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English Literature books summary |
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English Literature books summaryEnglish Literature books summaryContents: 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 Страницы: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23 |
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