Sam Review's "1984" by George Orwell - November 2015

Sam's Notes Taken Along the Way

Because this is my third time starting this, and second time finishing this book, I am going to try and focus on what the story is "really about", the metaphors within it, and why this book is so commonly read in high schools.

The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts. The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war. The Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order. And the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty.

WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY GOD IS POWER

Part One, Chapter One
I feel like it's important to note how bad life is.  Just within the first few paragraphs, the author talks about not being able to open the door without dust getting it, not being able to use the elevator to conserve power, having a varicose ulcer on his ankle that he still has to go to work with, and describing himself as "smallish, frail, and meager".

The telescreen being on constantly I think is a great point to pause on.  While we live in a world where we can sit in our apartments with no radio, no television, no sound, it is not a common practice, and typically once you go outside you are still going to hear murmurs from passing cars or neighbors.  I have read a few books that talk about how we as a society are "afraid of silence", addicted to the noise.

I wonder if the fact that Big Brother is mustached has anything to do with Hitler.  The book was originally published in 1949 which I believe was not too long after the end of WWII.  If it has nothing to do with Hitler, then when did mustaches start being a "typical" sign of the "bad guy"?

If the Ministry of Love maintains Law and Order, then how can their be now laws?  If there are no laws then how are there punishments for behavior and actions?

There are a lot of people who speculate that George Orwell may have correctly predicted the future, he just predicted it in the wrong year.  The section where Winston is talking about how "strange" it is to be writing by hand and in full words instead of just using the "speak write" and using Newspeak terms.  Ironic that as I'm re-reading this book the issue of kids no longer learning to write (or read) in cursive is an issue.

Another potentially correct foreshadow is the immunity we as a society seem to have to the bad things happening in the world.  The first diary entry Winston writes down is about this war flick with graphic imagery that the Party is amused by - a fat refugee being shot as he tries to swim away, a mother and her son blown up on a boat.  There are people in the book who are affected strongly by this, but the majority just laugh or nod along with it - which to me seems to be an accurate representation of how we are now.

Is the statement that women, especially young women, who are most likely to follow along with what the big government says?

The two minutes of hate confuses me.  From what I understand, they show this "traitor" talking about all the freedoms people should want, and it's the people themselves who start yelling and getting mad at the screen.  So it's not directly brainwashing, although it proves that the Party certainly is brainwashed.

"How could you communicate with the future?  It was of its nature impossible.  Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him; or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless."

Part One, Chapter Two

The idea of children being the enemy of their parents because children view the opinions of the Party to be almost like a game, seems very true.  So many times after I learned something in school I would tell mom that things she did were not done the right way, or things we should do more of like recycling or saving water, and she would always be so annoyed with me.

"The sacred principles of Ingsoc.  Newspeak, doublethink, the mutability of the past."

Part One, Chapter Three

"...his mother’s death, nearly thirty years ago, had been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no longer possible. Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason. His mother’s memory tore at his heart because she had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love her in return, and because somehow, he did not remember how, she had sacrificed herself to a conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable. Such things, he saw, could not happen today. Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows."

"...if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed— if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth."

Part One, Chapter Four

"With a faint feeling of satisfaction Winston laid the fourth message aside. It was an intricate and responsible job and had better be dealt with last. The other three were routine matters, though the second one would probably mean some tedious wading through lists of figures."

The idea that people could so casually alter the past and not question it, and even feel satisfaction in doing so.  I can totally understand it on a small scale, but the idea that this whole building full of people working to alter history in small, and very large, scales is terrifying.  It would start off simple enough, changing predictions of chocolate rations to be correct, or near correct, but then it's the whole of history.  And with almost everything being digital these days, it would be so easy to eliminate the majority of what we consider to be records of history.

"Even the written instructions which Winston received ... never stated or implied that an act of forgery was to be committed: always the reference was to slips, errors, misprints, or misquotations which it was necessary to put right in the interests of accuracy.
"But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry of Plenty’s figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than 145 millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared."

