1984 (1949) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

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Summary edit see section history

Characters edit see section history

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• Winston Smith: The novel's protagonist; a phlegmatic everyman. He has a varicose ulcer on one ankle and blond hair, and is neither fat nor thin. Has a hard time discriminating madness from truth. Very good at his job. Thirty-nine, smallish, frail figure. He has 5 false teeth. His hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades. He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. Winston was married—had been married, at any rate: probably he still was married, so far as he knew his wife was not dead. They had only been together for about fifteen months.
• Julia: Winston's female companion, and only real friend. She was a bold-looking girl with thick hair, a freckled face, and swift, athletic movements. Except for her mouth, you could not call her beautiful. Julia was twenty-six years old. She lived in a hostel with thirty other girls (“Always in the stink of women! How I hate women!” she said parenthetically), and she worked on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department. She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor. She was “not clever”, but was fond of using her hands and felt at home with machinery. She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the finished product. She “didn’t much care for reading,” she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces. She had no memories of anything before the early sixties and the only person she had ever known who talked frequently of the days before the Revolution was a grandfather who had disappeared when she was eight. At school she had been captain of the hockey team and had won the gymnastics trophy two years running. She had been a troop-leader in the Spies and a branch secretary in the Youth League before joining the Junior Anti-Sex League. She had always borne an excellent character. She had even (an infallible mark of good reputation) been picked out to work in Pornosec, the sub-section of the Fiction Department which turned out cheap pornography for distribution among the proles. There she had remained for a year, helping to produce booklets in sealed packets with titles like “Spanking Stories” or “One Night in a Girls’ School”, to be bought furtively by proletarian youths who were under the impression that they were buying something illegal. She had had her first love-affair when she was sixteen, with a Party member of sixty.
• Charrington: The man who owns the shop that Winston visits.
• Big Brother: The dictator of Oceania. Shares similarities with Joseph Stalin and other dictatorial figures. It is not clear whether he is made up or whether he is a real person. His propaganda decorates all buildings everywhere.
• O'Brien: A member of the inner party, within the Ministry of Truth whom Winston looks up to, without really knowing him. Winston suspects O'Brien is secretly opposing the Party. Holder of some post so important and remote that Winston had only a dim idea of its nature. O’Brien was a large, burly man with a thick neck and a coarse, humorous, brutal face. In spite of his formidable appearance he had a certain charm of manner. He had a trick of resettling his spectacles on his nose which was curiously disarming—in some indefinable way, curiously civilized. It was a gesture which, if anyone had still thought in such terms, might have recalled an eighteenth-century nobleman offering his snuffbox. He had the appearance of being a person that you could talk to if somehow you could cheat the telescreen and get him alone.
• Emmanuel Goldstein: The Antagonist to The Party; rallied against during the Party's Hate Week, and said to be a former top member before the Party's creation. Rumored to be the leader of an underground anti-party organization called The Brotherhood. e had a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard—a clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair of spectacles was perched. It resembled the face of a sheep, and the voice, too, had a sheep-like quality.
• Aaronson, Jones, Rutherford: Former members of the Inner Party whom Winston vaguely remembers as among the original leaders of the Revolution, long before he had heard of Big Brother. They confessed to treasonable conspiracies with foreign powers and were then executed in the political purges of the 1960s.
• Ampleforth: Winston's one-time Records Department colleague imprisoned for leaving the word "God" in a Kipling poem. Mild, ineffectual, dreamy creature with very hairy ears and a surprising talent for juggling with rhymes and metres, was engaged in producing garbled versions—definitive texts, they were called—of poems which had become ideologically offensive, but which for one reason or another were to be retained in the anthologies.
• Mr. Charrington: An old man in the prole district who sells Winston various items. Has white hair, and is more of a collector than salesman. A widower aged sixty-three and had inhabited his shop for thirty years.
• Katharine: Winston's wife; they are separated, not divorced. Katharine was a tall, fair-haired girl, very straight, with splendid movements. She had a bold, aquiline face, a face that one might have called noble until one discovered that there was as nearly as possible nothing behind it. 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” Winston nicknamed her in his own mind.
• Martin: O'Brien's butler-like servant. Very nondescript, and keeps his false mannerisms at all times. Only appears briefly. Small, dark-haired man with a completely expressionless face which might have been that of a Chinese.
• Mr. Parsons: Winston's naive neighbor and colleague. Fat, but active. Sweat excessively and a Party fanatic.
