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1984
Revision
Notes

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themes

context

di erent interpretations

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PLOT SUMMARY
PART I: CHAPTER 1-8
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Winston Smith returns to his apartment in Victory Mansions

He sees the posters on the stairs of an enormous face, underscored with
the words “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU”

Winston keeps a secret diary in an alcove in his apartment which is hidden
from the telescreen

Winston knows that, by writing in his diary, he is committing “thoughtcrime”
and therefore risking his life

He records that day’s Two Minutes Hate, during which he observed a darkhaired girl whom he often sees at the Ministry of Truth, and an Inner Party
member called O’Brien, with whom he made eye contact

Winston knows from the beginning that he will be arrested, and that this is
only a matter of time

He helps his neighbour, Mrs Parsons, by unclogging her sink, and meets
her two children, who are both members of the Party’s youth league, the
Spies

The next morning, Winston performs his “Physical Jerks”, an exercise
regime enforced on all Party members via their telescreens

Whilst doing this, Winston recalls that four years ago, Oceania was at war
with Eastasia, even though it is currently at war with Eurasia and
doublethink requires all citizens to accept that this has always been the
case

Winston works at the Ministry of Truth, where his daily assignments are sent
to him in the form of small, cylindrical paper rolls

He is tasked with “rectifying” certain news articles to ensure the Party is
always proven right

He does this by dictating the corrections into the speakwrite at his desk,
which translates spoken word into written word, and he puts all related
documentation into a “memory hole”, removing any evidence of the altered
data

He meets his fellow workers, Syme and Tom Parsons, at lunch

That evening, he uses his diary to record a visit he made to a prostitute
three years ago

After work one night, Winston nds himself walking through the streets of
London in a Prole district

He nds himself at the antique shop where he bought his diary

The owner, Mr Charrington, remembers Winston and suggests that Winston
take a look at another room, above the shop

The room contains some simple furnishings and, notably, no telescreen

Winston purchases a coral paperweight

On his way home, he spots the dark-haired girl from the Ministry, and
believes she might report him to the Thought Police


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Themes:
• Totalitarian Control & Psychological Manipulation
• Individual vs Collective Identity
————————————————————————————————

- Totalitarian Control & Psychological Manipulation: In Oceania, the

Party adopts the use of surveillance through telescreens, that
watch and hear everything, as well as language, with Newspeak
involving the loss of words to retain thought and control freedom
through thinking
...
At the
Ministry of Truth, Winston’s job involves editing news to t the
situation of Oceania as Big Brother predicts it
...
Through censorship and controlling people’s
memory, The Party is given the liberty to decide whatever truth
they deem t
...


- The Parsons’ children re ect many young children in Nazi
Germany who were indoctrinated into the Hitler Youth
Movement, who turned in their traitor parents, ever dutiful to The
Party
...
The use of euphemistic terms like “rectifying”
were common in totalitarian regimes to often disguise their own
barbaric practices
...

Being referred to as “duck speak”, which underlines the
regurgitation of party ideals, party members follow the doctrines
of Oceania without question
...


- The Party also tried to repress sexual desire, and if not repress it,
present it as something unclean and undesirable, only for the
purpose of recreation
...



- Individual vs Collective Identity: Winston writes in his diary, which

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is ultimately forbidden in Oceania
...
In Oceania, like many other dystopian
societies, the Party is drawn to the individual, and makes sure that
their main focus is on the doctrines of the state
...


- Winston looks towards the proles for hope in society, “if there is
hope, it lies in the proles”, as they are unmonitored by The Party
due to their unconsciousness to the doctrines of the state
...



PART II: CHAPTER 1-10

• On a bathroom break at work, the dark-haired girl passes Winston a
note upon which is written “I love you”

• They are able to arrange to meet in Victory Square, where there is a
crowd watching a convoy of war prisoners

• The girl whispers a plan to Winston to meet in the country on Sunday
afternoon

• They meet, and Winston learns that the girl’s name is Julia

• Winston recognises the countryside scenery from a dream he had

• The pair have sex, and Winston is inspired by Julia’s freedom and
rebellious nature

• Julia arranges how their relationship will work and they pursue their
secret relationship, learning more about each other

• Eventually, Winston rents the room above Mr Charrington’s shop as a
place for him and Julia to meet


• During their rst meeting there, Winston is horri ed to discover that
there are rats in the room, revealing that he is terri ed of them

• As time passes, a more fanatical atmosphere seems to be building,
and Syme disappears

