Work record

Nineteen Eighty-Four

Name: Nineteen Eighty-Four
Author: George Orwell

George Orwell

Also known as: 1984

1949 · Postwar Contemporary · Novel · English

CopyrightedFive-minute digest

Abstract

Written: Written 1946–1948; published June 1949
Setting: An imagined 1984; London, chief city of Airstrip One, a province of Oceania
Author: George Orwell
Country: United Kingdom
Language: English
Genre: Dystopian political novel
Form: Novel in three parts with an appendix, third-person narration limited to Winston
Recommended: Grades 11–12 (Summary and guide only; mature content: torture, sexual content, state violence.)

Background. Orwell finished the book on a remote Hebridean island while gravely ill, drawing on wartime propaganda, the Spanish Civil War and Stalin's purges. It appeared seven months before his death. Its working title was The Last Man in Europe, and the finished novel turned the everyday shabbiness of postwar London, with its rationing and bomb sites, into the setting for a fully administered tyranny.

Plot. In a London governed by an all-seeing Party, a records clerk begins a diary and a forbidden romance, trusts an official he takes for a fellow conspirator, and is arrested. Months of torture end in betrayal of the woman he loves and in complete surrender of his own judgment.

Ideas. The story explores how power can be secured by controlling information, memory and vocabulary as well as by force. Its invented terms, from doublethink to the memory hole, give readers a vocabulary for describing propaganda, surveillance and the falsification of history. The book also treats love, sex and private memory as forms of resistance, which is why the regime works so hard to absorb or destroy them, and why the hero's final defeat is inward rather than merely physical.

Reception. It became an immediate best seller, was suppressed in Communist countries, and has never gone out of print. The word Orwellian now names official deception in many languages, and the novel remains among the most frequently assigned books in secondary schools.

Main characters

Winston Smith: Records clerk who keeps a forbidden diary
Julia: Young rebel who becomes Winston's lover
O'Brien: Inner Party official and Winston's interrogator
Big Brother: The Party's ever-present, possibly fictional leader
Mr. Charrington: Shopkeeper who is secretly a Thought Police agent

Summary

Nineteen Eighty-Four is set in Airstrip One, the former Britain, now a province of the superstate Oceania. Oceania is ruled by the Party, whose ideology is called Ingsoc and whose face is Big Brother, a leader who may not exist. Telescreens watch every room, the Thought Police hunt for dissent, and the history of the past is rewritten to match the Party's present needs. Oceania is permanently at war with one of the two other superstates, Eurasia and Eastasia, and the enemy can change overnight without anyone admitting that it has. Winston Smith, a minor Outer Party member, works at the Ministry of Truth altering old newspaper articles. He begins a secret diary, an act punishable by death, and starts an illicit love affair with Julia, a young woman from the Fiction Department. They rent a room above the junk shop of Mr. Charrington, believing themselves unobserved. Winston becomes convinced that O'Brien, a member of the Inner Party, belongs to the Brotherhood, the underground resistance said to be led by Emmanuel Goldstein. O'Brien gives him Goldstein's book, which explains how the Party keeps power through permanent war, controlled scarcity and doublethink, the habit of holding two contradictory beliefs at once. The trap closes. Mr. Charrington is an agent of the Thought Police, and O'Brien is a loyal servant of the Party. Winston is taken to the Ministry of Love, where O'Brien tortures and re-educates him over a long period, insisting that reality exists only in the collective mind of the Party and that power is pursued for its own sake. In Room 101, faced with the thing he fears most, Winston betrays Julia. Released, broken and indifferent, he meets her once more without feeling. The novel's final line records that he has come to love Big Brother. An appendix, written as if from a later time, explains the principles of Newspeak, the official language designed to make unorthodox thought impossible by shrinking vocabulary. Orwell's coinages, including Big Brother, doublethink, thoughtcrime, Newspeak and the memory hole, have entered ordinary English, and the adjective Orwellian is widely used for official deception and surveillance. The novel is one of the most widely taught books in English, and Orwell described it as a warning about where totalitarian ideas could lead, not a prediction.

