English Literature books summary

She and Winston never discuss marriage, knowing it to be an

impossibility; but they do discuss Katharine. Julia asks about her, but

seems to know most of the essentials regarding Katharine's frigidity, even

the fact that she called sex "our duty to the Party." Julia knows because

she had undergone the same education as Katharine; intriguingly, and

perhaps because she is more sexually liberated, Julia has a clearer

comprehension than Winston of the Party's stance on sex.

Winston tells Julia about an incident early in his marriage to

Katharine where they had gotten lost on a community hike. They ended up

near the edge of a cliff. Katharine, uncomfortable, wanted to turn around

and try to find their way back; Winston points out a plant with two

different-colored flowers growing from the same root. As she unwillingly

returned to look, Winston realized that they were completely alone, and if

he chose to he could push her off the cliff. But he didn't.

He tells Julia he regrets that he didn't, although he knows it

wouldn't have made a difference. He lapses into a typically cynical

philosophical mood, which Julia, in her youthful and perhaps stubborn

optimism, rejects.

Chapter 4

Summary:

Winston has rented the upstairs room from Mr. Charrington, the antique

shop owner, and is waiting for Julia to arrive. Outside, a prole woman is

singing one of the drivelly songs churned out by a versificator in the

Music Department‹a monstrosity to begin with, but somehow pleasant-sounding

in the woman's rendering. The room feels curiously still to Winston because

of the absence of a telescreen.

Though taking this room is a huge risk, the couple were unable to

resist it after days and weeks of being unable to meet. Winston recalls how

when they at last manage to set a day to go back to the clearing, Julia

tells him the night before (once again through a meeting on the street)

that she can't go because she is menstruating. Winston feels furious‹his

feeling toward Julia and desire for her has changed from an act of

rebellion to a sense of proprietary physical obligation, and he feels

almost like she is cheating him. But at this point, she squeezes his hand

with affection and prompts a sudden, new tenderness in him. He realizes

that this sort of thing must be normal for couples who live together, and

he is overwhelmed by the wish that he and Julia were a happily married

couple with no cares and complete privacy to do as they wished. Quite soon

after this they agree to rent the room.

Julia arrives, bearing real sugar, white bread, jam, milk, and real

coffee and tea‹all Inner Party privileges which she has filched somehow.

She then asks Winston to turn his back for a short while; when he is

allowed to turn around again, he finds that she has put on makeup and

perfume. Before they get into bed, she expresses her intention to find a

real dress and high heels so that she can be "a woman, not a Party

comrade."

Winston wakes up around 9:00 (21:00), and wonders whether the peace

and freedom of lying in bed with your loved one on a cool summer evening

were ever a normal thing in the past. Julia wakes up, and is talking to

Winston when suddenly she spots a rat and hurls a shoe at it. Winston is

startled at the presence of a rat in this idyllic room, and recalls a

recurrent nightmare he has always had where he is standing in front of a

wall and behind it is something horrifying. He would always know, in some

deeply buried part of his mind, what was behind the wall, but he never

allowed himself to acknowledge it and would wake up without discovering it.

Julia gets up, makes coffee, and wanders around the room. She asks

about the engraving of St. Clement's Dane (which coincidentally hangs right

above where the rat had poked out its head), and to Winston's surprise,

adds a line to the nursery rhyme: "When will you pay me?' say the bells of

Old Bailey." Strangely, Julia too forgets the rest excepting the ominous

ending, giving Winston a sense of fate. After observing that the picture

likely has bugs behind it, and planning to clean it, Julia cleans herself,

washing off the makeup, while Winston gazes at the paperweight.

Chapter 5

Summary:

The chapter opens with a brief paragraph on Syme's disappearance, but

quickly moves on to the intense preparations for Hate Week that are

sweeping through the city and swallowing up everyone's time. Huge posters

depicting a Eurasian soldier aiming his sub-machine gun at you crop up

everywhere, intended to stir the population into a patriotic frenzy; as

though by design, more rocket bombs fall on the city, killing more people

than usual.