• O’Brien makes contact with Winston whilst at work, rea rming to
Winston his suspicions that O’Brien is a member of the resistance
group, the “Brotherhood”

• O’Brien invites Winston and Julia to visit him at his home

• As Winston and Julia’s relationship continues, they agree that the
Party will never be able to force them to stop loving each other, and
this is their ultimate rebellion

• Winston and Julia visit O’Brien at his home, where they are astounded
at the fact that O’Brien, as an Inner Party member, is able to turn o
his telescreen

• Winston reveals their hatred of Big Brother and the Party, and O’Brien
explains that the Brotherhood exists and Goldstein is real

• They are then “inducted” into the Brotherhood, and Winston reveals
the location of their hiding place above Mr Charrington’s shop

• O’Brien tells Winston that he will send him a copy of Goldstein’s
manifesto, which Winston receives and reads in the room above the
shop

• A voice comes from the picture above the bed, saying “You are the
dead” and the picture falls to reveal a hidden telescreen

• Winston and Julia have been betrayed by Mr Charrington, and as the
Thought Police enter the room to arrest them, Winston realises that
Mr Charrington is secretly a member of the Thought Police as well


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Themes:
• Love and Sex
• Independence and Identity
• Reality Control
————————————————————————————————
- Love and Sex: Winston and Julia meet, and he reveals how before
he had known her he wanted to ravish her and murder her
...
Winston’s distorted view of sex pushes him to despise
virginal qualities, as he feels that in itself is some loyalty to Big
Brother and The Party
...
The views of sex have been so deformed that
even the triviality of it has been linked to the Party, not being seen
as a form of pleasure, but rather a “political act”
...
Likening
the proles to animals, The Party represses sexual desire in its
members, but uses it to distract the proles from the reality of
their lives
...
He understands this fact but does not seem afraid of it, he
is willing to risk his life if it ensures him love and sex
...



- Independence and Identity: Winston and Julia di er in their ideas

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about rebellion
...
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stealing rations, having sex, etc
...
He understands that death is inevitable for them, as they
have already committed thoughtcrime
...


- While in the room, Winston observes a prole woman singing
heartily about Oceania
...
The woman represents
Winston’s hope in the proles, as she is a gure of freedom and
vitality
...


- Winston and Julia are motivated by the thought that the Party is
unable to get inside their heads and alter the love they feel for

one another, this love which they claim gives them a sense of
self
...
Altering the
past and the present allows them to dictate whatever realities they
decide
...
There
is a clear class divide here, as O’Brien has some control over his
own life and what the Party has access to, as opposed to the
masses of the Outer Party
...
Darkness
has connotations of evil or terror, but could also be interpreted as
having privacy and secrecy
...


- During Hate Week, it is announced that Oceania is and always
has been, at war with Eastasia and that Eurasia is an ally, to
which the members of the Party blindly accept
...


- Emmanuel Goldstein’s books outlines that all parts of a
totalitarian regime, including surveillance and reality control are
schemes to keep the hierarchy of society intact, with the rich
being able to maintain their grip on power
...


- Through a Marxist lens, the book explains the cycle of how the
Low and Middle class work together and rebel against the High
class, which parts of both splitting o and creating new groups
...
By erasing documents that
contained details of the past, Party members were unable to
critic the infallibility of Big Brother, or compare their state of living
to how good people of the past had it
...
Room 101 has
become a symbol that signi es pain, terror and torture, so much so
that an emaciated man becomes willing to betray everything he
has ever known and loved to escape the realities of the room
...
However, upon realising that “nothing in the world
was so bas ad physical pain”, Winston realises how torture is
impossible to resist heroically, and every will eventually succumb to
it
...
“For a moment he clung to
O’Brien like a baby”, Winston has been battered and broken
down, trying to understand the doctrines of the Party, trying to
gure out how 2+2=5
...


- O’Brien tells Winston that “If you want a picture of the future,
imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever” to show him
how there is no individuality and it will forever be oppressed
...
Winston can never die as an individual
...
He used it to warn the
world if it continued to allow dictators in power
...


Oceania exerts its power over its citizens through many ways, one of
which includes propaganda
...

No records of the past are allowed, and therefore memory becomes
unreliable
...


The Party also strives to eradicate any form of human connection, as
they need to fuel all loyalty to the Party alone
...
Their
children are then turned into spies for the Party, enabling that there is
no unorthodoxy among its members
...


