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

he may have committed facecrime, the unconscious betrayal of unorthodox

opinions via facial expressions or tics.

Parsons tells Winston another horrid story about his disgusting

children, and they are signalled to return to work.

Chapter 6

Summary:

Winston is writing in his diary about an encounter he had three years

ago with a prostitute. The memory is embarrassing and difficult for him,

and he feels an almost irresistible urge to scream obscenities or burst out

into some violent action to relieve his tension.

Of course he doesn't give in to the urge, and steels himself to

continue writing. His writing is interlaced with the memory of Katharine,

his wife, to whom he would technically still be married‹unless she were

dead‹although they are separated, because the Party does not permit

divorce. Katharine was physically attractive but, Winston soon discovered,

completely brainwashed by the Party, even in matters of sex. According to

the Party, there should be no pleasure in sex, which was an act intended to

beget children for the future of the Party. Katharine bought into this

ideology to the point where sex was an outright unpleasant act for Winston;

since no children were conceived, the couple were allowed to separate.

Perhaps because of his experience with Katharine, Winston believes that

none of the women in the Party have retained their natural sex drive.

Winston continues to write about his experience with the prostitute,

who had led him into a dark room with a bed. When he turned up the light,

he discovered to his horror that the woman was old, at least 50. But he

proceeded anyway.

Despite having gotten it all out, Winston does not feel any less

inclined to shout obscenities.

Chapter 7

Summary:

Once again Winston is writing in his diary. "If there is hope," he

writes, "it lies in the proles." Winston reasons that the proles are so

numerous that if they simply woke up they could bring down the Party. But

would they ever wake up? He remembers a day when he had been walking and

heard a great cry of anger; in hope, he hurried to the spot to see what was

happening. As it turned out, a stall that had been selling saucepans had

run out, and the disappointed women were momentarily united in their

despair. But, to Winston's disgust, rather than remaining united and

surging up against the source of their misery, they turned on each other

instead, fighting over the pans.

Winston reflects on the Party's attitude toward the proles, itself an

exercise in doublethink: while the Party claims to have liberated the

proles from the horrendous bonds of capitalism, it also teaches that the

proles are inferior and must be kept in line with a few simple rules. But

in general, the Party leaves the proles alone, to live as they have always

lived, outside of the Party's strict moral and behavioral dictates.

What Winston is not sure of is whether life before the Revolution was

really that much worse than it is in 1984. He looks at a children's history

book which he has borrowed from Mrs. Parsons, reading a passage about life

before the Revolution, when most people were poor and miserable, and all

money and power were concentrated into the hands of a very few evil persons

known as capitalists. Yet he can never be sure how much of it is lies; he

only has an instinctive feeling in his bones that life doesn't have to be

as miserable as it is, and that there must have been something better at

one time. Life, in fact, not only belies the constant stream of Party

propaganda, it does not even approach the Party's avowed ideal of a

militarily ordered society in which every moment of every day is a

triumphant struggle for the principles of Ingsoc.

Considering the regular erasure of the past, Winston once again

recalls the one time (mentioned earlier) when he had held concrete evidence

of the falsification of history. In the mid-1960s, three of the last

surviving original leaders of the Revolution, Jones, Aaronson and

Rutherford, had been arrested, vanished temporarily, and then had returned

to make spectacular confessions of treachery. Afterwards, they had been

pardoned, reinstated in the Party and given hollow but important-sounding

positions.

Winston had seen them in the Chestnut Street Cafe with a mixture of

fascination at how they embodied history and terror at the certainty of

their imminent destruction. No one sat near them; they sat alone at a table

with an untouched chessboard and glasses of gin. Winston noticed that

Rutherford, once a strong man, looked as though he were breaking up before

his eyes.

A song came over the telescreen: "Under the spreading chestnut tree/ I

sold you and you sold me:/ There lie they, and here lie we/ Under the

spreading chestnut tree." The three men remained motionless, but Winston

saw that Rutherford's eyes were full of tears, and suddenly noticed that

both Aaronson and Rutherford had broken noses.

Shortly after this, they were re-arrested and executed after a second

trial. Five years later, in about 1973, Winston was at his work when among

his assignment-related documents he found part of a page from an earlier

edition of the Times, dated about 10 years earlier, showing a photograph of

Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford at a Party function in New York. At their

trials, the men had confessed to have been in Eurasia consorting with the

enemy on that very date. Clearly the confessions were untrue. Though this

was not in itself surprising, the existence of this piece of paper was

concrete evidence of the Party's action.

Winston carefully calmed himself, then disposed of the evidence

through the memory hole. If it had happened today, he thinks, he would have

kept the photograph; somehow the fact of its existence, the fact that he

had held it in his hand, is reassuring to him. But he knows that because

the past is continually rewritten, the photograph today might not even be

evidence.

Winston does not understand why such an effort is being made to

falsify the past (i.e. the long-term goal). Perhaps, he thinks, he is

crazy; this does not scare him, though. What scares him is that he might be

wrong in thinking the past unchangeable. He picks up the book and looks at

the picture of B.B. on the frontispiece. In a sort of despairing fear,

Winston thinks to himself that the Party will eventually claim that 2 + 2 =

5, and that you would have to believe it; and again he is tormented by the

fear that they might, after all, be right.

