1984 Summary Essay Example For Students

1984: Summary Essay Summary The Story starts, as the title tells us, in the year of 1984, and it takes place in England or how it is called at that time, Airstrip One. Airstrip One itself is the mainland of a huge country, called Oceania, which consists of North America, South Africa, and Australia. The country is ruled by the Party, which is led by a figure called Big Brother. The population of Oceania is divided into three parts: 1. The Inner Party app. 1% of the population 2. The Outer Party app. 18% of the population 3. The Proles The narrator of the book is all-knowing and he is not participating in the action of the book himself. The protagonist is Winston Smith, a member of the OuterParty, working in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, rewriting and altering records, such as newspaper-articles, of the past. The action starts when Winston develops critic thoughts against the ruling dictatorship of the party, for the first time. Doing so he buys himself a book, a rare thing these days, to use it as a diary. As individual expression was forbidden by the Party, having a diary was a crime, which could even be punished with death. There were so-called telescreens in each room, showing propaganda and political pamphlets, which had a built in camera and microphone, in order to spy on the people. Therefore keeping a secret book was not only forbidden, but also very dangerous. When Winston makes the first entry in the diary ,he thinks about an experience he has made during the Two Minutes Hate, a propaganda film, that was repeated each day. During this Film he caught the eye of Oquot;Brien, a member of the Inner Party, of whom he thought that he might alos stand critic to the regime, or that at least there is a bond of some kind between them. After the reflection, he finds that he has written the sentence :Down with Big Brother all over the page. In the same night Winston dreams about, his mother and sister, who had starved to death in the war, because he had been so greedy. Then he dreams of having sex with a girl he has seen in the Records Department, during the Two Minute Hate. Early in the morning Winston is waken up by the harsh voice from the telescreen. During the performance of the exercises, Winstonquot;s thoughts move back to his childhood. The last thing he remembers clearly, is the World War. After the WW the party has taken control of the country, and from then on it was difficult to remember anything, because the party changed the history permanently to their own benefit see Doublethink Political System. After the exercises Winston goes to work, to the Minitrue Ministry of Truth, where his job is to alter records, and once altered, to throw them into the Memory Hole where they are burnt. For example B. B. Big Brother has promised that there will be no reduction of the chocolate ration, but there has been one, so Winston has to rewrite an old article, where the speech of B. B. s written down. At dinner Winston Smith meets Syme, a philologist, who is working on the 11 th edition of The Newspeak Dictionary see Newspeak Political System, Syme explains the main character of their work on this dictionary. During their conversation the telescreen announces that the chocolate ration has been risen to 20 g a week, whereas yesterday it was cut down to 20 g a week. Winston wonders whether hequot;s the only person with memory, that isnquot;t inflicted by Doublethink. As he looks around in the dining room he catches the eye of the dark-haired girl he had dreamed the same night. Back home again he makes an entry into his diary about his meeting with a prostitute three years ago. He rememberes her ugliness, but nevertheless he had sex with her. Winston had a wife, but she was very stupid and just following the orders of the Party, which said that there may only be Sex to produce new material for the Party, and that sex for the personal pleasure is a crime. Then Winston thinks about the Party, and believes that the only hope lies in the Proles who pose over 80% of Oceanias population. Later he remembers another fact of his past, Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford, the last three survivors of the original leaders of the Revolution. They were arrested in 1965, and confessed all kind of sabotage on trial, they were pardoned, reinstated but not long after were arrested again, and executed. During the brief period Winston has seen them in the Chestnut Tree Cafe. In the same year a half page torn out of The Times came to Winston trough the transport tube in the Minitrue. This page of The Times showed the three men in Eastasia on a certain day. But Winston remembered clearly that they have confessed being in Eurasia on that day At this time Eurasia was at war with Oceania, and Eastasia was an allied. So Winston could proof that the confessions were lies. But Winston had sent this paper down to the Memory Hole a kind of paper basket The last entry Winston writes in his diary is that freedom is to say that two and two makes four. If this is granted everything else follows. The next day Winston decides not to participate in the community actions, but to take a walk in the quarters of the Proles, around St Pancras station. During the walk a Rocket-Bomb explodes nearby. After a while Winston finds himself in front of the junk-shop, where he has bought the diary. There he sees an old man just entering a pub. He decides to follow the man, and to ask him about the time before the revolution, but the old man has already forgotten nearly everything about this time, except for some useless personal things. Winston leaves the pub and goes to the Shop, where he finds a pink