"Ministry of Truth , whose primary job was not to reconstruct the past but to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels—with every conceivable kind of information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from a child’s spelling-book to a Newspeak dictionary. And the Ministry had not only to supply the multifarious needs of the party, but also to repeat the whole operation at a lower level for the benefit of the proletariat. There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator. There was even a whole sub-section—Pornosec, it was called in Newspeak—engaged in producing the lowest kind of pornography, which was sent out in sealed packets and which no Party member, other than those who worked on it, was permitted to look at."

I pulled out this paragraph to look at it deeper with a group.  The "rubbish" created for the Proles is the kind of things that we today look forward to in our entertainment.  So what kind of correlation does the Party v. the Proles have in our current every day lives?

Part One, Chapter Five

I don't understand why they're allowed to buy gin at the lunch queue at work.

What is the group's opinion of "cutting the language down to the bone" and instead of having synonyms and antonyms having words like "Good" "Ungood" "PlusGood" and "DoublePlusGood" instead of "Good" "Bad" "Very Good" and "Extremely Good".

"...the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.
"...Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like ‘freedom is slavery’ when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness."

"The proles are not human beings."

Part One, Chapter Six

Imagine a world where you are not allowed to marry someone you are physically attracted to.  On that same topic, why even allow marriage if they have the technology to artificially inseminate people?  Why even chance two people who don't like each other very much to form a bond that could turn against the party?

Part One, Chapter Seven 

Why would the party choose to have the Proles make up 85% of the population?  Wouldn't it make more sense that the majority would be on the side of the party and the minority be the "free animals"?  Do the proles feel bad or good about their position in society? Why are they pretty much allowed to do whatever they want to while the members of the party are under such strict rules?

Do you think there is a type of brainwashing going on in our own society?  The majority of people talk about how much better life is now with all of this technology and all of this "work smart, not hard" mentality.  Do you think that if the government wiped out anyone who "romanticized" the time before technology had such a tight hold, do you think anyone would ever question what life "might be like" if we did more things for ourselves?   If we didn't live our lives in front of a telescreen?

"Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the earth goes round the sun; today, to believe that the past is inalterable. He might be ALONE in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him: the horror was that he might also be wrong."

Part One, Chapter Eight

While part of me thinks its crazy that Big Brother would care that you'd rather spend time alone instead of at the community theater, I also can't imagine every wanting more alone time than Winston already describes in his daily life.

"It seemed to him that he knew exactly what it felt like to sit in a room like this, in an armchair beside an open fire with your feet in the fender and a kettle on the hob; utterly alone, utterly secure, with nobody watching you, no voice pursuing you, no sound except the singing of the kettle and the friendly ticking of the clock."

"The place where there is no darkness was the imagined future, which one would never see, but which, by foreknowledge, one could mystically share in."

Part Two, Chapter One

"Nor did the idea of refusing her advances even cross his mind. Only five nights ago he had contemplated smashing her skull in with a cobblestone, but that was of no importance."

Part Two, Chapter Two

In the scene where Winston and the "Dark Haired Girl" are together and alone in the woods, he talks about how great it feels to have contact and to be with a woman but that he doesn't actually feel the desire to have sex with her.  I wonder if this is a normal reaction to living a solitary life most of the time, or if it is more likely that you would desire sex even more when the opportunity came along.

" Almost as swiftly as he had imagined it, she had torn her clothes off, and when she flung them aside it was with that same magnificent gesture by which a whole civilization seemed to be annihilated."

"Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act."

Part Two, Chapter Three/Four

Does it seem strange to you guys that only girls / unmarried women are preferred to work in the porn section of the fiction department?

"He wondered vaguely how many others like her there might be in the younger generation people who had grown up in the world of the Revolution, knowing nothing else, accepting the Party as something unalterable, like the sky, not rebelling against its authority but simply evading it, as a rabbit dodges a dog."

"When you make love you’re using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don’t give a damn for anything. They can’t bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you’re happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?"

"She was very young, he thought, she still expected something from life, she did not understand that to push an inconvenient person over a cliff solves nothing"

"She would not accept it as a law of nature that the individual is always defeated. In a way she realized that she herself was doomed, that sooner or later the Thought Police would catch her and kill her, but with another part of her mind she believed that it was somehow possible to construct a secret world in which you could live as you chose. All you needed was luck and cunning and boldness. She did not understand that there was no such thing as happiness, that the only victory lay in the far future, long after you were dead, that from the moment of declaring war on the Party it was better to think of yourself as a corpse."