Winston and Julia continue to meet in the upstairs room. Winston's

health, both physical and mental, has improved due to the existence of the

room. Occasionally he talks to Mr. Charrington, who seems to embody

history.

Though Winston and Julia know that they are doomed, they sometimes

yield to the illusion of permanence, and frequently talk about escaping

some way or another‹though they know that they will never commit even the

only feasible act among these options, which is suicide.

They talk about rebelling against the Party in a vague way; Winston

tells her about his unspoken bond with O'Brien, which does not strike her

as at all strange. Though Julia takes it for granted that everyone harbors

hatred for the Party, she does not believe in an organized underground; in

fact, she thinks that Goldstein and the tales about him were invented by

the Party for their own ends.

Julia's intelligence is also shown by her casually offered opinion

that the war with Eurasia is not actually happening‹that the government of

Oceania was dropping the bombs on its own people for the purposes of

keeping the population scared and emotionally subjected to the Party.

Winston has never even thought of this possibility. But for the most part,

Julia does not question Party doctrine unless it touches her own life in

some way; she believes much of the false history she has been taught in

school, and it doesn't seem important to her that this is untrue. Winston

is shocked by this, as well as by the fact that she doesn't seem to recall

that only four years ago Eastasia, and not Eurasia, was Oceania's enemy in

war.

Julia also does not seem to grasp the importance of Winston's story of

the photograph clearing Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford of wrongdoing. In

general she is not interested when Winston starts to delve into the

problems the Party presents. He realizes that people like Julia, who accept

what they are taught because they don't fully understand it, are in a fair

way to remain more sane than persons like himself.

Chapter 6

Summary:

Winston, walking down the long corridor where he had first spoken to

Julia, encounters O'Brien, who addresses him cordially regarding Newspeak

and what he considers Winston's elegant use of it. O'Brien obliquely refers

to Syme as someone who shares this opinion, to whom he had spoken recently;

Winston takes this as some sort of signal.

O'Brien says that he had noticed that Winston had recently used two

words now obsolete in the forthcoming Tenth Edition of the Newspeak

Dictionary, which has not been issued yet but of which O'Brien has an

advance copy. He offers Winston to visit him at his flat to take a look at

the Dictionary; through this device he gives Winston his address.

This whole exchange‹which has taken place under the watchful eye of a

telescreen‹takes only a couple of minutes, but it has sparked in Winston

both a cautious joy in the existence of the conspiracy he had hoped for,

and a dreadful certainty that it is the beginning of the end for him.

Chapter 7

Summary:

Winston awakens from a dream crying. The dream took place inside the

glass paperweight and somehow was about a protective gesture made by his

mother 30 years ago, and repeated in the film he wrote about in his diary

(where a helpless Jewish mother ineffectually tries to protect her child

from the bullets that are about to be fired at them). Within a few seconds

of waking, the memories surrounding this gesture flood back to Winston.

He had been a young boy, and London was a disaster area of starvation,

violence and unrest. His father disappeared, taking his mother's spirit

with him so that she moved through daily life waiting for her own

disappearance. She, Winston, and his baby sister lived in poor quarters and

had not enough to eat; despite his knowledge that the mother and sister

were starving, Winston would demand more food even though his mother would

automatically give him the biggest portion. One day there was a chocolate

ration, and Winston, though he knew the chocolate should be equally divided

between the three of them, found himself demanding the whole piece. After

long argument, his mother gave him 3/4 of the piece and the rest to his

sister. But Winston grabbed the piece from his sister and dashed for the

door, where he stopped at his mother's cry to come back. She looked at him;

the baby wailed; and she drew the baby closer to her, in some way that told

Winston the child was dying. He fled. When he came back a few hours later,

they both had disappeared.

