English Literature books summary

the three superstates. It could stimulate mass revolt due to its own

inefficiency; but the masses have no standards of comparison to even show

them the inefficiency or misery of Party rule. It could allow for the rise

of a strong Middle class, or it could lose its confidence in itself and its

ability to govern through the rise of certain attitudes in its own ranks.

These last two comprise an educational problem, and are solved through the

use of doublethink and the relative flexibility between the Outer Party and

Inner Party. Because Party membership is not hereditary, the Party is not a

class in the historical sense; it is concerned with propagating itself,

rather than with putting forth its children.

There is a discussion of Oceanic society and a detailed description of

the everyday life of a Party member, which delves into the mental

disciplines of "crimestop" (the ability to protect yourself from committing

thoughtcrime using stupidity), "blackwhite" (either an opponent's insolent

claim that black is white, or a Party member's laudable willingness to

claim black is white for the Party's sake), and doublethink (which in

reality encompasses all).

The alteration of history is explained as having two reasons: to

prevent Party members from having a standard of comparison, and to protect

the Party's supposed infallibility. "The mutability of the past is the

central tenet of Ingsoc," Goldstein writes, starting to touch upon the

issue that haunts Winston. According to Ingsoc, the past is defined by

record and memory; and since the Party creates and controls both of those,

it creates the past.

Here Goldstein comes to the practice of doublethink, and after a

detailed discussion of it (though nothing Winston doesn't already know),

claims that ultimately it is doublethink which has allowed the Party to

freeze the pendulum of social class struggle, because through doublethink

the Party is able to learn from past errors while maintaining the illusion

of its infallibility. Through the use of doublethink, the Party is able to

create an atmosphere of "controlled insanity," which is the ideal for

permanently keeping human equality at bay.

But when Goldstein comes to the central question‹i.e., why is it

necessary to forever avoid human equality? Winston stops reading, aware

that Julia has fallen asleep. He closes the book and reflects that he still

doesn't understand why (his question from a previous chapter). He knew

everything in those chapters already. But he derives comfort from the

feeling that he is not mad, and falls asleep with a feeling that he is

safe.

Chapter 10

Summary:

Winston awakens, feeling like he has slept for a long time; but the

old-fashioned clock says 8:30, i.e. 20:30. The woman outside starts singing

the love song she always sings, waking Julia, who gets up to light the

stove. Oddly, there is no oil left, although she had made sure it was full.

Remarking that it is colder, she gets dressed; Winston follows suit. He

goes to the window and looks out‹no sun. As he watches the prole woman,

Julia joins him, and he is surprised to find that he thinks the huge lady

beautiful. She must have had many children, he reflects, noting also that

he and Julia can never do that; but with hope he thinks about the millions

of people like that woman, who live their lives and will eventually rise up

to construct a new world. He knows that while he and Julia are dead, they

can yet share in the future by somehow passing along the secret that "2 + 2

= 4."

He says, "We are the dead." Julia echoes him.

And then they are startled by a voice from the wall echoing them. "You

are the dead."

At last, they have been caught. There had been a telescreen behind the

picture. Winston and Julia are ordered to remain still and untouching, in

the middle of the room, hands behind their heads, while storm troopers

surround the house and burst in through a window.

Winston remains as still as he can, trying to avoid being struck. One

of the storm troopers smashes the paperweight. Another hits Julia in the

solar plexus, knocking the wind out of her and sending her to the floor.

She is picked up and ignominiously carried out as Winston watches

helplessly.

Various uninteresting thoughts begin to hit Winston. It becomes

apparent that he and Julia have overslept‹that it is now 9:00 in the

morning, rather than in the evening. But he does not pursue this train of

thought.

Mr. Charrington enters, but he is altered in accent and appearance.

Winston realizes that he is a member of the Thought Police.

Part 3

Chapter 1

Summary:

Winston is in the Ministry of Love (he presumes), in a high-ceilinged

bare white cell with a telescreen in each wall and a bench running along

the perimeter. He has not eaten since he was arrested, and he has no

conception of how long ago that was.