Plot or Argument

Part One
Winston Smith rewrites records at the Ministry of Truth, starts a forbidden diary, attends the Two Minutes Hate, and notices both Julia and O'Brien. He wanders into the proles' district and buys a glass paperweight from Mr. Charrington's shop.
Part Two
Julia passes Winston a note declaring her love. They meet in the countryside and then in the room above Mr. Charrington's shop. O'Brien invites them to his flat, enrolls them in the Brotherhood and gives Winston Goldstein's book. The Thought Police arrest them.
Part Three
In the Ministry of Love O'Brien tortures Winston and teaches him to accept whatever the Party says is true. In Room 101 Winston betrays Julia. Released, he sits in the Chestnut Tree Café and finds that he loves Big Brother.
Appendix: The Principles of Newspeak
A scholarly essay on the official language of Oceania, explaining how its reduced vocabulary was meant to make heretical thought impossible.

Characters

Winston Smith, protagonist
Thirty-nine-year-old Outer Party member who works at the Ministry of Truth and secretly rebels.
Julia, major
Young Outer Party member who outwardly conforms and privately defies the Party through her affair with Winston.
O'Brien, antagonist
Inner Party official whom Winston trusts as a fellow rebel and who becomes his torturer.
Big Brother, symbol
The Party's leader, seen only on posters and telescreens; his real existence is uncertain.
Emmanuel Goldstein, symbol
Alleged leader of the Brotherhood and object of the Two Minutes Hate.
Mr. Charrington, minor
Elderly junk-shop owner who rents Winston a room and is revealed as a Thought Police agent.
Syme, minor
Philologist working on the Newspeak dictionary, later vaporized.
Parsons, minor
Enthusiastic Party loyalist denounced by his own daughter.

Lessons

Control of the past
The Party rewrites records so that it is always right. Students can consider why the novel treats memory and accurate records as a form of freedom.
- Why does the Party care so much about controlling the past?
- What does Winston hope to find in old objects such as the paperweight?
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Language and thought
Newspeak shrinks vocabulary so that dissent cannot be expressed. The novel invites discussion of how words shape what people can think and say.
- How would Newspeak make thoughtcrime impossible?
- Can you find examples of language that hides rather than reveals meaning?
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  Justiniani's wound, his withdrawal to seek a surgeon, the varying accounts of the injury, and the death of Constantine Palaeologus.
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Truth under pressure
O'Brien insists that two and two make five if the Party says so. The novel asks what it means to hold on to plain facts when power demands otherwise.
- What does O'Brien want from Winston beyond obedience?
- What is the effect of the final line of the novel?
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Context

Orwell wrote in the aftermath of the Second World War, with Nazi Germany defeated and the Soviet Union under Stalin dominant in Eastern Europe. His experience of propaganda in the Spanish Civil War and of wartime censorship and rationing in Britain fed the book, as did the Moscow show trials of the 1930s.

Composition

Orwell drafted the novel between 1946 and 1948, mostly on the island of Jura in the Inner Hebrides, while his health failed. Secker & Warburg published it in London on 8 June 1949; Harcourt, Brace published it in New York the same month.

Reception

The book was an immediate success on both sides of the Atlantic and has been translated into dozens of languages. It was banned or restricted in the Soviet bloc and elsewhere, and has been adapted for radio, television, film and the stage, including Michael Radford's 1984 film.