This dream reminds him of the one he had had two months ago, where he

saw his mother and sister sinking away from him. He wants to talk about his

mother to Julia, but she is drifting in and out of sleep. Winston thinks

about love, about the novelty of the past, where people would make an

ineffectual gesture or act knowing that it was ineffectual but doing it

just the same; this indicates to him that they acted of their own accord,

out of their own private loyalties and standards. It strikes him that the

proles had remained like this‹had remained human. For the first time in his

life he feels no contempt or indifference toward the proles, but a strange

sort of respect for them for remaining who they are.

Julia has awakened again, and they talk about their inevitable

parting. Though they know they will be forced to confess and not be able to

help one another, Winston says that the only important thing is that they

should never betray one another, in the sense of being made to stop loving

the other person. Julia considers this and opines that this would be

impossible because they would never be able to get inside you and change

what you think. Winston takes some hope from this, believing in Julia-esque

fashion that you could beat them in the end because they couldn't change

your feelings.

Chapter 8

Summary:

Winston and Julia arrive together at O'Brien's flat. The neighborhood

of Inner Party residences is a whole new world of wealth, cleanliness and

luxury with which neither Winston nor Julia is familiar. O'Brien's servant

Martin takes them in to O'Brien's office or drawing-room, where O'Brien is

working. Winston, already afraid, feels suddenly embarrassed‹what if he has

made a mistake and O'Brien is not sympathetic?

As O'Brien approaches, he astonishes the couple by shutting off the

telescreen, which, he explains, is an Inner Party privilege. He stands

sternly before them, waiting for a short while, before his face relaxes and

he breaks the silence.

Winston explains that they are there because they believe that O'Brien

works for an underground organization which they wish to belong to. Martin

enters, but O'Brien says he is one of them, so they all sit down with a

glass of wine (which neither Winston nor Julia has ever tasted) and talk

about the Brotherhood. O'Brien asks a series of questions to test how far

Winston and Julia will go to further the goals of the Brotherhood; when he

asks whether they are willing to separate from one another, they both reply

in the negative. O'Brien asks Julia whether she understands that even if

Winston survives, he would be substantially altered both in physique and

identity; she nods, pale.

O'Brien dismisses Martin, telling him to look carefully at Winston and

Julia before he goes. Martin gives them a long look without any

friendliness or emotion in it whatsoever, then leaves. O'Brien explains

that the Brotherhood is unusual because each agent works alone, with no

support, minimal information, and no link to one another except the common

ideal they hold for the destruction of the Party. Matter-of-factly, he

outlines their lives: they will work for a while, then be caught, forced to

confess and executed. "We are the dead," he says, echoing Winston's words

to Julia a couple of chapters ago.

O'Brien dismisses Julia, then settles some details with Winston about

getting him a copy of the book, i.e. Goldstein's heretical text exposing

the true nature of the current world and the methods by which the

Brotherhood will destroy the Party. After working out these plans, O'Brien

says to Winston, "We shall meet again . . . in the place where there is no

darkness." Winston's last question to him regards the nursery rhyme of the

bells, of which O'Brien knows the final line: "When I grow rich,' say the

bells of Shoreditch."

Chapter 9

Summary:

Winston, exhausted after five days of intense work, and carrying in

his briefcase the book, goes to Mr. Charrington's shop.

The rush of work had begun on the sixth day of Hate Week, when‹at the

climax of hatred directed at Eurasia‹suddenly Oceania's alliance switched,

so that the enemy was now Eastasia and Eurasia was an ally. Remarkably, the

change occurred without any admission that it had taken place; the anti-

Eurasia posters and propaganda everywhere were suddenly deemed sabotage,

the work of Goldstein and his agents, and promptly torn down, while the

venomous speaker who had been castigating Eurasia shifted to vilifying

Eastasia without losing a beat. During the confusion, Winston is handed a

briefcase containing the book.