• Syme: Winston's intelligent colleague, very much into writing the new language of Oceania. Works for the Research Department. Doesn't like Parsons. Winston's "friend" who worked in the records department. Syme was a philologist, a specialist in Newspeak. Indeed, he was one of the enormous team of experts now engaged in compiling the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary. He was a tiny creature, smaller than Winston, with dark hair and large, protuberant eyes, at once mournful and derisive, which seemed to search your face closely while he was speaking to you. In an intellectual way, Syme was venomously orthodox. He would talk with a disagreeable gloating satisfaction of helicopter raids on enemy villages, and trials and confessions of thought-criminals, the executions in the cellars of the Ministry of Love. Talking to him was largely a matter of getting him away from such subjects and entangling him, if possible, in the technicalities of Newspeak, on which he was authoritative and interesting. There was something that he lacked: discretion, aloofness, a sort of saving stupidity. You could not say that he was unorthodox. He believed in the principles of Ingsoc, he venerated Big Brother, he rejoiced over victories, he hated heretics, not merely with sincerity but with a sort of restless zeal, an up-to-dateness of information, which the ordinary Party member did not approach. Yet a faint air of disreputability always clung to him. He said things that would have been better unsaid, he had read too many books, he frequented the Chestnut Tree Cafe, haunt of painters and musicians.
• Mrs. Parsons: Parsons' wife. She stays home and takes care of her two children. Fears being turned in to the Thought Police by her children, and is in a constant state of stress and fear. Neighbor of Winston. She was a woman of about thirty, but looking much older. One had the impression that there was dust in the creases of her face. She had a habit of breaking off her sentences in the middle.
• Winston's Mother: Mostly depicted in flashbacks, she took care of the young Winston and his sister; Winston recalls that she was taken from him by the Party when he was a small boy. Most of his flashbacks are associated with Winston depriving his mother and sister of food in favor of himself. She was a tall, statuesque, rather silent woman with slow movements and magnificent fair hair.
• Parson Kids: Mr and Mrs Parson's children. Very "pro-party". They detest and report rebels, and thought criminals, and will sell you to the thought police in a heartbeat.
• Comrade Ogilvy: Made up man who recently died in battle, in heroic circumstances.
• Rutherford: One of the last survivors of the Revolution. Rutherford had once been a famous caricaturist, whose brutal cartoons had helped to inflame popular opinion before and during the Revolution. Even now, at long intervals, his cartoons were appearing in The Times. They were simply an imitation of his earlier manner, and curiously lifeless and unconvincing. He was a monstrous man, with a mane of greasy grey hair, his face pouched and seamed, with thick negroid lips. At one time he must have been immensely strong; now his great body was sagging, sloping, bulging, falling away in every direction. He seemed to be breaking up before one’s eyes, like a mountain crumbling.
• Aaronson: One of the last survivors of the Revolution
• Comrade Withers: A prominent member of the Inner Party, had been singled out for special mention and awarded a decoration, the Order of Conspicuous Merit, Second Class.
• Comrade Tillotson: Works in records department. Small, precise-looking, dark-chinned man.
• Tom Parsons: Mrs. Parsons husband. Parsons was Winston’s fellow-employee at the Ministry of Truth. He was a fattish but active man of paralysing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms—one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party depended. At thirty-five he had just been unwillingly evicted from the Youth League, and before graduating into the Youth League he had managed to stay on in the Spies for a year beyond the statutory age. At the Ministry he was employed in some subordinate post for which intelligence was not required, but on the other hand he was a leading figure on the Sports Committee and all the other committees engaged in organizing community hikes, spontaneous demonstrations, savings campaigns, and voluntary activities generally. He would inform you with quiet pride, between whiffs of his pipe, that he had put in an appearance at the Community Centre every evening for the past four years. An overpowering smell of sweat, a sort of unconscious testimony to the strenuousness of his life, followed him about wherever he went, and even remained behind him after he had gone. room—a tubby, middle-sized man with fair hair and a froglike face. At thirty-five he was already putting on rolls of fat at neck and waistline, but his movements were brisk and boyish. His whole appearance was that of a little boy grown large, it was almost impossible not to think of him as being dressed in the blue shorts, grey shirt, and red neckerchief of the Spies. In visualizing him one saw always a picture of dimpled knees and sleeves rolled back from pudgy forearms. Parsons did, indeed, invariably revert to shorts when a community hike or any other physical activity gave him an excuse for doing so.
• "Skull faced man": Prisoner. He was a commonplace, mean-looking man who might have been an engineer or technician of some kind. But what was startling was the emaciation of his face. It was like a skull. Because of its thinness the mouth and eyes looked disproportionately large, and the eyes seemed filled with a murderous, unappeasable hatred of somebody or something. The man was dying of starvation. Has a wife and three children.
• Jones: One of the last survivors of the Revolution
• Ms. Smith: Prisoner. An enormous wreck of a woman, aged about sixty, with great tumbling breasts and thick coils of white hair.
• Winston Smith: Against the government in every way, tries to join a group, ends up getting caught and becomes a totally different person
• Winston's father: Dark and thin, dressed always in neat dark clothes (Winston remembered especially the very thin soles of his father’s shoes) and wearing spectacles.
• Bumstead: Chinless, toothy face exactly like that of some large, harmless rodent. His fat, mottled cheeks were so pouched at the bottom that it was difficult not to believe that he had little stores of food tucked away there. His pale-grey eyes flitted timorously from face to face and turned quickly away again when he caught anyone’s eye.

