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Crafted and edited with care, Worth Books set the standard for quality and give you the tools you need to be a well-informed reader.
This short summary and analysis of 1984 includes:
- Historical context
- Chapter-by-chapter overviews
- Character analysis
- Important quotes
- Fascinating trivia
- Glossary of terms
- Supporting material to enhance your understanding of the original work
About 1984 by George Orwell:
George Orwell’s classic novel 1984 is a cautionary tale about a dystopian society under the crushing and watchful eye of a tyrannical regime led by Big Brother. The dark story revolves around Winston Smith, an everyman who is tired of the government’s lies and relentless persecution of people who dare think for themselves. He manages to find the strength to stand up to a totalitarian system and, in the process, finds love and affection in a world where both have been deemed obsolete.
Originally published in 1949, Orwell’s 1984 is a masterpiece of modern fiction and one of the most enduring and influential books of the twentieth century.
The summary and analysis in this ebook are intended to complement your reading experience and bring you closer to a great work of fiction.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504044981 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Worth Books |
| Publication date: | 03/07/2017 |
| Series: | Smart Summaries |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 30 |
| Sales rank: | 549,214 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Summary and Analysis of 1984
Based on the Book by George Orwell
By Worth Books
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 2017 Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4498-1
CHAPTER 1
Summary
ONE
I
On a cold, windy April day in 1984, Winston Smith comes home at lunchtime from his job at the Ministry of Truth. He wears company-issued blue overalls and appears frail and older than his thirty-nine years. Because of a varicose ulcer in his ankle, the climb to his dingy, seventh-floor flat in the Victory Mansions is painful. Winston rests on the landings where enormous posters of a mustachioed man stare at him. The caption reads: BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.
Inside the apartment, Winston looks out the window at the towering white Ministry of Truth pyramid where he's employed as a clerk rewriting records. There are three other pyramids housing the Ministry of Peace (the war department), the Ministry of Love (the frightening department of law and order), and the Ministry of Plenty (the department of economic affairs). From a distance he sees the slogan inscribed on the Ministry of Truth's facade: WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
Winston can't remember what London was like before it became the chief city of Airstrip One of Oceania. He pours a teacup of oily Victory Gin and sits in an alcove, his back to the ubiquitous telescreen, which can see and hear everything in range. He takes out a pen, a bottle of ink, and a blank book, and recalls the incident that triggered his decision to start a diary.
It was last week, at the Two Minutes Hate. He was surprised to see a dark-haired young woman and O'Brien, a high-ranking Inner Party member. Winston was wary of the too-attractive dark-haired woman, suspecting she might be an agent of the Thought Police. O'Brien, on the other hand, gave him the impression of being a counter-revolutionary. The Hate session began with a screeching noise, followed by the onscreen face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, along with Goldstein's bleating voice.
Goldstein is the commander of the Brotherhood, an underground network conspiring to overthrow the State. Winston felt loathing for the dark-haired girl, partially because she was pretty and sexless — a symbol of chastity common in young Party comrades. The Party expects him to hate Goldstein, but he views Goldstein as a guardian of truth and sanity in a world full of lies. Winston despises Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police, and prays the rumors of a growing resistance are true. At the Hate session, O'Brien's eyes met Winston's, and he thought it was a sign of their solidarity.
Back at his apartment, Winston scribbles down words in a stream of consciousness, then writes the phrase "DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER" over and over again. The act is punishable by death.
A knock at the door makes him jump.
Need to Know: Winston is on the threshold of joining the revolution, but he doesn't know how. If there are others who feel as rebellious as he does, the diary could be a way to preserve his memories for future readers — maybe O'Brien. The words in the diary are proof that something exists outside himself.
II
In his haste, Winston leaves the diary open on the table with the treasonous words in sight. He answers the door and finds Mrs. Parsons, his neighbor and the wife of his colleague Tom Parsons, in need of help unclogging her sink since her husband's at work. Inside the Parsons' flat, their two unruly children surround him with a menacing game of name-calling: "traitor," "thought-criminal," and "Goldstein." Their taunting unnerves him. Mrs. Parsons explains that the children are agitated because they can't go to the hanging at the park.
In the hall, returning back to his apartment, something stings the back of Winston's neck. He turns to see Mrs. Parsons pulling her son, holding a slingshot, back inside. The fear on her face is warranted, since every week a child reports his parent to the police.
Seven years earlier, Winston dreamed that a voice in the dark whispered, "We will meet in the place where there is no darkness." Now he recognizes the voice as O'Brien's, and wonders if it's a prophecy.
A bulletin over the telescreen reports that Party forces have won a glorious victory. Also chocolate rations will be reduced. Winston looks through the window down at the street where a poster with the word INGSOC (the sacred principles of the Party) flaps in the wind. Before Winston heads back to work, he writes, "Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death." He washes the incriminating ink stains off his fingers and hides the diary in a drawer.
Need to Know: Thought used to be free and truth used to exist. Now conformity and uniformity are required. Big Brother controls everything — even thoughts. Without personal freedoms people are essentially dead.