Orwell did not want people to become desensitised to what was
happening in reality, deliberately setting the book in a ctionalised
version of Great Britain to demonstrate that totalitarianism could
succeed anywhere unless people resist
...
Sex, by the
Party, is seen to be unclean and immoral, and only should be between
married couples for the sole purpose of procreation
...
The Hate Week and the Two Minutes
Hate are further means of channelling sexual tension and frustration,
transforming them into war fever and leader worship
...
The essence of their
love does not withstand the persecution of the O’Brien, as both admit
to betraying the other, making the sincerity of the love arguable
...


Love in 1984 is the clear antithesis of everything the Party stands for
...
This results in the dehumanisation of society via the removal
of the strongest and most basic of human bonds, love
...


Technology, which is generally perceived as working towards a
common good, can also facilitate evil
...



Identity and Individuality

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In 1984, Winston desperately tries to establish himself as an individual,
as opposed to the homogenous group of the Outer Party members
...



Winston’s own identity is restricted in Oceania, as he is unsure of the
day or what time it is, and his memory is unreliable, as he is unsure the
dates of the dreams he has, and has no documentation to prove the
things he believed were true actually happened
...
There is no freedom of self-expression,
and nobody has an identity
...


Winston ultimately loses the last fragment of his individuality, when he
renounces Julia
...
Winston cannot die as an individual
...


• Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy supplied arms during the war, while
USSR aided the Republicans, in hopes to make them Communist
...


• Stalinism; all acts can be justi ed by the commitment to an
eventual end
...



- Joseph Stalin could have been Orwell’s main inspiration for Big
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-

Brother, the use of brother and comrade has connotation of
communism, similar to the Soviet Union
...
Totalitarian regimes such as the one in Stalin's
Soviet Union had similar demographics in relation to the class
system of 1984
...



Literary Context

1984 highlighted as a dystopian ction explores the conditions of
human life in a dystopian society, which are often bleak, mainly through
deprivation, oppression or terror (or all 3)
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The Party is an all-powerful force of oppression and control, destroying
individual identity and ensuring the population live in poverty,
exhaustion and misery:

Dystopian ction often also explores the e ects of oppressive societies
on the individual mind, for example:

Winston’s trouble retrieving and trusting his memories, and his
struggles to determine reality from imagination, emphasise how the
oppressive regime have in uenced not only its people’s physical
surroundings but also their mental states


The use of satire can also be commented on as being typical of
dystopian ction
...


Social Context

Orwell’s main in uences were political and rooted in the time between
1914 to 1945, a period between two world wars linked by a major
economic recession, as well as increasing con ict between capitalism
and communism
...
For examples, “2+2=5” was a real political slogan from the Soviet
Union, as a promise to complete the industrialising Five Year Plan in
four years
...
Big Brother is interpreted to have
been modelled on Stalin, and the choice of a Jewish name for
Emmanuel Goldstein re ects the Nazi party’s anti-semitic rhetoric and
ethnic cleansing policies
...


He realised that mass media was a key factor in Hitler’s rise to power
and incorporated the use of propaganda, parades and telescreens,
which are drawn from the Nazi Party public propaganda and its
marches and large-scale rallies
...


Winston cannot really remember whether or not life was better, or if he
was happier, before the Revolution


- The dangers of this are re ected in the fact that the members of

the Inner Party have more freedoms than the average citizen, such
as being able to turn o their telescreens and live in wealth rather
than poverty


Connections to other Dystopian texts
• Children in 1984 are indoctrinated in the regime, similar to Brave New
World by Alduous Huxley
...


• O’Brien says to Winston, “If you want to picture the future, just
imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever” which closely
links to Jack London’s Iron Heel, which symbolises the rise of English
Socialism
...
They are referred to by given numbers, which
could be linked to they dystopian ction The Birth of Love by Joanna
Ravenna, where the prisoners are also numbered
...



Women in Dystopian Fiction


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There is some feminist analysis on the way women have been
presented in dystopian ction, particularly in Orwell’s work
...


There is the contrast of the pleasure-seeking and overtly submissive
Julia, who Winston “could do what he liked with her” to the heart prole
woman, “with mare-like buttocks”
...
The woman is
stripped of all agency however, she is reduced to an assemblage of
body parts: arms, belly, heart
...
She, like Julia, is used for the sole purpose of
sparking hope in the mind of the male protagonist
...


