Part 1 Chapter 1

The story opens in a grimy London, the chief city of Airstrip One, within the province of Oceania, where protagonist Winston Smith arrives home to his small apartment for his meagre lunch. The face of Big Brother, both a character and a concept, is plastered everywhere with the caption ‘Big Brother is watching you’, and Winston’s bleak reflections set a foreboding tone of a deteriorating society that prevails throughout the novel. The reader is introduced to the restrictiveness of Winston’s environment; he feels compelled to suppress any childhood memories from the telescreen through which he is closely watched.

Winston works at one of the four mega-buildings, the Ministry of Truth, Minitrue in Newspeak (the language of Oceania), which is the news, entertainment, education and fine arts arm of the government. The other mega ministries are the Ministry of Peace, which is concerned with war, the Ministry of Love, which upholds law and order, and the Ministry of Plenty, which maintains economic affairs. In Newspeak they are, respectively, Minipax, Miniluv and Miniplenty.

The slogans of the Party are War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength. With these antithetical slogans, the reader is introduced to the concept of doublethink (a word in Newspeak), which holds that two opposing and individually exclusive ideas or opinions can be held and believed in simultaneously and absolutely, which in practice requires one to use logic against logic or to suspend disbelief in the contradiction.

Winston starts writing in a diary, an act of thought crime he knows is punishable by death, and realises he is unaware for whom the words are intended. He writes about his recent trip to see a film until he is interrupted by thoughts of a women at work (Julia), whom he suspects is an agent of the Thought Police, and to whom he is both attracted and repulsed, and by Inner Party member O’Brien whom he believes is a dissident of the Party. The reason Winston believes this is because during the daily Two Minute Hate, where the face of traitor and enemy of the people Emmanuel Goldstein is broadcast via telescreen and Party members are expected to verbalise their hate, Winston believes he and O’Brien exchanged a secret code as their eyes met. Breaking from his thoughts, Winston realises he has repeatedly written the words, ‘Down with Big Brother’, and experiences panicked thoughts of his impending arrest before he hears a knock at his door.

Part 1 Chapter 1 Quotes

The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. Part 1 Chapter 1

The black-moustachio’d face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston’s own. Part 1 Chapter 1

He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses …? Part 1 Chapter 1

WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH Part 1 Chapter 1

He had set his features into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen. Part 1 Chapter 1

The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal … but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp. Part 1 Chapter 1

…he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984 … it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two. Part 1 Chapter 1

Once when they passed in the corridor she gave him a quick sidelong glance which seemed to pierce right into him and for a moment had filled him with black terror. The idea had even crossed his mind that she might be an agent of the Thought Police. (about Julia) Part 1 Chapter 1

He felt deeply drawn to him, … because of a secretly held belief – or perhaps not even a belief, merely a hope – that O’Brien’s political orthodoxy was not perfect. Part 1 Chapter 1

Goldstein was the renegade and backslider … one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared. Part 1 Chapter 1

…the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, …was not a thing that could be concealed for ever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you. Part 1 Chapter 1

He was an object of hatred more constant than either Eurasia or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at war with one of these Powers it was generally at peace with the other. (about Goldstein) Part 1 Chapter 1

Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: VAPORIZED was the usual word. Part 1 Chapter 1

Part 1 Chapter 2

The knock at the door was Mrs Parson, Winston’s neighbour. Her kitchen sink is clogged and she needed Winston’s help since her husband, Tom Parsons, who works with Winston at the Ministry of Truth, was not home. Winston assists but is berated by her Party-indoctrinated children, who label him a traitor, a thought criminal and Goldstein.

Returning home, Winston continues with his diary and thinks about O’Brien. He recalls a dream in which he heard the statement: ‘We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness’. In light of the exchange with O’Brien during at the Two Minute Hate, Winston now feels the words he is writing may be for O’Brien. Winston’s musings orient the reader to his conflicting situation where he tries to balance the Party’s mutability of the past with the existence of his memories and an unimaginable future. He realises his death at the hands of the thought police is inevitable, and aims to stay alive as long as possible.