piece of glass with apiece of coral inside which he buys. Mr Carrington, the owner of the shop leads him upstairs to show him an old fashioned room. W. Smith likes the room because of its warmth and of course because there are no telescreens. When Winston leaves the shop he suddenly meets the dark-haired girl in the street. He now believes that this girl is an amateur spy or even a member of the Thought Police, spying on him. The next morning he meets the girl in the Ministry of Truth, and in the moment she passes, she falls down and cries out in pain. When Winston helps her up, she has presses a piece of paper into his hand. At the first opportunity he opens it and finds the startling message: I love you written on it. For a week he waits for an opportunity to speak with her. Finally he is successful, and he meets her in the canteen where they fix a meeting. Some time later they meet on the fixed place, there the girl gives Winston precise instructions how to get to a secret place on Sunday. It is Sunday and Winston is following the girlquot;s directions. On the way he picks some bluebells for her. And then finally she comes up behind him, telling him to be quiet because there might be some microphones hidden somewhere. They kiss and he learns her name: Julia. She leads him to another place where they cannot be observed. Before she takes off her blue party-overall, Julia tells Winston that she is attracted to him by something in his face which showes that he is against the party. Winston is surprised and asks Julia if she has done such a thing before. To his delight she tells him that she has done it scores of times, which fills him with a great hope. Evidence of corruption and abandon always gives him with hope. Perhaps the whole system is rotten, and will simply crumb to pieces one day. The more men she had, the more he loves her, and later as he looks at her sleeping body, he thinks that now even sex is a political act, a blow against the falseness of the Party. Winston and Julia arrange to meet again. Winston rents the room above Mr Carringtons junk shop, a place where they can meet and talk without the fear of being observed. It is summer and the preparations for Hate Week, an enormous propaganda event, are well forthcoming, and in this time Winston meets Julia more often than ever before. Julia makes him feel more alive, she makes him feel healthier, and he even puts on weight. One day Oquot;Brien speaks to Winston in the Ministry of Truth. He refers, obliquely to Syme, the philologist, who has vanished a couple of days before, and is now, as it is called in Newspeak an unperson. In doing so Oquot;Brien is committing a little act of thoughtcrime. Oquot;Brien invites Winston to his flat, to see the latest edition of the Newspeak dictionary. Winston now feels sure that the conspiracy against the Party he had longed to know about the Brotherhood, as it is called does exist, and that in the encounter with Oquot;Brien he has come into contact with its outer edge. He knows that he has embarked on a course of action which will lead , in one way or another, to the cells of the Ministry of Love. Some days later Winston and Julia meet each other to go to the flat of Oquot;Brien, which lies in the district of the Inner Party. They are admitted to a richly furnitured room by a servant. To their astonishment Oquot;Brien switches off the Telescreen in the room. Normally it is impossible to turn it off Winston blurts out why they have come: they want to work against the Party, they believe in the existence of the Brotherhood, and that Oquot;Brien is involved with it. Martin, Oquot;Brienquot;s servant brings real red vine, and they drink a toast to Emanuel Goldstein, the leader of the Brotherhood. Oquot;Brien asks them a series of questions about their willingness to commit various atrocities on behalf of the Brotherhood and gets their assent. They leave, and some days later Winston gets a copy of The Book, a book written by Emanuel Goldstein, about his political ideas. Now it is Hate Week and suddenly the war with Eurasia stopps, and a war with Eastasia starts. This of course meant a lot of work for Winston. He had to change dozens of articles about he war with Eurasia. Nevertheless Winston finds time to read the book. The book has three chapters titled, War is Peace, Ignorance is Strength and Freedom is Slavery, which were also the main phrases of the party. The main ideas of the book are: 1: War is important for consuming the products of human labour, if this work would be used to increase the standard of living, the control of the party over t he people would decrease. War is the economy basis for a hierarchical society. 2: There is an emotional need to believe in the ultimate victory of Big Brother. : In becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. The continuity of the war guarantees the permanence of the current order. In other words War is Peace 4: There have always been three main grades of society; the High, the Middle and the Low, and no change has brought human equality a millimetre nearer. 5: Collectivism doesnquot;t lead to socialism. In the event the wealth now belongs to the new high-class, the bureaucrats and administrators. Collectivism has ensured the permanence of economic inequality. 