Power / Politics Utopia / Dystopia Language / Storytelling Memory / Time Identity Self Love Desire Technology Modernity

Comparisons

Animal Farm
Orwell's earlier fable treats the betrayal of a revolution allegorically; Nineteen Eighty-Four imagines the fully established totalitarian state that follows.
We
Orwell reviewed Zamyatin's novel in 1946, and its glass city, numbered citizens and surgical cure for imagination anticipate many features of Oceania.
Brave New World
Huxley's World State keeps order through pleasure and conditioning rather than fear; the two novels are often read as rival forecasts of how freedom could be lost.
The Road to Serfdom
Orwell reviewed Hayek's book in 1944, granting much of its warning about concentrated power while doubting its faith in free competition.
The Origins of Totalitarianism
Arendt's 1951 study analyzes the ideology, terror and propaganda that Orwell dramatizes, from the rewriting of facts to the isolation of the individual.
Darkness at Noon
Koestler's novel of an old Bolshevik's interrogation explores the same logic of forced confession that O'Brien applies to Winston.
Politics and the English Language
Orwell's 1946 essay on political euphemism and stale phrasing lays out the concerns about language that Newspeak takes to an extreme.
The Gulag Archipelago
Solzhenitsyn's account of the Soviet camp system documents in history the arrests, interrogations and rewritten pasts that Orwell imagined in fiction.

Quotes

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

— George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Part One, Chapter 1, opening sentence (Secker & Warburg, 1949).Quote card

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“BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU”

— George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Part One, Chapter 1 (Secker & Warburg, 1949).Quote card

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familiar things Transcriber s note This referred to a specific page in the printed book In this Project Gutenberg edition the pertinent information is in Chapter XXX paragraph Another case very clearly described by a dentist occurred at the town of Columbus in the United States of America quite recently The subject was a German who kept a liquor-shop and was an inveterate drunkard CHAPTER I In Chancery London Michaelmas term lately over and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln s Inn Hall Implacable November we...

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

How the Party controls records, language and memory.
Objects from the past, such as the paperweight and the nursery rhyme about St Clement's.
Who is watching whom, and how Winston learns he was wrong.
What Goldstein's book explains and what it leaves out.

Key terms and names

Doublethink: Holding two contradictory beliefs at once and accepting both.
Newspeak: The official language of Oceania, designed to narrow the range of thought.
Thoughtcrime: The crime of thinking against the Party.
Telescreen: A two-way screen that both broadcasts and watches.
Room 101: The room in the Ministry of Love that holds each prisoner's worst fear.

Seminar Questions

Comprehension What is Winston's job at the Ministry of Truth?
Comprehension How do Winston and Julia try to avoid detection?
Interpretation Why does the Party want Winston to love Big Brother rather than merely obey?
Interpretation What role do the proles play in Winston's hopes?
Interpretation Why does Orwell end the novel with an appendix about Newspeak written in the past tense?
Big Question Is the freedom to say that two plus two make four the foundation of all other freedoms?
Big Question Which is the greater threat to freedom: fear, as in Oceania, or comfort?

Faith Connections

John 8:32 (Scripture)
'The truth shall make you free': the novel's treatment of objective truth as the ground of freedom invites comparison with this saying.
Plato, Republic, the allegory of the cave (Great Conversation)
Plato's prisoners take shadows for reality; Oceania manufactures the shadows deliberately and punishes anyone who turns toward the light.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: If a ruling power can control records, language and private life, it can control what people believe to be true, and the defense of freedom therefore begins with the defense of objective truth and memory.

Rhetorical device: coinage (neologism). Terms such as doublethink, thoughtcrime and unperson name ideas the Party wants to make ordinary, showing how invented language can normalize what it describes.

Debate: Resolved: Surveillance does more harm to a free society than censorship.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Explain how the Party uses language to control thought, drawing on Newspeak, doublethink and the slogans of the Ministry of Truth.

Comparison with Brave New World: Compare the methods of control in Oceania and in Huxley's World State. Which society is more stable, and which is more frightening?

Creative Prompts

Essay
Orwell said the novel was a warning rather than a prophecy. Choose one feature of Oceania and write an essay on what it warns against and whether the warning still applies.
Fiction
Write a short scene set in the Records Department in which a worker is asked to change a document she remembers clearly.
Classroom
Create a short Newspeak dictionary: replace ten ordinary words with Newspeak forms and discuss what can no longer be said.