Part 1 Chapter 2 Quotes

Some Eurasian prisoners, guilty of war crimes, were to be hanged in the Park that evening, Winston remembered. This happened about once a month, and was a popular spectacle. Children always clamoured to be taken to see it. Part 1 Chapter 2

It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children. Part 1 Chapter 2

… 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. Part 1 Chapter 2

Ingsoc. The sacred principles of Ingsoc. Newspeak, doublethink, the mutability of the past. Part 1 Chapter 2

We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness. Part 1 Chapter 2

To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone – to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone. (from Winston’s diary) Part 1 Chapter 2

Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death. Part 1 Chapter 2

Part 1 Chapter 3

This chapter, through Winston’s dreams, introduces the reader to Winston’s late mother and sister. Winston’s clarity around their fate is obscured but he feels their lives ‘…had been sacrificed for his own’. Winston’s dream segues to a scene which often recurs in his dreams, the ‘Golden Country’, where elm trees sway in the breeze and where dace (small fish) swim in the pools of a slow-moving stream. This time he dreams the dark-haired girl (Julia) is there, and that with the removal of her clothing, Big Brother, the Party and the Thought Police have all ceased to exist. He awakes with the word ‘Shakespeare’ on his lips.

Winston is called to attention by the telescreen to perform Physical Jerks, the daily exercise routine for Outer Party members. He recalls childhood memories and considers how memories provide an evidentiary link to the past and ponders how knowledge can exist outside of one’s consciousness if the Party could alter or negate historical records, effectively allowing lies to enter history and become truth; the Party claims to have invented planes yet Winston can remember planes existed prior to the Party’s existence. Winston’s thoughts impact on his exercise performance and he is reprimanded by the exercise director through the telescreen.

Part 1 Chapter 3 Quotes

… his mother’s death …had been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no longer possible. Tragedy … belonged to the ancient time, … when there was still privacy, love, and friendship, and …members of a family stood by one another … Part 1 Chapter 3

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed – if all records told the same tale – then the lie passed into history and became truth. Part 1 Chapter 3

Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past. Part 1 Chapter 3

All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’. Part 1 Chapter 3

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic … Part 1 Chapter 3

… to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again… Part 1 Chapter 3

That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink. Part 1 Chapter 3

Part 1 Chapter 4

This chapter introduces detail into Winston’s work at the Ministry of Truth where he uses a dictating machine, the ‘speakwrite’, to rewrite history so that it conforms with the Party’s goals, while making obsolete any previous contradictory sources by discarding them through ‘memory holes’ in the wall. For example, when chocolate is rationed, after a previously issued promise to the contrary, Winston simply alters the previous promise to be a warning that chocolate would in fact be rationed.
Additional colleagues are introduced including the hostile Tillotson, in the next cubicle, and Ampleforth, who reworked poems. Winston is tasked with rewriting a speech given by Big Brother in which he praised a person, Comrade Withers, who had since fallen into Party disfavour and was made to disappear, vaporised. Winston substitutes the record by reappropriating Comrade Withers into the imaginary war hero, Captain Ogilvy, a model Party man who had died in heroic circumstances. In doing so, Winston was able to negate Comrade Withers’ entire existence, making him an ‘unperson’, while bringing to life, and death, a person of complete fiction.