6: Wealth is not inherited from person to person, but it is kept within the ruling group. : The masses proles are given freedom of thought, because they donquot;t think! A Party member is not allowed the slightest deviation of thought, and there is an elaborate mental training to ensure this, a training that can be summarised in the concept of doublethink. So far the book analyses how the Party works. It has not yet attempted to deal with why the Party has arisen. Before continuing with the next chapter Winston turns to Julia, and finds her asleep. He also falls asleep. The next morning when he awakes the sun is shining, and down in the yard a prole women is singing and working. A Symbol In Lord Of The Flies EssayThis gave Orwell the opportunity to focus on the reaction of the individual to totalitarianism, love, and cruelty. Political System Party The Party of Oceania poses about 19% of the whole population of Oceanias mainland. Generally one could divide the Party into the Inner Party, which is comparable to the communistic Nomenclature, and the Outer Party. Winston Smith himself is a member of the Outer Party. The members of the Inner Party hold high posts in the administration of the country. They earn comparable much money, and there isnquot;t a lack of anything in their homes, which looked like palaces. The people of the Outer Party live in dull grey and old flats. Because of the war there is often a lack of the most essential things. The life of the Outer Party is dictated by the Party, even their spare time is used by the Party. There are so-called community hikes, community games and all sort of other activities. And refusing the participation at this activities is even dangerous. The life of a Party member is dictated from his birth to his death. The Party even takes children away from their parents to educate them in the sense of Ingsoc. ou can find this also in the Communist future plansThe children are taught in school, to report it to the police Toughtpolice when their parents have unorthodox thoughts, so-called Thoughtcrimes. After the education the Party members start to work mainly for one of the four Ministries Minipax, Minitrue, Miniluv, Miniplenty. The further life of the comrades continues under the watchful eyes of the Party. Everything the people do is targeted by t he telescreens. Even in their homes people have telescreens. Each unorthodox action is then punished by joycamps Newspeak word for forced labour camps. Proles The proles make about 81% of the population of Oceania. The Party itself is only interested in their labour power, because the proles are mainly employed in the industry and in the farms. Without their Labour force Oceania would break down. Despite this fact the Party completely ignores this social caste. The curious thing about this behaviour is, that the Party calls itself a Socialistic Party, and generally socialism at least at the beginning and middle of this century is a movement of the proletariat. So one could say that the Party abuses the word Ingsoc. Orwell again had pointed at an other regime, the Nazis, who had put socialism into their name. One of the main phrases of the Party is Proles and animals are free. In Oceania the proles live in very desolate and poor quarters. Compared to the districts where the members of the Party live, there are much fewer telescreens, and policemen. And as long as the proles donquot;t commit a crime crime in our sense / not in the sense of the party Toughtcrime they donquot;t have any contact with the state. Therefore in the districts of the proletarians one can find things that are abolished and forbidden for the Party members. E. g. ld books, old furniture, prostitution and alcohol mainly beer Except Victory Gin all of these things are not available for the Party-members. The proletarians donquot;t participate in the technical development. They live like they used to do many years ago. To my mind the Party ignores the Proles, because they pose no danger to their rule. The working class is too uneducated and too unorganised to pose a real threat. So there is not really a need to change the political attitudes of this class. Newspeak Newspeak is the official language of Oceania, and had been devised to meet ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. In the year 1984, there is nobody, who really uses Newspeak in speech nor in writing. Only the leading articles are written in this language. But it is generally assumed that in the year 2050 Newspeak would superset Oldspeak, or common English. The purpose of Newspeak is not only to provide medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other methods of thought impossible. Another reason for developing Newspeak is, to make old books, or books which were written before the era of the Party, unreadable. With Newspeak ,Doublethink would be even easier. Its vocabulary is so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This is done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings whatever. Generally Newspeak words are divided into three groups: the A,Balso called compound words and the C Vocabulary. A-Vocabulary: The A-Vocabulary consist of the words needed in business and everyday life, for such things as drinking, working, and the like. The words of this group are nearly entirely composed of Oldspeak words, but in comparison, their number is very small. Nevertheless the meaning of this words is much more defined, and it allows no other interpretation. B-Vocabulary: The B-Vocabulary consist of words which have been deliberately constructed for political purpose. Without the full understanding of the principles of Ingsoc it is very difficult to use and understand this words correctly. The B-Vocabulary are in all cases compound words, and they consisted of two or more words, merged together in an easy pronounceable form. Example: goodthink Goodthink means very roughly orthodoxy, or if it is regarded as a verb to think in a good manner. The infected as follows: noun-verb goodthink; past tense and past participle, goodthinked; present participle, goodthinking; adjective, goodthinkful; adverb, goodthinkwise; verbal