Before being brought to this place he had been taken to a prison full

of both "common criminals" (i.e. prole gangsters, thieves, prostitutes,

etc.) and political prisoners like himself. He notes that the common

criminals comport themselves with almost no fear of consequences, in direct

contrast to the political prisoners, and that they have set up a sort of

hierarchical social order within the prison.

One huge, drunken woman is brought in kicking and screaming and dumped

on Winston's lap. She seems to take a liking to him, asks his name, and is

surprised to find that it is the same as hers. She speculates that she

might be his mother; he reflects that it is possible, given her age and the

potential changes time may have wrought.

In this prison, Winston hears for the first time a reference to "Room 101,"

which he does not understand.

In the cell in the Ministry of Love, Winston has nothing to do except

sit still and think. He is so paralyzed by hunger and fear that he cannot

even feel for Julia. Dreading torture, he thinks hopefully of the razor

blade O'Brien might send.

People start to come into the cell. The first is Ampleforth, the poet

from Winston's department. They talk briefly before the telescreen shouts

at them to be quiet. After a while, Ampleforth is taken out to Room 101.

The next person to enter is, to Winston's utter surprise, Parsons, whose

daughter denounced him to the Thought Police for saying "Down with Big

Brother" over and over again in his sleep.

After Parsons is removed, various other prisoners are brought in and

taken out. Again, someone is assigned to be taken to Room 101, and Winston

observes her fear without comprehending it. A starving man is brought in;

everyone in the cell seems to realize at once that he is dying of

starvation. Another prisoner, a chinless man, gets up to offer him a crust

of bread. The telescreen roars at him to freeze and drop the bread. An

officer and a guard enter; the guard smashes the man in the mouth, sending

him across the cell and breaking his dental plate.

After this, the starving man is summoned to Room 101. In mortal

terror, he flings himself into a posture of supplication, begging them not

to send him there. The officer is implacable. The prisoner begs them to do

anything to him, anything else but Room 101; still no relenting.

Desperately, he tries to point the finger at the chinless man, shrieking

that they should be taking him instead; the guards move forward to remove

him by force. He grabs one of the iron legs supporting the bench and puts

up a surprisingly good fight before his fingers are broken by a vicious

kick and he is dragged away.

An unknown amount of time passes, and Winston is alone. He is tortured

by hunger, thirst, and panic; he still hopes for the razor blade; his

thoughts of Julia are distant and cannot compete with his fright of the

pain he knows he will be suffering.

The door opens again, and O'Brien enters. Winston is shocked into

forgetting the telescreen for the first time in years. "They've got you

too!" he exclaims, to which O'Brien replies, "They got me a long time ago,"

and steps aside to reveal a guard with a truncheon. O'Brien was not, after

all, the co-conspirator Winston had thought; but somehow, now, he sees that

he has always known this was the case. This thought flits through his mind

almost unnoticed as he watches the guard's truncheon..

The blow falls on Winston's elbow and he is blinded by pain. Writhing

on the floor, he cannot think of anything except that there are no heroes

in the face of pain.

Chapter 2

Summary:

For an indeterminate amount of time, Winston has been tortured, first

with frequent and vicious beatings, then with extensive interrogations

where the nagging of his questioners wore him down even more than the

beatings. He has confessed all manner of impossible crimes and implicated

everybody he knows. His memories are discontinuous and in some cases

hallucinatory. Through it all he has the sense that O'Brien has been in

charge of his life in the Ministry of Love‹that O'Brien dictates when

Winston shall be tortured and fed. Winston is not sure when it was, but he

recalls hearing a voice telling him not to worry, because "I shall save

you, I shall make you perfect." Winston is not certain whether it is

O'Brien's voice, but it is the same voice he heard in his old dream.

Winston drifts into a consciousness that he is in a room with O'Brien,

strapped to a bed. O'Brien is in control of some sort of pain-generating

device which will play a part in the current interrogation.