III
When Winston was 11 years old, his mother, father, and baby sister disappeared — probably swallowed up by the purge of the 1950s. He often imagines his family sucked down into a deep well or watery grave. One night, he dreams of a green pasture and the dark-haired girl walking toward him, tearing off her clothes. He wakes with the word "Shakespeare" on his lips, just as the telescreen whistles and announces that Physical Jerks (daily exercises) begin in three minutes. Winston crawls out of bed and labors to follow the rhythmic movements of the woman on the telescreen.
Winston remembers only bits and pieces of his childhood, before the country was at war and when Airstrip One was called England, Britain, or London. Today Oceania is at war with Eastasia and Eurasia. Reality is controlled by the principles of "Newspeak" and "doublethink." Knowledge only exists in consciousness, so when the Party erases history and replaces it with a fable, it's acceptable to the masses.
Need to Know: Working for the Ministry of Truth means Winston must live in a state of knowing and not knowing: conscious of the truth, while telling the Party's carefully constructed lies.
IV
Inside Winston's cubicle at the Records Department are three orifices: a small tube for written messages, a larger one for newspapers, and a wide slit covered by wire grating for scrap paper. Nicknamed "memory holes," documents slated for destruction are dropped in the slots and incinerated in furnaces. Winston's job entails rewriting Party statements and promises. He substitutes the facts with new and corrected ones. Newspapers, books, magazines, leaflets, films, photographs — any type of documentation — are corrected to fit the new reality according to the Party. Burning the original text makes it impossible to prove falsification has taken place. A lie becomes the truth.
His cubicle is located in a windowless hall among rows of identical cubicles filled with swarms of workers engaging in a multitude of jobs. Most of them he doesn't know by name. Today Winston receives an assignment to rewrite a speech by Big Brother. He invents a war hero to commemorate named Captain Ogilvy, adds a few lines to the speech, and inserts a fake photograph. With a single act of forgery, a new man is brought into existence.
Need to Know: The Party washes and rewrites history, substituting facts with their own propaganda. Statistics are fantasies and people who've been vaporized are deleted as if they never lived. Every piece of information fades away into a shadowy world of uncertainty.
V
At the canteen, Winston sits with Syme, an intelligent man working on the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary. His job is to destroy words, not invent them. He says someday Oldspeak (current English) will be obsolete and Newspeak will replace it. Controlling language narrows one's range of thought. Obliterating literature from the past creates a new climate of belief. Soon there will be no need to think at all.
Tom Parsons joins them and apologizes to Winston for the slingshot incident. He launches into a boastful story about how his young daughter turned a stranger in for wearing funny shoes. The Thought Police can pick up on the slightest thing: A change in facial expression, a nervous tic, or letting your mind wander. Anything can give you away. Winston fakes a smile, but he's disturbed by Tom's story.
A new bulletin over the telescreen announces that Oceania's standard of living has gone up twenty percent, and chocolate rations are increasing. Winston wonders if he's the only one who remembers that yesterday they said chocolate rations were decreasing.
The dark-haired girl at the next table turns and looks at Winston, arousing suspicion that she's spying on him.
Need to Know: Language is systematically being eliminated by the government, while Winston and his coworkers continue to invent scenarios of progress and victory that don't exist.
VI
In his diary, Winston reconstructs an encounter with a prostitute three years earlier that still torments him. The Party forbids consorting with prostitutes, but doesn't dole out too serious a punishment. It's promiscuity between Party members that is considered a serious crime. The unspoken aim of the Party is not to prevent men and women from forming loyalties, but to remove the aspect of pleasure from the sexual act. Marriage must be preapproved, and couples attracted to one another are usually denied. Intercourse is for the sole purpose of producing children.
Winston and his wife, Katharine, were married for fifteen months. She was the most stupid, vulgar, and empty-minded person he'd ever met, but he'd have stayed with her if it hadn't been for the sex. She was a wooden board who submitted to him with her eyes shut. When no child was conceived, they agreed to part ways. What Winston wants more than anything is to be loved, and to break down a woman's wall of Party-ingrained virtue.
Need to Know: The Party's goal is to kill an individual's sexual instinct, and barring that, to distort erotic impulses. From an early age, women are indoctrinated in the belief that chastity is a noble attribute that proves their loyalty to the government. Big Brother considers lust a thought-crime.
VII
Winston is convinced that hope for the future lies in the proles, the working class of Oceania. Overthrowing the government from inside the Party would be impossible, so it would have to come from outside. Proles are in the perfect position for revolt because they haven't been indoctrinated into the Party's ideology, and the civil police hardly ever interfere with them, even though they make up 85% of the population. If proles organized and channeled their energy toward political rebellion, they'd have a chance.
Winston pulls out a children's history book borrowed from Mrs. Parsons and begins copying down a detailed description of London before the Revolution, when capitalists ruled. Capitalists owned all the land, money, houses, and factories. Everyone was a slave. Winston has no tangible evidence that these facts are untrue, but he feels it in his gut. The Party line about the city's current success is directly contradicted by what Winston witnesses on the streets, with people shuffling around in leaky shoes and sleeping in rundown housing. The telescreens constantly spew statistics about prosperity, while erasing the proof about what's really going on. For thirty seconds in 1973, Winston held proof of the Party's corruption in his hand. He found a photograph of concrete evidence that three men convicted of treason were innocent. If the photo were ever to get out, it would have destroyed the Party. Not wanting to be arrested, Winston threw the photo into the memory hole, but he'll never forget the image nor the date the snapshot was taken.