• Gerald Federer o ers a psychoanalytical perspective for O’Brien and
Winston’s relationship, as a sort of homosexual homoerotic
relationship with a sadomasochism aspect to it, mainly because of
Winston’s complete adoration and admiration for O’Brien, and his
inability to stop loving him even while he is being tortured
...
” With the
Party adopting fragments of people’s memory and changing how
they remember it, they essentially change the course of history
...


• Psychoanalytical perspective for Winston’s hatred for women (or
possibly love for Julia) stemmed from the disappearance of his
mother at a young age
...


• From A Marxist perspective, the lower classes have traditionally been
manipulated through the encouragement of behaviours such as
gambling, drinking, and fornication
...



• Jennifer O’Dee (2013) stated that “Orwell characterises his women
under a misogynistic lens”: women are either presented to be sexual
objects, or completely sexless, child-bearing machines
...

heresy

Motifs
• “Oranges and lemons” - a popular British nursery rhyme that most
people know, however in 1984, citizens in Oceania only manage to
know fragments of it (Julia “I don’t know
...
It signi es
the eradication of shared British culture by the Party (British
Nostalgia)
...
The
coral in the center of the paperweight represents rarity, and the fact
that it is embedded in the glass and cannot be touched represent the
problem in Winston's life
...


• The Victory Gin - When Winston is fully converted, he lls up the loss
of his dignity and self-respect with Victory Gin
...



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The reader should note that Orwell consistently names items,
processes, and events antithetically to their intents, results, and

purposes and thereby makes Winston's world more terrible and
frightening
...
’
‘We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness’
‘We are the dead’
‘At the end of it we’re sure to be apart’
‘We shall be utterly without power of any kind’
‘War destroys materials that can make people intelligent
...
in the end
we shall shoot you
...
The Party has control
through nature
...

This also extends to Winston as a gure, he too is a part of nature
...
There has to
be something belongs to nature, something that people will feel
naturally - like pain, in order for them to be successful
...
Winston however, in
relation to female characters, is a misogynist
...



- Julia is transformed from the only free individual in Oceania, as the

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novel suggests, to the domesticated housewife, cooking, cleaning
and protecting Winston from the rat in the corner (and essentially
the outside world)
...


Women in 1984, especially prole women, are often treated as
stupid and are objecti ed, compared to animals in the book
...
His resistance to the su ocation of
his identity as part of the Outer Party highlights the harshness of
Oceania’s rule, constituted by the powers of The Party, The
Thought Police and Big Brother
...

He wishes for a revolution, which he sees only possible through the
proles, who are unaware of the state’s power, and deemed
intellectually incompetent to start a revolution
...


Winston embodies the every-man narrative, a beacon of selfexpression, hope, love and freedom
...


Winston’s ongoing aw is his fatalism (the belief that events are
predestined and so are inevitable), as he goes through the novel
knowing he will eventually get caught and be killed by the Thought
Police
...
When he is being tortured,
O’Brien calls him out for lying that he thought he would never be

caught, showing that Winston truly never believed in such a
rebellion, as only gave himself false hope
...
He is not the beacon of hope, and never will be
...
She represents the elements of humanity that
Winston does not: pure sexuality, cunning, and survival
...
In a
hedonistic way, she is interested mainly in her own pleasure,
through her small-scale rebellions like having a variety of lovers, or
stealing illegal food items like chocolate
...


Julia at times embodies conventional traits of a “feminine identity”,
as she wears makeup to “please Winston”, and calls him
a ectionate names
...
Julia gives Winston hope, that eventually
gets them both destroyed
...
Even though he
is Winston’s torturer, Winston paradoxically comes to love him as
his saviour

O’Brien makes mention of the fact that the Party “had gotten him a
long time ago”, which illustrates some consciousness outside the
doctrines of Oceania
...
O'Brien is often seen as a
father gure and a friend to Winston
...
If Winston would
simply embrace the Party's doctrine, he would be "clean
...



Emmanuel Goldstein and Big Brother:

- Big Brother and Emmanuel Goldstein are the conceptual leaders of

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the opposing forces in Oceania: Big Brother is the titular head of
Oceania, and Goldstein is the leader of his opponents, the
Brotherhood
...


Winston can not tell if either of the two exist, but O’Brien claiming
he wrote Goldstein’s book could be an indication that both are
party propaganda
...


He is symbolic to Soviet Russia’s Stalin, and the use of a ectionate
appellation “brother” connotes trust, security and safety, ironic to
the state of Oceania

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