But abruptly, his belief in common sense reasserts itself, and he

somehow feels that he is writing his diary to O'Brien. Defiantly, he

defends the truth of the obvious, writing, "Freedom is the freedom to say

that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows."

Chapter 8

Summary:

Winston is walking through the streets, taking a risk in missing his

second evening at the Community Centre in three weeks, but having been

unable to pass up the lovely evening air. He has been walking aimlessly

through the streets, observing the people and their surroundings, which are

equally dilapidated. Identifiable as a Party member by his blue overalls,

he is watched warily by the inhabitants, and reflects that it would be

dangerous to run into the patrols here, since it could draw you to the

Thought Police's attention.

Suddenly there is a commotion and people start bolting indoors;

Winston is warned by a passerby that a bomb is about to fall. He throws

himself down to protect himself against the blast. The bomb falls 200

meters away on a group of houses. He approaches the site and comes upon a

severed human hand, which he kicks into the gutter before turning into a

side street to avoid the crowd.

Winston passes a group of men who are arguing about the Lottery, which

is the one public event the proles really attend to and sink their energy

and powers of calculation into. However, as Winston knows, the big prizes

are awarded to fictitious persons, and only small sums are actually paid

out by the Ministry of Plenty.

Winston walks into a neighborhood which seems familiar; after a short

while he recognizes it as the area where he had purchased his diary,

penholder and ink. He pauses, and sees an old man entering a pub across the

alley. He is suddenly seized with the impulse to try and find out from this

old man what life was like before the Revolution.

He hurries into the pub, creating a bit of a pause in activity, and,

after witnessing an argument between the old man (who demands a pint) and

the barman (who only deals in liters and half-liters), Winston buys the old

man a beer. They sit in a noisy corner near a window and Winston tries to

get the old man to tell him about the past. However, the man latches onto

details that are too small to prove to Winston one way or another whether

the Party histories are true or false.

Winston leaves, thinking sadly that even now, when there are survivors

of the pre-Revolution days, it is impossible to find out whether the big

picture had changed for better or worse. He walks on, not thinking where he

is going, until he stops and realizes that he is outside the junk-shop

where he had bought the diary.

After some hesitation, he judges it safer to enter the shop than

loiter outside of it, and starts to talk with the proprietor, Mr.

Charrington. Winston wanders through the shop, and his attention is caught

by a glass paperweight with a coral inside. Captivated by its beauty,

Winston buys it for $4.00 and puts it into his pocket. The man, cheered by

the money, invites Winston to see an upstairs room. It is a bedroom

furnished with old-fashioned furniture, but most importantly, with no

telescreen. Winston feels a nostalgic security, almost a familiarity with

the room, and the thought flashes through his mind that it might be

possible to rent this room‹though he immediately abandons the notion.

The proprietor shows Winston an engraving of an old church which had

been bombed long ago, St. Clement's Dane. He quotes an old nursery rhyme:

"Oranges and lemons,' say the bells of St. Clement's, You owe me three

farthings,' say the bells of St. Martin's"; he doesn't remember the rhyme

in full, but he does recall the ending: "Here comes a candle to light you

to bed, Here comes a chopper to chop off your head." He talks a little

about the churches in the rhyme; Winston wonders when they had been built,

to what era they belonged.

Winston doesn't buy the engraving, but stays to talk a bit with Mr.

Charrington, seeming somehow to hear the bells of the nursery rhyme in his

head (though he has never actually heard church bells ringing as far as he

remembers). As he leaves, he decides to return to the shop after a month or

so, to buy things and talk to Charrington and maybe rent the room...

He is roused horribly from his reverie by seeing the girl with dark

hair walking towards him. She looks directly at him, then continues on her

way. Paralyzed, Winston realizes that she must be spying on him‹why else

should she be there? He walks in the wrong direction with a pain in his

gut, then turns, and considers killing her with the paperweight. But he

abandons the idea, as well as every other one he considers for trying to

safeguard himself. He simply goes home.

Once there, he takes out his diary but doesn't write anything for a

while as he struggles with his fear and the paralysis it has brought upon

him. He tries to open the diary, to think of O'Brien, but his mind is on

the torture that inevitably falls between capture by the Thought Police and

death (both of which are certain once you have committed thoughtcrime).

He recalls his dream, where O'Brien said that they would meet "in the

place where there is no darkness"; this place, he believes, is the imagined

future. But the face of B.B. drifts into his mind, pushing out O'Brien.

Winston takes a coin out of his pocket, and looks at it, trying to fathom

B.B.'s smile; the three Party slogans ring through his head.

Part 2

Chapter 1

Summary:

On his way to the lavatory one morning, Winston encounters the girl

with dark hair in the corridor. Her right arm is in a sling. As she

approaches, she suddenly trips and falls on her arm, and cries out in pain.

Although Winston regards her as a dangerous enemy, he also feels sorry for

her and helps her up. As he does so, she very discreetly slips a small

piece of paper into his hand, surprising him greatly.