Part 1 Chapter 4 Quotes

It was therefore necessary to rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother’s speech, in such a way as to make him predict the thing that had actually happened. Part 1 Chapter 4

Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames. Part 1 Chapter 4

Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. Part 1 Chapter 4

All history was a palimpsest [rewritable record with traces of the former text], scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. Part 1 Chapter 4

Here were produced rubbishy newspapers, … sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator. Part 1 Chapter 4

Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head. Part 1 Chapter 4

Big Brother’s familiar style: a style at once military and pedantic, and, because of a trick of asking questions and then promptly answering them … [was] easy to imitate. Part 1 Chapter 4

Comrade Ogilvy, who had never existed in the present, now existed in the past, and when once the act of forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar. Part 1 Chapter 4

Part 1 Chapter 5

Winston has lunch with his friend Syme, a Party member working on a revised edition of the Newspeak dictionary whose intelligence Winston suspects will soon have him vaporised. Syme extols the virtues of Newspeak in narrowing the range of thought to make thought crime impossible; where there are no words capable of expressing independent, rebellious thoughts cannot be conceived. Orwell shows the social implications of destroying language, and alludes to how language can be weaponised to control people.

Parsons, Winston’s neighbour, joins Syme and Winston at the canteen. He apologises for his children’s behaviour towards Winston when he had fixed their sink, though is proud of their zealousness. An announcement by the Ministry of Plenty with statistics to support ‘our new, happy life’ juxtaposes with the physical decay of the canteen environment and its occupants, as described by Winston.

Winston sees the dark-haired girl from his office (Julia) staring at him and grows uneasy, suspecting that she is following him. The telescreen emits a signal and the canteen’s occupants return to work.

Part 1 Chapter 5 Quotes

‘You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying words – scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone.’ (Syme) Part 1 Chapter 5

‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. (Syme) Part 1 Chapter 5

It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word?’ (Syme) Part 1 Chapter 5

‘In your heart you’d prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning. You don’t grasp the beauty of the destruction of words.’ (Syme) Part 1 Chapter 5

‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.’ (Syme) Part 1 Chapter 5

‘Even now, of course, there’s no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It’s merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. … The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.’ (Syme) Part 1 Chapter 5

‘The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron – they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions … changed into something contradictory of what they used to be.’ (Syme) Part 1 Chapter 5

‘Orthodoxy means not thinking – not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.’ (Syme) Part 1 Chapter 5

It was not the man’s brain that was speaking, it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck. Part 1 Chapter 5

It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. Part 1 Chapter 5

…to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: FACECRIME, it was called. Part 1 Chapter 5

Part 1 Chapter 6

In the evening, Winston writes in his diary about a sexual encounter he had with a prole. He ruminates on the Party’s abhorrence of sex and its relegation of the act to one of Party duty for the purposes of reproducing new members. Winston’s former wife Katherine had been indoctrinated to this view, and she and Winston separated when they realised they would not have children.

Winston shares his longings for sexual intimacy. As he continues writing, he does not achieve the satisfying release for which he longed and feels the ‘the urge to shout dirty words’.

Part 1 Chapter 6 Quotes

Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom. Part 1 Chapter 6

The most deadly danger of all was talking in your sleep. There was no way of guarding against that, so far as he could see. Part 1 Chapter 6

The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and women from forming loyalties … Its real, undeclared purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act. … Part 1 Chapter 6

The only recognized purpose of marriage was to beget children for the service of the Party. Part 1 Chapter 6

She had not a thought in her head that was not a slogan, and there was no imbecility, absolutely none that she was not capable of swallowing if the Party handed it out to her. ‘The human sound-track’ he nicknamed her in his own mind. (Winston, on his ex-wife Katherine) Part 1 Chapter 6

Part 1 Chapter 7

Winston writes that if there is any hope for change in society it lies in the working class proles, if they could be made to recognise the power in their majority. He envies their relatively free life, void of telescreen surveillance, and wishes they would rise up from Big Brother’s oppressive control.

Winston remembers that the revolution which wiped out the original capitalist leaders occurred during the great purges that commenced in the 1960s. He ponders on the Party’s claims to have liberated the proles and the contradictions this presents: they built great cities yet London is in a state of decay with unreliable electricity; they improved lives, increased the literacy rate and reduced the mortality rate but people live in poverty, fear, food rationing and dilapidated housing. Winston suspects the Party’s claims to be false but has no reliable source against which to cross-reference his suspicions.