Quotes edit see section history

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• “The thought police would get him just the same. He had committed--would have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper--the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.”

• “Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.”

• “Whoever controls the past controls the present, whoever controls the present controls the future.”

• “To die hating them, that was freedom.”

• “He sat down with a friendly smile. The silly blond face beamed into his. Winston had a hallucination of himself smashing a pickax right into the middle of it.”

• “Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?”

• “It was like swimming against a current that swept you backwards however hard you struggled, and then suddenly deciding to turn round and go with the current instead of opposing it. Nothing had changed except your own attitude...”

• “One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.”

• “We shall meet in a place where there is no darkness”

• “Your own worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system.”

• “The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.”

• “Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me”

  Song from telescreen

• “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.”

  Party Slogan

• “To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one's lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.”

  Narrator

• “How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive?”

  Narrator

• “For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable -- what then?”

  Narrator

• “Two plus two make four.”

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• WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

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• 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'

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• Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.

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• The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education and the fine arts. The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war. The Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order. And the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv and Miniplenty.

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• Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.'

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• '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.

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• Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

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• It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.

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• 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.

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• It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one's own body.

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Balzac
• Paris
• Maupassant
• Oceania: One of three intercontinental super-states who divided the world among themselves after a global war.
• London: A city that belongs to Airstrip One, main setting of the novel.
• Airstrip One: Province that makes up the area once known as England.
• Eurasia: One of the three world super-states. It is made up of the northern part of Asia and Europe.
• Eastasia: One of three world super-states. It makes up China and the countries on the southern edge of Asia.
• Africa: One of the locations mentioned as the scene of a great battle. Not held permanently by any of the three super-states.
• Miniluv: The Ministry of Love, where those are taken to be interrogated by the thought police and reformed.
• Minitrue: The Ministry of Truth, where Winston works.

Organizations edit see section history

• The Party: The communist ruling party of Oceania, also known as Ingsoc (English Socialism).
• Thinkpol: The Thought Police.
• Miniluv: The Ministry of Love. This ministry deals with the laws and security of Oceania.
• Minipax: Ministry of Peace. This ministry deals with war against other states
• Miniplenty: Ministry of Plenty. This ministry deals with industrial and agricultural productions on the state of Oceania
• Minitrue: Ministry of Truth. This ministry concerns itself with the media, including newspapers, novels, musics and movies.
• The Brotherhood: Secret organization dedicated to overthrowing the Party.
• Proles: The working-class of Oceania.
• Records Department: Department in the Ministry of Truth, charged with changing all past records to reflect current politics.
• The Spies: The Party's organization for children, taught to hate thought criminals and traitors. Organize as the primary-middle compulsory education

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Glossary edit see section history