O'Brien begins by telling Winston that he is insane because he does

not have control of his memory, and that he recalls false events. He

mentions the photograph of Jones, Rutherford and Aaronson as a

hallucination Winston has had‹and then holds up the very photograph. Before

Winston's eyes, O'Brien proceeds to dispose of the photograph through a

memory hole and immediately deny that it ever existed. Winston feels

helpless because he realizes it is quite possible that O'Brien is not

lying, that he in fact believes that the photograph never existed.

They talk about the nature of the past and reality; O'Brien tells

Winston that reality exists only in the mind of the Party, and that Winston

has got to make an effort to destroy himself in order to become "sane." He

then asks Winston if he recalls writing in his diary that "Freedom is the

freedom to say that 2 + 2 =4," and this touches off a whole round of

torture. O'Brien holds up four fingers and asks Winston how many there are,

if the Party says there are five. Winston, for a long while, can only see

four, and suffers increasing levels of pain for it. O'Brien does not accept

Winston merely saying that he sees five; he has to actually believe it. At

last, Winston's senses are so dazed by pain that he is no longer sure how

many fingers there are.

O'Brien allows him a respite (for which Winston is lovingly grateful),

and asks him why he thinks people are brought to the Ministry of Love. When

Winston guesses that it is to make people confess or to punish them,

O'Brien suddenly becomes quite animated, and almost indignant in his

explanation. The point is not to hear about or punish petty crimes; it is

to actually change the Party's enemy, i.e. to empty him of himself and his

dangerous individualistic ideas, and to fill that void with the Party. This

precludes the possibility of martyrdom and the subsequent threat of people

rising up against the Party later. Even Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford,

O'Brien tells Winston, were in the end filled only with penitence and

adoration of Big Brother.

Winston feels that O'Brien's mind contains his own, and is not quite

sure which one of them is mad, though he thinks it must be himself since it

doesn't seem likely that O'Brien is.

O'Brien looks down at him sternly. He tells him, "What happens to you

here is for ever. . . . Things will happen to you from which you could not

recover, if you lived a thousand years." These things, notably, will wipe

out all human feeling from Winston‹in other words, they will take away his

humanity, and he will be nothing but a shell filled with the Party.

At this point, Winston is hooked up to another device which does not

pain him but seems to knock out some part of his brain, so that for a short

while he can remember nothing of his own accord but merely takes, and

believes, whatever O'Brien tells him to be truth. The effect wears off, but

it has made its point: that it is, in fact, possible for the Party to get

inside him and make him believe its truth.

The session is drawing to its close, and O'Brien mentions how he

agrees with Winston's diary entry about how it doesn't matter whether

O'Brien was an enemy or a friend because he could be talked to.

Magnanimously, he allows Winston to ask any question he desires; but his

answers are yet cruel, "truthful" only in the sense that they reference the

Party's truth.

Winston realizes suddenly that O'Brien knows what he is going to ask,

and he does: "What is in Room 101?" But O'Brien merely responds that

everyone knows what is in Room 101, and Winston is put to sleep.

Chapter 3

Summary:

Some time has passed. After innumerable sessions with O'Brien, Winston

has completed the first "stage in his re-integration"‹learning‹and O'Brien

judges that it is time for him to move on to the second, understanding.

O'Brien quotes Winston's diary entry about understanding "how" but not

"why." He mentions Goldstein's book, informing Winston that he was one of

the people who wrote it, and that it is true as a description of the world

but that its discussion of insurrection is nonsense and impossible; the

Party, he says, will rule forever, and Winston must get that into his head.

That said, he turns to the question of why the Party holds onto its

power. Winston answers incorrectly and suffers for it. O'Brien answers his

own question: "The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake." Power is

defined as something that must be collective, and as power over human

beings. Almost as an aside, O'Brien says the Party already controls matter.

Winston, roused, argues that they do not, but O'Brien silences him using

plenty of doublethink, and returns to the idea of holding power over men.

