Characterization
This is the full name of the protagonist and what connections one can make with these two names.
What is Winston Smith? Winston Churchill and the most common surname
This is the local residence of the protagonist and how it is described.
What is Victory Mansions, which sounds grand, but is actually surrounded by gritty dust and vile wind, and smells like “boiled cabbage and old rag mats”? There is a huge poster of Big Brother, glorious leader of Oceania, opposite a lift that does not work.
Orwell uses the word "Party" to suggest that the fictional regime in 1984 is based on this regime that was then in place in the Soviet Union in 1949 under the totalitarian dictatorship of this leader.
What is the Communist regime under the leadership of Joseph Stalin?
This is the literary device of which the following three excerpts are examples: Winston lives in Victory Mansions, which sounds grand, but is actually surrounded by gritty dust and vile wind, and smells like “boiled cabbage and old rag mats”. There is a huge poster of Big Brother, glorious leader of Oceania, opposite a lift that does not work. Winston’s bright blue overalls cover a meager body.
What is juxtaposition or irony?
A possible meaning of the statement “We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness” (25).
What is Winston interprets it as a kind of hopeful prophecy — a promise of a better future or a secret meeting of minds, possibly linked to overthrowing the Party?
“A place where there is no darkness” might suggest truth, clarity, and freedom — unlike the oppressive world he lives in.
It turns out to refer to the Ministry of Love, where the lights are never turned off — a prison and torture chamber where the Party breaks people mentally and physically.
The phrase captures Winston’s early belief in a future rebellion or enlightenment, but Orwell uses it to show how the Party twists language, dreams, and even hope into tools of control.
This is how the protagonist is described in terms of physical appearance and health.
What is as a man of "thirty-nine" years with "a varicose ulcer above his right ankle"?
This is the province and superstate in which London of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is located.
What is Airstrip One, Oceania? “It had been called England or Britain” (34).
This is the reaction of Winston’s society to the film shown on the previous evening in which a ship full of refugees was bombed.
What is amusement (indicating a lack of empathy)? (16)
This is the effect of the anaphora in this sentence: “You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized” (9).
What is the repetition of the word every indicates how pervasive the surveillance was that spied on the members of the Party. One feels overwhelmed and hopeless.
This is why the “B-B” chant fills Winston with horror and why this is perhaps odd (22). Consider what Winston does…
What is the fact that he participates and many of Winston’s activities seem an attempt to drown consciousness, so it is not clear why this one stands out?
This is what reveals Winston’s deep need for connection and hope during the Two Minutes Hate; despite living in a society built on surveillance and mistrust, Winston imagines this. (17)
What is Winston’s desire to believe that O’Brien shares his thoughts and feelings? O’Brien holds an important post in the Inner Party...
While Winston is fixing the sink the Parsons children appear, wearing the uniform of the Spies, a youth organization that encourages children to spy on their parents and report behavior disloyal to the Party. The Parsons children are upset because they cannot go here. The Spies resemble the Youth movement, which indoctrinated children in this country in the 1940s.
What is the hanging? What is Germany?
Winston’s act of secretly writing a diary to an unknown future reader reflects this central theme, as he tries to preserve his thoughts. Consider what is forbidden…
What is the conflict between individual and collective identity? What is the preservation of personal thoughts in a society where independent identity is forbidden?
This is how paradox is involved with the descriptions of the government ministries.
What is paradox involves two contradictory ideas, both of which turn out to be true. The names of these departments attempt to put a better face on the job of each department—for example, the Ministry of Love is in charge of keeping order, which includes incarceration and torture?
This is the literary device which employs references and what it refers to in the provided instance. Big Brother’s constant surveillance in 1984 visually refers to this concept of an omnipresent authority, blending political dictatorship with a spiritual presence that demands obedience.
What is the allusion to an all-seeing godlike figure or totalitarian ruler like Stalin or Hitler?
These are some (at least two) techniques used on the telescreen to encourage the Party members’ hatred of Emmanuel Goldstein – a hatred in which even the protagonist appears to take part. (18-20)
What is a “hideous, grinding screech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil” and the sight of Goldstein’s face? Goldstein’s voice is made to sound like a sheep’s voice as well. Note the bleating reference on page 20. Later, the Eurasian armies march in the picture behind his head. Finally, the soldier turns into Big Brother, giving the audience a mutual shudder of pleasure.
This is the ministry located in a building with no windows at all. It is surrounded by "barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests" (12)
What is the Ministry of Love?
Returning to his own apartment after helping Mrs. Parsons, Winston considers how the woman's children might be watching her in a couple of years "for symptoms of unorthodoxy" (24). Here there is reference to how children now denounced their parents to the Thought Police. This is the message that Orwell is attempting to send with this depiction of the children in regards to the subject of family.
What is loyalty to the family has been co-opted by loyalty to the state?
This is how paradox is found in the description of Victory Gin. (13)
What is paradox is evident given how often Winston drinks something that tastes “like nitric acid” and made the drinker feel as if he had been “hit on the back of the head with a rubber club”? A few seconds later, though, “the world [begins] to look more cheerful”. Winston knows how bad the gin will taste, and yet he continues to drink it.
This is what Comrade Ogilvy symbolizes. (44-45)
What is as Winston’s creation after Comrade Withers has fallen into disgrace, Ogilvy serves as a symbol of the Party's power to manipulate history and control information, ultimately shaping public perception and individual identity? (44-45)
This is how the reader can tell that Winston is a round character when it comes to his response to his work.
“Winston’s greatest pleasure in life was in his work. Most of it was a tedious routine, but included in it there were also jobs so difficult and intricate that you could lose yourself in them as in the depths of a mathematical problem — delicate pieces of forgery in which you had nothing to guide you except your knowledge of the principles of Ingsoc and your estimate of what the Party wanted you to say. Winston was good at this kind of thing” (43) He likes to think!
These are three ways in which Golden Country differs from the setting of Winston’s reality.
(1) It is a natural and serene landscape in contrast to the “gritty dust” and “boiled cabbage” stench of Victory Mansions.
It was an old, rabbit-bitten pasture, with a foot-track wandering across it and a molehill here and there. In the ragged hedge on the opposite side of the field the boughs of the elm trees were swaying very faintly in the breeze, their leaves just stirring in dense masses like women’s hair.
(2) It symbolizes emotional and physical freedom - “The girl with dark hair was coming towards them across the field. With what seemed a single movement she tore off her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside. With its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm. (33)
It is associated with knowledge - Winston awakens saying Shakespeare.
The following statement explains this additional theme: "To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984" (15).
What is the theme of reality control by a government that does not wish its citizens to think independently?
This is what is ironic about the statement that “nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws.”
What is “the absence of laws does not lead to complete freedom; instead, it leads to complete terror, since there is no way to object when the Thought Police says that one has committed thought crime, as there are no standards to use when protesting. (14)
The following example of thoughtcrime seems to indicate this change in the protagonist's life: "Now that [Winston recognizes] himself as a dead man, it [becomes] important to stay alive as long as possible” (30).
What is the bestowal of a reason to live on Winston's life, whereas he did not have one before?