Winston recalls sitting in a café next to three former Party men, Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford, who had previously been arrested and vanished but who re-emerged shortly later and were re-arrested for treason, made to falsely confess, then executed as enemies. Winston remembers coming across a photograph of the men on his desk which proved that they could not have committed the treason as on the date in question they had been at a Party function. On realising he was holding concrete proof of the Party’s deception, Winston had thrown the photograph into the memory hole, fearing his remembrance of history would be recognised by the thought police through the telescreen, and he would be arrested.

Winston concludes that his diary writing is intended for O’Brien, whom he is sure is on his side.

Part 1 Chapter 7 Quotes

If there was hope, it MUST lie in the proles, because only there in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. Part 1 Chapter 7

But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength. would have no need to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. Part 1 Chapter 7

…the Party taught that the proles were natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals, by the application of a few simple rules. Part 1 Chapter 7

They were born … they went to work at twelve … they married at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling, filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult. (the proles) Part 1 Chapter 7

Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious. (the proles) Part 1 Chapter 7

Proles and animals are free. Part 1 Chapter 7

It was curious that the fact of having held it in his fingers seemed to him to make a difference even now, when the photograph itself, as well as the event it recorded, was only memory. Was the Party’s hold upon the past less strong, he wondered, because a piece of evidence which existed no longer HAD ONCE existed. (about the photograph of Jones, Aaronson & Rutherford) Part 1 Chapter 7

Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. Part 1 Chapter 7

The hypnotic eyes gazed into his own. It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you – something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses. (Winston, on Big Brother) Part 1 Chapter 7

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. Part 1 Chapter 7

Part 1 Chapter 8

Winston goes for a walk through the prole district and narrowly avoids being injured by a rocket bomb. He enters a pub where he sees an older man who would have been middle-aged during the revolution and from whom Winston thinks he can get some truth as to the conditions when capitalism still existed. However the old man’s memory is incoherent and when Winston does not get the answers he seeks, he laments how history will be forgotten with the failed memories of the last of the older generation.

Winston walks to the second-hand store where he had previously purchased his diary and buys a clear glass paperweight from the proprietor, Mr Charrington. Winston looks at further items in an upstairs room and finds a cosily set up space with a fireplace, and no telescreen. He is awakened to a ‘nostalgia, a sort of ancestral memory’ and, imagining the room to be a perfect place to rent, makes the risky decision to return to the store in a month’s time. He sees a picture of a church which Mr Charrington tells him is St Clement’s Dane (a real-life church in present-day London but which had been ruined in the novel), which prompts him to recite part of a rhyme, ‘Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement’s’. The mysterious rhyme with its missing verses stays with Winston throughout the rest of the novel, symbolising fading memories.

On stepping out of Mr Charrington’s store, Winston sees the dark-haired girl (Julia) and becomes convinced she is following him. Back at his apartment, Winston contemplates suicide and tries to encourage himself by thinking of and writing to O’Brien. Instead, he finds himself thinking about the different methods with which the Thought Police will torture him with when he is arrested as a thought criminal.

Part 1 Chapter 8 Quotes

His spectacles, his gentle, fussy movements, and the fact that he was wearing an aged jacket of black velvet, gave him a vague air of intellectuality, as though he had been some kind of literary man, or perhaps a musician. (Winston, on Mr Charrington) Part 1 Chapter 8

The thing was doubly attractive because of its apparent uselessness, though he could guess that it must once have been intended as a paperweight. Part 1 Chapter 8

Winston wondered vaguely to what century the church belonged. It was always difficult to determine the age of a London building. Anything large and impressive … was automatically claimed as having been built since the Revolution … Part 1 Chapter 8

‘…oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s.’ That was a rhyme we had when I was a little boy. How it goes on I don’t remember, but I do know it ended up, ‘Here comes a candle to light you to bed, Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.’ (Mr Charrington) Part 1 Chapter 8