Since power over others depends on making the subject suffer, the

Party's view of the future is a world based upon hatred, fear, and

destruction. All instincts of love and beauty will be eradicated and only

power, ever more refined and absolute, will remain.

Winston, horrified, again attempts to argue against the possibility

that such a world could ever last eternally. When O'Brien asks why Winston

thinks it should fail, he cites his belief that the spirit of man will

prevail. Ironically, O'Brien asks Winston if he thinks he is a man. Winston

replies that he does. O'Brien tells him that he must be the last man, and

bids him take off his clothes and go look in the mirror at the end of the

room.

When Winston sees himself, he has a nasty shock. He is a skeleton,

dirty, broken, disgusting. He is, as O'Brien cruelly emphasizes, falling

apart. He breaks down into tears. Once again, O'Brien's manner changes to

near-kindness, as he tells Winston that he can get himself out of this

state because he got himself into it. He lists the humiliations Winston has

suffered, and asks him whether there is a single degradation he has not

experienced. Winston looks up and replies that he has not betrayed Julia.

O'Brien seems to understand this, and agrees, looking at Winston

thoughtfully. Far from taking this as any sort of hint, Winston is flooded

with his old worship of O'Brien, almost grateful that he has understood

without explanation.

Chapter 4

Summary:

More time has passed, and Winston is no longer being tortured. In

fact, he is being fed and kept clean and allowed to sleep. At first he is

only interested in sleep and no conscious mental activity; he dreams

abundantly, always happy peaceful dreams, with Julia, his mother, or

O'Brien‹the three people he cares about.

Gradually he grows stronger, though he is shocked at how weak he had

become. Correspondingly, his mind becomes more active, and he sits down to

try and re-educate himself. He reviews everything he has been told, writes

down Party slogans and falsities such as "2 + 2 = 5," all the while

reflecting how easy it has been to mentally surrender, to "think as they

think."

Still, he is troubled by some mental objections, and tries to practice

crimestop, which is the conscious stopping of thought before it leads you

into thoughtcrime. He finds that it is difficult to attain the stupidity

necessary to avoid seeing blatant logical flaws. At the back of his mind,

he wonders how soon he will be shot. The only thing he knows is that they

always shoot you in the back of the head.

Winston has a dream or reverie in which he is walking down the

corridor, waiting to be shot, feeling happy and at peace. He walks into the

Golden Country..

Suddenly he bolts awake, having heard himself cry out longingly for

Julia.

He had had a fleeting sensation of her being inside him, and at that

moment had loved her more than at any previous moment. Somehow he feels she

is still alive and that she needs his help.

Despairing, Winston lies back, waiting for the tramp of boots in the

corridor. His thoughtcrime sprang from the fact that while he has tamed his

mind to the Party, he has tried to keep his innermost self‹his heart‹away

from them. He wonders how much time he has added to his torment by the cry.

Rebelliously, he decides to lock his hatred of the Party so far inside

him that it is even a secret from himself, and envisions the final moment

where, just before the bullet hits him, all his hatred would explode. This,

he feels, is the last avenue of freedom open to him: to have his final

heretical thought right before their bullet reached him.

But this will be difficult. He thinks of Big Brother and wonders what he

really feels toward him.

O'Brien enters at that moment with an officer and guards. He orders

Winston to stand up and examines him. He asks Winston what he feels towards

Big Brother. Winston replies that he hates him. The last step, O'Brien

tells him, is to learn to love Big Brother, and he orders Winston to be

taken to Room 101.

Chapter 5

Summary:

Winston has been taken to Room 101 and strapped into a chair. O'Brien

enters and tells him what is in Room 101: the worst thing in the world,

which varies between individuals but is always something unendurable to the

person in the chair. For Winston, it is rats.

A mask with a cage attached to it is brought in. From its

construction, it is clear that the mask is designed to fit over Winston's

face, and at the pulling of a lever, the rats inside the cage‹enormous,

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