noun, goodthinker. The B-Words are not constructed on any etymological plan. The words of which they are made up can be placed in any order mutilated in any way which makes them easy to pronounce e. . toughtcrime, crimethink thinkpol, tought police. Many of the B-Words are euphemisms. Such words for instance as joycamp forced labour camp or Minipax Ministry of Peace in charge of the army , mean almost exact opposite of what they appear to mean. Again some words are ambivalent, having the connotation good when applied to the party, and bad when applied to i ts enemies. Generally the name of any organisation, building, and so on is cut down to a minimum number of syllables and to a minimum of length, in an easy pronounceable way. This isnquot;t only in Newspeak, already other, especially totalitarian systems, tended to used abbreviations for political purpose Nazi, Comintern, Gestapo, .. But the difference is that only in Newspeak this instrument is used with consciousness. The Party intended to cut down the possibility of associations with other words. C-Vocabulary: The C-Words are consisting of technical and scientific terms. From the foregoing account it is very easy to see that in Newspeak the expression of unorthodox opinions, above a very low level, is impossible. It is only possible to say Big Brother is ungood. But this statement canquot;t be sustained by reasoned arguments, because the necessary words are not available. Ideas inimical to Ingsoc can only be entertained in a very vague and wordless form, and can only be named in very broad terms. One could in fact only use Newspeak for political unorthodoxy, by illegitimately translating some of the words back into Oldspeak. For example All mans are equal was a possible Newspeak sentence, but only in the same sense in which All man have the same weight is a possible Oldspeak sentence. It did not contain a grammatical error, but it expressed a palpable untruth i. e. that all man have the same size, weight .. The concept of political equality no longer existed. In 1984, when Oldspeak is still the normal mean of communication, the danger theoretically exists that in using Newspeak words one might remember their original meanings. In practice it is not difficult for a person well grounded in Doublethink to avoid doing this, but within a couple of generation even the possibility of such a lapse would have vanished. A person growing up with Newspeak as his sole language would no more know that equal had once had the secondary meaning of politically equal also free,.. There would be many crimes and errors which would be beyond of the power to commit, simply because there were nameless and therefore unimaginable. It is to be foreseen that with the passage of time Newspeak words would become fewer and fewer, their meanings more and more and more rigid, and the chance to put them to improper uses always diminished. So when Oldspeak had been once and for all superseded the last link with the past would have been severed. Doublethink Doublethink is a kind of manipulation of the mind. Generally one could say that Doublethink makes people accept contradictions, and it makes them also believe, that, the party is the only institution that distinguishes between right and wrong. This manipulation is mainly done by the Minitrue Ministry of Truth, where Winston Smith works. When a person that is well grounded in Doublethink recognizes a contradiction or a lie of the Party, then the person thinks that he is remembering a false fact. The use of the word Doublethink involves doublethink. With the help of the Minitrue it is not only possible to change written facts, but also facts that are remembered by the people. So complete control of the country and itquot;s citizens is provided. The fact of faking the history had already been used by the Nazis, who told the people that already German Knights believed in the principles of National Socialism. Symbolism In Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell draws a picture of a totalitarian future. Although the action deals in the future, there are a couple of elements and symbols, taken from the present and past. So for example Emanuel Goldstein, the main enemy of Oceania, is, as one can see in the name, a Jew. Orwell draws a link to other totalitarian systems of our century, like the Nazis and the Communists, who had anti-Semitic ideas, and who used Jews as so-called scapegoats, who were responsible for all bad and evil things in the country. This fact also shows that totalitarian systems want to arbitrate their perfection. Emanuel Goldstein somehow also stands for Trotsky, a leader of the Revolution, who was later declared as an enemy. Another symbol that can be found in Nineteen Eighty-Four is the fact that Orwell divides the fictional superstates in the book according to the division that can be found in the Cold War. So Oceania stands for the United States of America , Eurasia for Russia and Eastasia for China. The fact that the two socialistic countries Eastasia and Eurasia in our case Russia and China are at war with each other, corresponds to our history Usuri river. Other, non-historical symbols can be found. One of these symbols is the paperweight that Winston buys in the old junk-shop. It stands for the fragile little world that Winston and Julia have made for each other. They are the coral inside of it. As Orwell wrote: It is a little chunk of history, that they have forgotten to alter. The Golden Country is another symbol. It stands for the old European pastoral landscape. The place where Winston and Julia meet for the first time to make love to each other, is exactly like the Golden Country of Winstons dreams.