English Literature books summary

English Literature books summary

Contents:

Last update: 17.12.2002 (version 3.1)

1) 1984 by G.Orwell 2

2) Animal Farm by G.Orwell 15

3) Childe Harold by G.G.Byron_____________________________________17

4) The French Lieutenant's Woman by J.Fowles 18

a) French Lieutenant’s Woman in Russian 20

5) Gulliver’s Travels by Daniel Defoe 21

6) Heart of Darkness by J.Conrad 29

7) Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott 32

8) Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H.Lawrence 36

9) Lord of the Flies by W.Golding 38

10) Middlemarch by G.Eliot 42

11) Oliver Twist by Ch.Dickens 55

a) The Poor Laws 63

b) What does the phrase "justice is blind" normally mean? 64

c) The Victorian middle class's stereotypes of the poor. 65

12) A Passage to India by E.M.Forster 65

13) Pride and Prejudice by J. Austen 71

14) Pygmalion by B.Shaw 82

15) The Quiet American by G.Greene_________________________________86

16) Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe 87

17) The Picture of Dorian Grey by O.Wilde 92

18) The Time Machine by H. G. Wells (1866 - 1946) 102

19) Ulysses by J.Joyce 103

20) Vanity Fair by W.Thackeray 109

21) William Shakespeare 117

a) Extremely Short Summaries. Good for Seminars 117

i) A Midsummer Night's Dream 117

ii) The Merchant of Venice 118

iii) The Tragedy of Richard II 118

iv) Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 118

v) Othello 119

vi) King Lear, 1594 119

vii) The First Part of King Henry IV 119

viii) The Tragedy of Julius Caesar 120

ix) Macbeth 120

x) Romeo and Juliet 120

b) Full Summaries of Some Shakespeare's Works 121

i) Hamlet 121

ii) King Lear 127

iii) Macbeth 133

iv) The Merchant of Venice 138

v) Othello 142

vi) Richard III 144

vii) Romeo and Juliet 149

viii) The Tempest 152

ix) Twelfth Night 153

22) Wuthering Heights 156

1984 by G.Orwell

Part 1

Chapter 1

Summary:

The book opens on a cold April day with 39-year-old Winston Smith

returning to his dilapidated flat in Victory Mansions. The hallway sports

an enormous poster of a man known as "Big Brother"; the caption reads, "BIG

BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU." The eyes of the poster seem to follow Winston as

he moves.

Upon entering his flat, Winston dims the telescreen (where someone is

reading statistics about pig-iron production), which can never be turned

off completely, and which both receives and transmits. Outside, Winston can

see "BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU" posters, a poster with the word "INGSOC"

on it, and the police patrol spying on people.

Winston is living in London, the predominant city of the province

known as Airstrip One in Oceania. Bombed sites reveal that some sort of war

is going on. Winston tries to recall his childhood, to see if things have

always been like this, but cannot.

Outside his window stands the Ministry of Truth (a.k.a. "Minitrue" in

Newspeak, the official language of Oceania), an enormous structure

displaying the three slogans of _the Party_: WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS

SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. There are four Ministries: the Ministry of

Truth concerns itself with the spread of information through news,

entertainment, education and the arts; the Ministry of Peace (Minipax)

deals with war; the Ministry of Love (Miniluv) administers law and order;

and the Ministry of Plenty (Miniplenty) handles economic affairs.

After swallowing some shocking Victory Gin and plying himself with a

cheap Victory cigarette, Winston carefully tucks himself out of the

telescreen's visual range with an old book, an old pen and an inkbottle.

These are compromising possessions, acquired through various means; Winston

is secretly something of a rebel, unhappy with the status quo. What he is

about to do--start a diary--is not "illegal" (since, we discover, there are

no laws anymore), but is certainly life-threatening.

Unused to writing by hand, Winston falters momentarily before writing

"April 4th, 1984." He sits back, uncertain whether it actually is 1984, and

he suddenly wonders for whom he is writing. Here the concept of

_doublethink_ (see Analysis) hits him; his attempt to communicate with the

future is impossible, futile. He is no longer sure what he wanted to write;

the moment has been building for weeks and suddenly he finds himself

wordless. Even when he tries to write, he finds he is not recording the

incident which had inspired him to begin the diary on this day .

