a speech in which BB has awarded decorations to a Comrade Withers.
• Withers has since become an “unperson”, probably executed, with all evidence of his existence destroyed.
• He decides to transfer the decoration to an entirely imaginary hero, Comrade Ogilvy, and invents a suitably virtuous life for him.

PART 1 – chapter 5

• Winston spends his lunchtime in the Ministry canteen with Syme, a colleague who is working on the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary.
• Syme enthuses about how thoroughly he and his colleagues are reducing the English vocab.
• Soon people’s capacity to think unorthodox thoughts will be inhibited because they will not have the words needed to formulate them.
• As he listens, Winston suspects that Syme is too clever and indiscreet for his own good and that he will one day be killed by the Party.
• While the 2 are talking, Parsons joins them, who boasts of how his daughter and her friends followed a stranger and denounced him as a spy, possibly resulting in the man’s execution.
• Winston reflects that Parsons, in contrast to Syme, will never be vaporized by the state because he is so uncritically enthusiastic about the Party.
• They listen to a series of announcements from the Ministry of Plenty & Winston is depressed by the way the others seem to effortlessly believe the lies that they hear.
• He is also alarmed by the sight of the girl from the Fiction Dep. who seems to be following him.
• He fears she is spying on him with the intention of revealing him to the Thought Police.

PART 1 – chapter 6

• Winston records in his diary a visit he made to a prostitute 3 years ago. While writing down his experiences, he recalls how he separated from his wife Katharine a decade ago.
• Reason: as a good Party member she regarded sex as a pleasure less duty to be gone through in order to create a child.
• Winston longs for a healthy sexual relationship and regards such expedients as his visit to the ageing prostitute with horror.

PART 1 – chapter 7

• Winston’s thoughts turn to the proles, who form 85% of the population.
• They actually have the physical strength to overthrow the Party, but they are preoccupied with the hard lives they lead and with the distractions which the state offers them (i.e. gambling on lottery)
• He again reflects on the impossibility facing even an educated person like himself in learning what life was like before the Revolution.
• He can see the discrepancy between the Party’s claims about society and the drab reality he experiences, and he is sure that much that appears in the history books is untrue, but evidence has been edited by people like himself.
• Only once did he have actual proof of the state’s lies. The document concerned 3 “traitors” who he saw in the late “1960s” at the Chestnut Tree Cafe, passing the time until their eventual execution by drinking gin and listening to a telescreen jeeringly sing, “Under the spreading chestnut tree/ I sold you and you sold me” (p.80).
• In “1973”, while working on some documents, he came across a photograph torn out of the Times, showing the 3 men together in NY.
• This contradicted statements in their confessions that on the date in question they were in Eurasia. Winston could not show this evidence to anyone, and destroyed it after about 10 minutes to avoid incrimination.
• Even after many years of reflection, he can’t understand why the Party shapes society as it does & he feels despair at this, but he takes courage from the thought that O’Brien may be on his side.
• Thinking of him as his reader, he concludes the diary entry by stating: “Freedom is the freedom to say that 2+2 makes 4. If that is granted, all else follows” (p.84).

PART 1 – chapter 8

• Winston truants from an evening at the Community Centre and wanders instead through the slums of north London, observing and reflecting upon the proles.
• After escaping death from a rocket bomb, he enters a pub and strikes up a conversation with an elderly man, hoping that his informant will be able to give him a first-hand account of the past.
• However the information he receives is so fragmentary and personal that it is useless.
• He leaves the pub and wanders the streets until he finds himself at the junkshop where he bought the diary.
• Here he buys a beautiful coral paperweight and talks to the shop owner, Carrington, about various relics of the past, including the nursery rhyme “Oranges and lemons”.
• On his way home he is terrified to find himself passing the girl from the Fiction Dep.
• He now believes more than ever that she is spying on him and will soon denounce him to the authorities.

-END OF PART 1-