1984 Study Guide Questions – Flashcards

Big Brother is watching you

Ministry of Truth (Minitrue)- News, entertainment, education, the fine arts Ministry of Peace (Minipax)- War Ministry of Love (Miniluv)- Law and Order Ministry of Plenty (Miniplenty)- Economic affairs

It is unusually placed.

Open a diary. Punishment is death or 25 years in a forced labor camp.

When the body gets blown apart.

Emmanuel Goldstein/Primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party's people.

Eastasia/Eurasia

Uncontrollable exclamations of rage/ Hate rises to a frenzy.

War is Peace Freedom is Slavery Ignorance is Strength

Winston hates woman/ Winston hates her because he wanted to sleep with her, but couldn't. Junior Anti-Sex League

DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER

Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later, they were bound to get you. Punishment was annihilation. Referred to as being vaporized.

A family neighbor to Winston on the same floor. The Parsonses's flat was bigger than Winston's and dingy in a different way. Everything had a battered, trampled on look, as though the place had just been visited by some large animal.

"You're a traitor" "You're a thought-criminal! You're a Eurasian spy! I'll shoot you, I'll vaporize you, I'll send you to the salt mines!"

They cannot attend the hanging.

"Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it. The songs, the processions, the banners, the hiking, the drilling with dummy rifles, the yelling of slogans, the worship of Big Brother -- it was all a sort of glorious game to them. All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children. And with good reason, for hardly a week passed in which The Times did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak -- 'child hero' was the phrase generally used -- had overheard some compromising remark and denounced its parents to the Thought Police."

Newspeak, doublethink, the mutability of the past. Ingsoc (Newspeak for English Socialism or the English Socialist Party) is the political ideology of the totalitarian government of Oceania

"Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.

They had been sacrificed for Winston's life.

An old rabbit-bitten pasture with a foot track wandering across it and a molehole here and there. Winston dreamed that the girl with dark hair was coming toward him, and with a single movement she tore off her clothes and flung them aside.

"Who controls the past controls the future"

Reality Control

To change history on file/ delicate pieces of forgery

All one knew was that an astronomical figure of boot pairs had been produced on paper but half of Oceania went barefoot.

They produce cheap romance novels, pornography, and other things in those lines....... it's all about keeping people from thinking.

An unperson could be arrested and released to remain at liberty for as much as a year or two before being executed. After execution these people are wiped from the history of existence.

Winston invents a person named Comrade Ogilvy and substitutes him for Comrade Withers in the records. Comrade Ogilvy, though a product of Winston's imagination, is an ideal Party man, opposed to sex and suspicious of everyone. A figure made as a hero to be honored.

Compiling the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak dictionary. Syme would be vaporized within two years.

His experience with a prostitute three years ago.

Marriage was looked down upon because it couldn't be controlled. Couples could marry, but they had to obtain permission. Sex was looked upon as a means of procreation.

An organization that advocated complete celibacy for both genders.

Katherine...... she didn't find intercourse pleasurable.

Hope lies in the proles... Hope to destroy/ overthrow the party.

The party believes that it is not necessary to know much about the proles as long as they continue to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. In addition, the Party's slogan on the matter was "proles and animals are free"

Day and night the telescreens bruised your ears with statistics proving that people today had more food, more clothes, better houses, better recreations -- that they lived longer, worked shorter hours, were bigger, healthier, stronger, happier, more intelligent, better educated, than the people of fifty years ago. Not a word of it could ever be proved or disproved. The Party claimed, for example, that today 40 per cent of adult proles were literate: before the Revolution, it was said, the number had only been 15 per cent. The Party claimed that the infant mortality rate was now only 160 per thousand, whereas before the Revolution it had been 300 -- and so it went on. It was like a single equation with two unknowns. It might very well be that literally every word in the history books, even the things that one accepted without question, was pure fantasy. For all he knew there might never have been any such law as the jus primae noctis, or any such creature as a capitalist, or any such garment as a top hat.

Winston had once been in possession of a photograph proving that the Party members had been staying in New York when they were allegedly said to be committing treason in Eurasia.

They outnumbered everyone. They were 85% of Oceania's population.

"Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that mattered.

They weren't indoctrinated because their ideology didn't make a difference either way. The party would never accept them....... they were indifferent to their existence.

The Outer Party wears boiled outlined blue jumpsuits. Which are given out by the Party since you work for the state. The Inner party members wears black jumpsuits and trousers, which means you could easily spot them.

Winston is searching for what life was really like before the revolution. He wants to know if the history books are accurate or if historical information had been changed by the party.

Winston visits Mr. Charrington's antiques shop.

Mr. Charrington is an old widower with a cockney accent that keeps a secondhand store in the Prole district

The incident "They were perhaps four meters apart when the girl stumbled and fell almost flat on her face. A sharp cry of pain was wrung out of her. She must have fallen right on the injured arm. Winston stopped short. The girl had risen to her knees. Her face had turned a milky yellow color against which her mouth stood out redder than ever. Her eyes were fixed on his, with an appealing expression that looked more like fear than pain." The surprise; "Nevertheless it had been very difficult not to betray a momentary surprise, for in the two or three seconds while he was helping her up the girl had slipped something into his hand. There was no question that she had done it intentionally. It was something small and flat. As he passed through the lavatory door he transferred it to his pocket and felt it with the tips of his fingers. It was a scrap of paper folded into a square." Winston thought the message was going to be something political. Instead, it said, "I love you."

Thought Police

"I love You"

After a few attempts he was actually able to sit down with her in the cafeteria at lunchtime. They arrange to meet in Victory Square where it's always crowded.

They meet in a hideout found by Julia located in Golden Country.

There may be hidden microphones somewhere.

Julia

Winston dreamed of a similar scenario in his dream?

Winston and Julia have sex. It is forbidden in their world.

Julia explains that she has had sex "scores of times"

Winston and Julia meet up several times in the novel 1984, but it is usually no more than once a month or so. Their days off rarely coincide, and both work long hours. The time they spend together is both romantic and fearful. There is a certain thrill and urgency to the risk of getting caught.

"Julia was twenty-six years old. She lived in a hostel with thirty other girls ('Always in the stink of women! How I hate women!' she said parenthetically), and she worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department. She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor. She was 'not clever', but was fond of using her hands and felt at home with machinery. She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the finished product. She 'didn't much care for reading,' she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces. She had no memories of anything before the early sixties and the only person she had ever known who talked frequently of the days before the Revolution was a grandfather who had disappeared when she was eight. At school she had been captain of the hockey team and had won the gymnastics trophy two years running. She had been a troop-leader in the Spies and a branch secretary in the Youth League before joining the Junior Anti-Sex League. She had always borne an excellent character. She had even (an infallibIe mark of good reputation) been picked out to work in Pornosec, the sub-section of the Fiction Department which turned out cheap pornography for distribution among the proles. It was nicknamed Muck House by the people who worked in it, she remarked. There she had remained for a year, helping to produce booklets in sealed packets with titles like Spanking Stories or One Night in a Girls' School, to be bought furtively by proletarian youths who were under the impression that they were buying something illegal."

"She hated the Party, and said so in the crudest words, but she made no general criticism of it. Except where it touched upon her own life she had no interest in Party doctrine. He noticed that she never used Newspeak words except the ones that had passed into everyday use. She had never heard of the Brotherhood, and refused to believe in its existence. Any kind of organized revolt against the Party, which was bound to be a failure, struck her as stupid. The clever thing was to break the rules and stay alive all the same. 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."