Winston and his fellow workers at the Ministry had spent 90 hours

rewriting history so that no trace of the war with Eurasia could be found

in the documents of the past 5 years. After the monumental task had been

completed, every Ministry worker had been given the rest of the day off, so

Winston had headed for the upstairs room.

As he waits for Julia to arrive, he starts to read the book, entitled

The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism. He starts off looking

at Chapter 1, entitled "Ignorance is Strength," but breaks off to enjoy the

fact that he is reading, and takes up again with Chapter 3, "War is Peace."

This lengthy chapter discusses the history of events that led to the

current state of the world with its three superpowers, Oceania, Eurasia,

and Eastasia, and the territory they have theoretically been fighting over

for a quarter-century (which comprises a wide swath of land across Africa,

the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, and Indonesia).

First, the nature of war has changed: it has become continuous, and

therefore its aims are different. It is continuous because none of the

superpowers could ever win, and unnecessary in the old sense because each

could sustain itself materially and ideologically they're almost identical.

According to Goldstein, the aim of warfare is no longer conquest; it

is to use up production surplus while not raising the standard of living at

home. The reason for this is, essentially, that those in power wish to

maintain a hierarchical society‹an aim that was threatened by scientific

progress, whereby machines could raise the general standard of living to

the point where wealth could theoretically be evenly distributed. Because

hierarchy depends on poverty and ignorance, as well as keeping people too

busy to complain about conditions, it became the goal of the ruling class

to somehow maintain industry while not distributing goods. The only way to

do so was continuous warfare, which addresses this need practically but

also psychologically, by correctly maintaining the morale of the Party.

As long as they remain at war, the three superstates support one

another. The standards of living in all three are actually the same, as are

their socio-political systems. The techniques of warfare haven't really

changed in 30-40 years, because they don't need to. None of the superstates

ever undertakes a major risk, i.e. one that could lead to a serious defeat.

Not much fighting really goes on and it never approaches the heartland of

any of the three powers, because that would jeopardize cultural integrity

and risk people finding that other humans are pretty much the same as they,

which could prove the undoing of these governments. Whatever fighting or

strategy there is a dance of alliances, where each power tries to swallow

up an ally and then do the same with its remaining opponent.

When war becomes continuous, it is no longer dangerous, therefore no

recourse to the past and lessons learned then is necessary; neither is

efficiency; neither is any need to even address reality. Reality can be

shaped however the ruling class chooses.

Thus war is waged by the state upon its own citizens, not for conquest

but for maintaining the social structure. Because its nature has been so

altered, and that the same effects can be achieved through a state of

peace, "war is peace"‹the true meaning of the Party slogan.

Winston stops reading. The book is reassuring because it helps him to

know he is not insane. Julia comes in, and is less interested in the book

than in Winston.

Later, as they lie in bed, he starts to read it to her, from Chapter

1, which discusses class differences and the historical nature of the class

struggle between High, Middle and Low.

Socialist movements aiming for liberty and equality were more and more

openly abandoned over the first half of the twentieth century, until the

three currently dominating world movements‹Ingsoc in Oceania, Neo-

Bolshevism in Eurasia, and Death-Worship in Eastasia‹had emerged with their

new aims of "unfreedom and inequality." Their intent: to become the High,

and then freeze the cycle of class struggle so as to permanently maintain

their status. To this end, technical advances were anathema because they

promoted human equality, which was to be fought at all costs.

By the middle of the century, the new totalitarian forces had emerged

from the Middle, but with a difference: they were less concerned with

wealth than with power, and they had learned from history how they might

maintain their power and stifle all opposition. Technologies enabled 24-

hour surveillance and complete mind control; and the "abolition of private

property" really meant the appropriation of all property by the Party as a

group.

According to history, the new ruling class could only be toppled one

of four ways. It could be conquered by an external power; this has

effectually ceased to be a possibility with the mutual unconquerability of

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