This incident took place during that morning's "Two Minutes Hate," a

daily, almost orgiastic ritual of propaganda. Winston recalls noticing two

people: a girl whose name he does not know but whom he recognizes as

working in the Fiction Department, and O'Brien, an imposing man and member

of the Inner Party. Winston feels a dislike for the girl, whose youth gives

him the sense that she is a dangerous Party zealot; by contrast, he feels

drawn to O'Brien in a way almost resembling trust, because he hopes that

O'Brien is secretly politically unorthodox.

The "Two Minutes Hate" begins with footage of Emmanuel Goldstein, "the

Enemy of the People," castigating the Party. Apparently, Goldstein had once

been a leading Party member who rebelled, was condemned to death, and

disappeared to form the underground Brotherhood. The symbol of ultimate

treachery, Goldstein is featured in every Hate as the source of all crimes

against the Party. [Through Winston's reaction, we begin to get the sense

that the image and persona of Goldstein are actually completely

manufactured, hinting at the possibility that he is in fact a

propagandistic creation of the Party. This is reinforced by the observation

that there are always new spies, new Brotherhood members, being exposed

every day, despite the Party's brutal efficiency in creating universal

hatred for Goldstein.]

As the Hate goes on, people get increasingly worked up, shouting and

throwing things at the screen. [It is, Winston notes, impossible to avoid

joining in.] The Hate overwhelms the members, sweeping them into a blind

ecstasy of hatred. Winston directs his hatred at the girl, because, he

realizes, he wants to sleep with her.

The Hate reaches its climax when the terrifying images melt into the

face of Big Brother, who utters soothing words before fading away into the

three Party slogans. The crowd, passionately relieved at the appearance of

their "savior" starts to chant, "B-B! . . . B-B!" Here Winston catches

O'Brien's eye. In an instant, Winston feels that O'Brien is communicating

to him that he is on his side; this is the moment which brings him to his

diary.

After some reflection, Winston looks again at his page and finds he has

been writing automatically:

DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER

DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER

He knows there is no point in tearing out the page, because he has

committed thoughtcrime, and in the end the Thought Police will get him

anyway; he, and every last vestige of his existence, will be completely

wiped out--"vaporized."

Suddenly there is a knock at the door. Winston is terrified by this,

but knows that to delay would be worse than anything, so he gets up to

answer it.

Chapter 2

Summary:

Winston finds Mrs. Parsons, his neighbour, at his door, asking him if

he can help repair her kitchen sink. Mrs. Parsons is a rather helpless,

dusty-looking woman; her husband Tom works with Winston at the Ministry of

Truth. Tom is something of an imbecile, slavishly devoted to the Party and

quite active in its social workings.

As Winston clears the blockage from the pipe, the Parsons children

come out and start dancing around him, calling him a "traitor" and a

"thought-criminal." These children, like many others, are horrid little

savages being trained to be good Party members through systematic

brainwashing; many denounce their own parents to the Thought Police.

Winston returns to his diary and starts thinking of O'Brien. About

seven years ago he had had a dream where he had been walking through a dark

room and someone had said to him, "We shall meet in the place where there

is no darkness." At some point, Winston identified the voice as O'Brien's.

Whether or not O'Brien is a friend or an enemy--and Winston still isn't

sure--they are connected by an understanding.

Winston feels isolated, yet pursued, everywhere faced (literally) by

Big Brother. He knows his thoughtcrime--his diary--will result only in

annihilation. Yet somehow, he takes heart in the idea that in the very act

of recording truths he is keeping himself sane and carrying on humanity. He

returns to his diary and starts to write "to the future or to the past, to

a time when thought is free."

"Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death," Winston

writes, and in doing so recognizes himself as already dead. He now must

simply stay alive as long as possible.

Winston carefully washes the ink from his hands and puts the diary away

before going back to work.