• "The book": Titled "Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism" and supposedly written by Goldstein, it contains the story of humankind and the Revolution, arguing that there is hope for a stronger future without the dishonesty and manipulation of the Party.
• Doublethink: Newspeak word with two mutually contradictory meanings. The first is used to refer to an opponent, and can be defined as habitually contradicting plain facts. The second is used to refer to a Party member, and can be defined as a loyal willingness to believe contradictory statements when the Party demands it, which allows for continual alteration of the past. Also, it entails knowing that you are lying but still believing the lie that you are telling.
• Ministry of Love (Miniluv): Maintains law and order. Protected with great force. Only those arrested for Thought Crime or who are on official Party business can enter. Referred to within the novel as "the place with no darkness" because the lights are always on. Dissidents are taken here to be tortured, reformed, or killed.
• Ministry of Peace (Minipax): Responsible for the Party's management of issues surrounding war.
• Ministry of Plenty (Miniplenty): Responsible for the Party's economic affairs.
• Ministry of Truth (Minitrue): Responsible for all Party news, entertainment, education and fine arts. The Party's propaganda machine.
• Newspeak: The official language of Oceania and the new language of the Party, devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc (English Socialism). The goal of Newspeak is to reduce the English language to the fewest words possible and supercede Oldspeak by 2050. Removing words removes ways to define anti-Party feelings and the ability to disagree. For example, the word "speedful" can be used in place of the word "rapid."
• Oldspeak: The English language as we know it today.
• Telescreen: A device similar to a television, but aside from broadcasting, it also serves as an aid for the thought police to spy. Members of the party and lower can not turn it off, only dim the volume.
• Crimestop: A newspeak word, meaning to stop oneself from thinking something disloyal to the party, before the thought comes about.
• The Thought Police: A police force that arrests people for committing crimes to the party, no matter how insignificant.
• Ingsoc: English Socialism, the system the citizens of Oceania live by. The three tenets of Ingsoc are Newspeak, mutability of the past, and doublethink.

Themes & Symbolism edit see section history

• Julia: Although it is rare when authors use characters as symbols, Julia is the symbol of feminism in 1984. She is one of the only female figures in the novel and she is perhaps the only one with her qualities in Oceania.
• Physical Control: The party not only manipulates the minds of the people, but watches their every move.
• Urban Decay: The world is a dilapidated place. Elevators never work, and basic necessities are rather unreliable. Adding to the image of impoverished people who know no other way of life.
• Totalitarianism: The whole regime of Oceania is this.
• Two Plus Two Make Five: Shows how the Party can manipulate the citizens thoughts so easily that they could be lead to believe that 2 + 2 is 5 instead of 4.

Series & Lists edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. George Orwell (Author)

Other Contributors:

1. Erich Fromm (Foreword)
2. Kurt Wagenseil (Translator)
3. Walter Cronkite (Preface)
4. Frank Muller (Reader)

First Edition edit see section history

Awards edit see section history

• Prometheus (1984: Hall of Fame Award Recipient)
• BBC's Big Read (April 2003, #8)

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: PR6029.R8 N647 2003; PZ3.O793 Ni2 PR6029.R8
• Dewey: 823.912

Notes for Parents edit see section history

Book includes mature language and situations.

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Literature & Fiction › Authors, A-Z › ( O ) › Orwell, George
• Books › Science Fiction & Fantasy › Authors, A-Z › ( O ) › Orwell, George
• Books › Science Fiction & Fantasy › Science Fiction › Alternate History
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Classics
• Books › Literature & Fiction
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Literary

Links to Supplemental Material edit see section history

• Nineteen Eighty-Four Wikipedia Page
• 1984 SparkNotes
• Read 1984 Online
• Download Free Audio Book
• Secondary Solutions Literature Guide for teaching 1984: Common Core and NCTE/IRA Standards-Aligned Literature Guide for 1984

Movie Connections edit see section history

• 1984 (IMDb): Michael Anderson, 1956
• 1984 (IMDb): Released December 14, 1984. Directed by Michael Radford. Starring Richard Burton and John Hurt.

More Books Like This edit see section history

Books with Additional Background Information edit see section history

Books That Influenced This Book edit see section history

Books Influenced by This Book edit see section history

Books That Cite This Book edit see section history