Part Two, Chapter Five

I find it ironic that Winston was so much happier, and even more willing to do what was expected of him, after he had his little hiding spot above the store.  He didn't feel as much hatred towards the government at that time.

"To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one’s lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available."

I wonder, since Winston was so anti-government, why he didn't ever imagine that the acts of war against their country could possibly be done by their own government.  The idea that the bombs were being dropped by the government to keep their people scared as an idea that Julia had brought up to him.

Part Two, Chapter Seven

"...she [Winston's mother] had possessed a kind of nobility, a kind of purity, simply because the standards that she obeyed were private ones. Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered from outside. It would not have occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love. When the last of the chocolate was gone, his mother had clasped the child in her arms. It was no use, it changed nothing, it did not produce more chocolate, it did not avert the child’s death or her own; but it seemed natural to her to do it. The refugee woman in the boat had also covered the little boy with her arm, which was no more use against the bullets than a sheet of paper. The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world. When once you were in the grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference. Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever heard of again. You were lifted clean out of the stream of history. And yet to the people of only two generations ago this would not have seemed all-important, because they were not attempting to alter history. They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself. The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition. They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another. The proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened inside.

"At the end we’re certain to be apart. Do you realize how utterly alone we shall be? When once they get hold of us there will be nothing, literally nothing, that either of us can do for the other. If I confess, they’ll shoot you, and if I refuse to confess, they’ll shoot you just the same. Nothing that I can do or say, or stop myself from saying, will put off your death for as much as five minutes. Neither of us will even know whether the other is alive or dead. We shall be utterly without power of any kind. The one thing that matters is that we shouldn’t betray one another, although even that can’t make the slightest difference.  I don’t mean confessing. Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn’t matter: only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you—that would be the real betrayal. If you can FEEL that staying human is worth while, even when it can’t have any result whatever, you’ve beaten them."

"They could not alter your feelings: for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable."

Part Two, Chapter Nine

"They add nothing to the wealth of the world, since whatever they produce is used for purposes of war, and the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war."

"...the conditions of life in all three super-states are very much the same. In Oceania the prevailing philosophy is called Ingsoc, in Eurasia it is called Neo-Bolshevism, and in Eastasia it is called by a Chinese name usually translated as Death-Worship, but perhaps better rendered as Obliteration of the Self. The citizen of Oceania is taught to execrate them as barbarous outrages upon morality and common sense. Actually the three philosophies are barely distinguishable..."  -- Couldn't the same almost be said about organized religion?

"A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war. This is the inner meaning of the Party slogan: WAR IS PEACE"

"The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim—for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives—is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal."  --  Makes me think of what the intern at work said to me "If you're not a liberal in your 20s then you have no heart.  If you're still a liberal in your 30s then you have no brain."

Even with the in depth explanation of the society of Oceania I still am dumbfounded by how 85% of the population is the proles, who live a shitty but mostly free existence compared to the Outer Party which is the status Winston has.  Why are the proles allowed so much more leniency compared to the Outer Party?

"‘She’s beautiful,’ he murmured.
"‘She’s a metre across the hips, easily,’ said Julia.
"‘That is her style of beauty,’ said Winston."

Part Three, Chapter One

"In the face of pain there are no heroes"

Part Three, Chapter Two

Electroshock therapy has always disturbed me more than most, especially since it so commonly used for psychological disorders and I just don't see how it helps.  However for the sake of fiction, I do find it interesting that in this book, that was written at a time when electroshock therapy was used for insanity, Winston is put through electroshock therapy because he cannot practice DOUBLETHINK and is therefore insane.

Part Three, Chapter Three

How does O'Brien always know what Winston is thinking when Winston said a few times that the only thing The Party didn't have the power to do was to read your mind?

Part Three, Chapter Four

"To die hating them, that was freedom."

Part Three, Chapter Five

If the reason behind the rat torture is to make Winston love big brother, why do they choose something that could very well kill him?  How is he supposed to come back from this and love big brother?  Or in the other hypothetical situations like being burned or buried alive, how are you supposed to come back from these things?  Is the idea simply that they will choose to sacrifice someone else?  If that's the case why did the guy who offered up his wife and three children not get released right then and there?