Chapter 3

Summary:

Winston dreams of his mother that she and his baby sister are sinking

down away from him, having in some way given their lives so he could

survive. He barely remembers his family, as they had likely fallen victim

to a purge in the 1950s. His mother's death, he feels, was a particular

tragedy, arising from a loyalty and complex emotion which are no longer

possible.

The dream shifts suddenly to an idyllic spot Winston calls "the Golden

Country," where the dark-haired girl comes to him and in one graceful,

careless gesture, tears off her clothes and flings them aside. Winston

feels no desire for her, but instead a strong admiration of the defiance of

the gesture, which itself belongs to a previous time, just like Winston's

mother's love. Winston wakes up saying the word "Shakespeare."

Winston is awakened by the telescreen. The Physical Jerks--morning

exercises--begin, directed by a woman on the screen. As he exercises,

Winston tries to remember the era of his childhood. He recalls an air raid

which caught everyone off guard, and since which Oceania had been

continuously at war. Currently, in 1984, Oceania is at war with Eurasia and

allied with Eastasia.

Although there are no records kept to contradict the given current

alignment, Winston knows that four years ago the alliance was reversed;

still, the present situation is always officially represented as though it

has always been. Winston is terrified by the thought that by so thoroughly

controlling history and information, the Party might actually be creating a

new truth. He reflects that the past has been destroyed because it only

exists in his own memory. Only once has Winston held proof that a

historical fact had been officially falsified--but his thoughts are

interrupted by the woman on screen shouting at him, Winston Smith, to try

harder.

Chapter 4

Summary:

Winston is at his job in the Records Department in the Ministry of

Truth. He receives four assignments, tiny slips of paper on which are

written (mostly in Newspeak) his instructions. As it turns out, these

messages involve the "correction" of past issues of the Times, where a

speech of Big Brother's is "misreported" ("malreported" in Newspeak) or

statistics forecasting manufacturing output are "misprinted." The first

three assignments are simple; the fourth one, which mentions "unpersons,"

is an enticingly elaborate task which involves some use of imagination, and

Winston sets it aside to be dealt with last, almost like a dessert.

Winston uses his speakwrite (a sort of dictaphone) to quickly deal

with each of the first three assignments; he rewrites the articles, pushes

his work through the pneumatic tube in his cubicle, and disposes of the

original message and any notes through the "memory hole," which leads to a

furnace. In this way, newspapers, books, cartoons, even films and

photographs, are continually re-edited so as to conform with the current

state of political and economic affairs, and to make it appear as though

the Party has always been correct in its predictions or consistent in its

alliances. Any and all prior editions are destroyed, no matter how many

revisions are made.

Winston reflects that in many cases, what he is doing is not really

forgery, because the original statistics or "facts" are made up to begin

with. Nobody really knows anything except that on paper, millions of pairs

of boots are being produced, while on the streets, half of Oceania's

population runs barefoot.

Looking around, Winston notes that he hardly knows the people in his

Department, or what they do exactly. Across the hall from him Tillotson,

who flashes him a hostile look, sits with his speakwrite; a woman from the

Two Minutes Hate, whose husband had been vaporized, works next to Winston

at tracking down and eliminating references to "unpersons" (people whose

existences had been obliterated); and the dreamy Ampleforth works a few

cubicles away at rewriting poems so their ideologies will correspond with

the dominant one. As Winston reflects on the Department as a whole, the

staggering size of the operation becomes evident, especially as it is only

one part of the Ministry of Truth, which not only supplies materials to

Party members but to the "proles" (proletariat) as well.

At last, after disposing of some more messages and attending the Hate,

Winston settles down to work away at his engaging assignment: rewriting a

highly "unsatisfactory" article in an issue of the Times which references

people who no longer exist. Winston reads the original article, where Big

Brother's Order for the Day praises an organization called the FFCC and

awards the Order of Conspicuous Merit, Second Class, to one Comrade

Withers, a member of the Inner Party. Three months after this, however, the

FFCC had been dissolved and its members presumably disgraced, though there

was no report of this. Winston knows that this is the way it usually

happens: people who somehow displease the Party simply vanish and are never

heard from again. Although Winston does not know why Withers fell from

grace, he does know that the man is most likely dead, since he is called an

"unperson."