Winston knows how the Party falsifies the past, but he doesn't understand why. He believes that O'Brien is in agreement with him. How could anyone not know that the natural world exists and the laws of nature don't change? Stones are hard, water is wet, and freedom means you can say aloud "two plus two makes four."
Need to Know: Proles are a large, untapped socioeconomic group with the potential power to abolish the Party, partly because they're beneath suspicion, and partly because they're free to live their lives. But the proles show little sign of wanting change.
VIII
While on a detour through a prole neighborhood, formerly the northeast slums of London, Winston admires the simpler lives in the rundown area, especially when he smells real coffee brewing.
Someone shouts, "Steamer!" which is a nickname for a rocket bomb. Everyone scatters, and Winston ducks for cover. He survives the blast, dusts himself off, and continues walking. He finds a bloodied hand severed at the wrist and nonchalantly kicks the stump into the gutter.
A few blocks away from the bombsite, pubs are teeming with customers as if nothing had happened. He buys an old man a drink and asks him about what life was like before the Revolution. The old man's recollection is a rubbish heap of details, so Winston gives up and returns to the street.
Wandering aimlessly, he finds himself in front of a junk shop where he'd bought the diary years before. After quickly ducking inside, Winston is greeted by the shop owner, Mr. Charrington. Most of the wares on display are trash, but Winston finds an appealing antique paperweight made of glass and coral. It's a beautiful object from the past.
Mr. Charrington shows Winston a room upstairs that has an armchair, a bed, and a fireplace. On the wall is a picture of a building in a frame that Winston finds familiar. Mr. Charrington explains that it was a church, and recites a rhyme about it, "Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement's." Winston likes the room's feeling of nostalgia — a sort of ancestral memory. He promises himself he'll return.
Back on the street, Winston is shocked to see the dark-haired woman walking toward him. She passes without saying a word, but now he's sure she's following him.
At home, Winston takes out his diary, but can't concentrate. All he can think about is the torture he might be subjected to if he's caught. He tries to conjure up the face of O'Brien, but Big Brother pops into his head instead.
Need to Know: There are few people remaining from the old days and many are too senile to remember the past. Worse, what they recall is scattered and useless. Once memories fail and written records are extinguished, there will be no standard against which to prove the truth.
TWO
I
Four days have passed since Winston saw the dark-haired woman near the junk shop. Now, in a corridor of the Ministry of Truth, she's heading toward him with her arm in a sling. As she reaches him, she trips and falls, letting out a cry of pain. Winston helps her up and asks if she's hurt. She says she's fine, thanks him, and continues on her way. In the few seconds it took to help her up, the girl slipped a scrap of paper into his hand. It reads, "I love you."
Winston can't focus on work, and figures out a plan to talk to the young woman. It's possible she's setting a trap, but he's willing to take that risk. He'll approach her at the canteen at lunchtime. Several days pass before he finally manages to find an empty seat next to her. They arrange a clandestine meeting that night at Victory Square.
Standing shoulder to shoulder in a dense crowd of people, the woman whispers instructions for a rendezvous Sunday afternoon. She squeezes Winston's hand.
Need to Know: Winston is willing to put his life in jeopardy for a chance to have a love affair with the dark-haired woman.
II
There are no telescreens in the countryside, but it's still dangerous. Winston meets the dark-haired woman and they silently walk down a wooded path to a grassy knoll in a clearing. Soon she's in his arms, kissing him and using terms of endearment, but they stop short of lovemaking. Her name is Julia and she's been with hundreds of men. Because Winston hates pure and virtuous women, that revelation makes him more drawn to her.
Need to Know: Pure love or lust no longer exists in the Party. Emotions are always mixed with fear and hatred. Sex is a political act of defiance.
III
Julia is twenty-six years old, lives in a hostel with thirty other young women, and works on novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department. The only person she knew who was alive before the Revolution was her grandfather. He died when she was eight. She's a good comrade, and once worked producing porn for distribution among the proles. Only women worked in Pornosec, because the Party considered men's sexual instincts less controllable. Julia breaks Party rules for her own pleasure — she's not interested in political revolt. She believes it's possible to live the way you want and she won't tolerate negative talk of dying.
Need to Know: The sexual impulse is dangerous to the Party, just like parental instincts, which explains why children are systematically removed from their parents once they're old enough. The family is an extension of the Thought Police.
IV
Winston knows how dangerous it is to rent the room above the junk shop, but with the difficulty of arranging regular liaisons with Julia, he has no other choice.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Contents
Context,Overview,
Cast of Characters,
Summary,
Character Analysis,
Themes and Symbols,
Direct Quotes and Analysis,
Trivia,
What's That Word?,
Critical Response,
About George Orwell,
For Your Information,
Bibliography,
Copyright,