Though he is fired with curiosity, Winston knows he cannot look at the

piece of paper for a while. He goes back to his desk and tosses the slip

casually among the other papers there. As he works, he speculates that the

note could either be some sort of threat or summons or trap from the

Thought Police, or‹and this excites him‹a message from some sort of

underground organization like the Brotherhood.

When he finally gets the chance to look at the note, he is astounded,

because it reads "I love you."

This naturally throws him into an agitation for the rest of the

morning. During lunch he is not even allowed the luxury of temporary

solitude, as Parsons immediately shows up to bore him with details of Hate

Week preparations. After lunch, Winston immerses himself in his work, and

goes to the Community Centre in the evening; he is waiting to be alone in

bed to think.

At last he is alone, and he begins to think about how to meet her. It

would be impossible to repeat that morning's method. He cannot follow her

home because it would entail waiting around outside the Ministry, which

would be bound to be noticed. Sending a letter would be impossible as mail

is routinely opened. The only solution is to sit at a table with her in the

canteen, somewhere in the middle of the room as far as possible from the

telescreens, amidst a buzz of conversation in which the brief exchange of a

few words could go unnoticed.

The next week is torture for Winston: the girl disappears for three

days, during which time he cannot stop thinking about her and worrying that

she has been vaporized or that she has changed her mind. She reappears, but

Winston is unable to sit with her in the canteen, though he tries. The next

day he succeeds, and they form a plan to meet that evening in Victory

Square.

In the Square, Winston sees the girl but must wait until more people

have gathered so as to speak with her unnoticed. Fortunately, the passing

of a convoy of Eurasian prisoners allows Winston and the girl to lose

themselves in a massive crowd of onlookers. They squeeze next to one

another to watch, and the girl subtly gives Winston detailed directions to

a place where they can meet on Sunday afternoon.

They continue to watch the prisoners, and right before they must part,

the girl squeezes Winston's hand.

Chapter 2

Summary:

It is Sunday afternoon. Winston is out in the country after what

sounds like an almost pleasant journey by train. He is early, and comes

across a thick patch of bluebells; he stoops to pick some, and the girl

arrives. She leads him expertly through the woods to a hidden clearing.

They talk a little, then start to kiss, but Winston feels no physical

desire yet because his disbelief and proud joy are too strong.

The girl, Julia, doesn't seem to mind; she sits up and they start to

talk some more. She is brassy and rebellious, even producing some

wonderfully tasty black-market chocolate, though she goes out of her way to

present a fanatically devout front in order to stay safe. She is young, and

Winston doesn't understand why she should be attracted to him; she explains

that it was something in his face, that she could tell he didn't belong,

that he hated the Party.

They leave the clearing and walk around, coming finally to the edge of

the wood. There, Winston has a gradual shock: he recognizes the landscape

as the Golden Country of his dreams. As if to prove it, he asks Julia if

there is a stream nearby, and she replies that there is.

A thrush lands nearby and starts to sing, its song startling in the

stillness. The song is beautiful, original, never quite the same, and

Winston watches and listens with awe. What, he asks himself, makes the bird

sing, if there is no other bird around to listen or respond? Gradually,

however, Winston stops thinking and simply feels the beauty of it. At this

point he kisses Julia and feels that he is ready to make love.

They hasten back to the clearing. Julia turns to him, and just as in

his dream, she defiantly tears off her clothes and flings them aside.

Before doing anything, Winston takes her hands and asks her: has she done

this before? Yes, quite a lot. With Party members? Always, though never

with Inner Party members. Winston is filled with joy at the thought that

the Party is at its foundation corrupt. He tells Julia that he hates purity

and goodness and that he desires corruption; she responds that she ought to

suit him just fine. His final question: does she enjoy the act of sex

itself? When she replies, "I adore it," Winston's last hope is fulfilled,

and they make love.

They fall asleep. Winston awakens first to reflect that their act has

been a political one, "a blow struck against the Party."

Chapter 3

Summary:

Julia arranges the details of her and Winston's departures from the

clearing, using her practical sense (which Winston feels he lacks) and her

thorough knowledge of the countryside around London. They never return to

the clearing, as it turns out, and only once more that month succeed in

making love, inside the ruins of a church.

As they meet during the evenings, they "talk by instalments," as Julia

puts it‹their conversation cuts in and out mid-sentence according to the

relative levels of safety in their surroundings. Once during a walk, a bomb

falls near them, and Winston, thinking the plaster-whitened Julia is dead,

kisses her‹to discover that she is alive and he is coated in plaster too.

Meetings are dangerous and difficult to coordinate as their schedules

rarely coincide. Julia is astonishingly busy with Party activities; her

view is that as long as you keep up appearances and obey the small rules,

you could transgress the bigger ones. She even convinces Winston to

volunteer as a part-time munition worker.

Julia is 26, and works on the machinery in the Fiction Department,

literally churning out novels like any other mass-produced commodity. She

has established such a good character for herself that she had even been

selected to work in Pornosec, the division of the department dedicated to

producing cheap pornography for the proles. Her first affair was at age

sixteen; her view of life is simply that it is an eternal struggle between

you and the Party over whether or not you can have a good time.

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

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