Winston decides to rewrite the speech entirely on a new topic: the

commemoration of the exemplary life of Comrade Ogilvy. Ogilvy, of course,

is purely Winston's invention, but he will be given life through a few

lines and a faked photograph or two. Winston creates Ogilvy's life‹that of

a textbook good Party member from the age of three‹and his heroic death

with a zesty enjoyment of the process.

Although Winston is fairly certain that other people, including Tillotson,

have been given the same assignment, he also believes that his own version

will be the one that is chosen.

Chapter 5

Summary:

Winston is in the rather unpleasant canteen, where he meets up with

Syme‹not exactly his "friend" (since you have comrades rather than

friends), but one whose society is more pleasant to Winston than that of

others. Syme, a philologist, works in the Research Department and is one of

a team of experts who are compiling the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak

Dictionary. (See Appendix for an in-depth discussion of Newspeak and points

relevant to this chapter.)

Syme asks Winston if he has any razor blades‹there is currently a

shortage, as there always is of one item or another. Winston lies that he

hasn't, though he has been saving two unused ones against the razor blade

famine. As he and Syme go through the queue, Syme discusses yesterday's

public hanging of prisoners with a relish that demonstrates his rabid yet

somehow intellectual orthodoxy.

As they eat their disgusting and somewhat unidentifiable lunch,

Winston gets Syme talking about the Dictionary's progress. Syme,

immediately fired with enthusiasm and a strange love for Newspeak, goes

into a panegyric about the destruction of words and the nature of Newspeak,

which is, he points out, the only language which gets smaller every year.

This limiting of vocabulary, Syme points out, is aimed at limiting thought

so that unorthodoxy will become literally impossible, since there will no

longer exist words to express or explain concepts that run counter to the

accepted ideology.

Syme discourses so intelligently upon these topics that Winston

suddenly thinks that Syme will certainly be vaporized someday, despite his

political orthodoxy. He is too intelligent for the Party to allow him to

stick around. In addition, he is somehow "shady"‹not subtle enough, too

well-read, with a tendency to frequent the Chestnut Street Cafe, where long

ago the old Party leaders would meet before they were discredited, and

Goldstein was rumored to have spent time.

Parsons, Winston's neighbor, appears in the canteen and makes his way

over to Winston and Syme (who takes out some work to avoid having to

interact with Parsons). Parsons, a large man with a dumb devotion to the

Party and its ideals, asks Winston for his subscription payment for the

upcoming "Hate Week." Parsons talks proudly about his monstrous children,

the younger of whom turned in a suspicious-looking person to the

authorities.

Discussion is halted by an announcement from the Ministry of Plenty,

describing how production is up and the standard of living has been raised.

It is reported that a demonstration has been held to thank B.B. for raising

the chocolate ration to 20 grams/week, and Winston wonders incredulously

whether people can swallow this after having been told the day before that

the ration was being reduced from 30 grams/week to 20. Yet the people

around him, either through not thinking at all or through doublethink, do

accept it, forcing him to wonder whether he is the only person around who

has a memory.

Depressed, Winston looks around, at the horrid food, ugly clothes, and

bleak surroundings. Somehow he feels that things should be better, even

though he has never known a time when they were‹when food tasted pleasant

and things worked as they were supposed to. Even the people look ugly to

him, belying the Party's Aryan ideal.

The announcement ends, and Winston lapses into a reverie thinking

about who he knows will likely be vaporized, and who will not‹namely,

Parsons, the girl with the dark hair, and the man at a nearby table who has

been speaking in a quack about the wonders and achievements of the Party.

Winston is startled out of his reverie by the awareness that the girl

with the dark hair is sitting at the next table, and is looking at him. She

turns away, but Winston is terrified because she has been turning up near

him a good deal lately. He worries that she may be an amateur spy and that

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