Page Title

(Continued from previous page)

Part One: Section Two

This action of the second section of Part One is designed to point up the dirtiness, the squalor, and the furtiveness of daily life in the society of which Winston Smith is a part. Winston answers the knock on his door to find, not an agent of the Thought Police (actually, such an agent wouldn't have knocked but would have broken down the door), but the wife of a neighbor, Mrs. Parsons. She asks if Winston could help her out in repairing the drain of her kitchen sink, which has become blocked. (If one were to call a repairman, it might take days or he might not come at all.) Winston agrees to help and as he cleans out the filthy drain he is harassed by the two Parsons children, a boy of nine and a girl of six or seven, who are playing with toy weapons. They are already in uniform. "I'll vaporize you, I'll send you to the salt mines," the boy says to Winston Smith. They are clamoring to be taken to see the public hanging of some Eurasian war prisoners; this again shows the brutalization of society by such spectacles as mass hangings and torture of prisoners. "Nearly all children nowadays were horrible," Winston thinks to himself. For children are trained to spy, especially on their parents, and to report any indications of unorthodoxy to the authorities. Most people are now frightened of their own children, and with good reason!

There is a dream on Winston's mind as he completes the repair of the drain. Seven years previously he had dreamed that he was in a dark room, and that someone had said to him: "We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness," Gradually, it had come upon Winston that the man who had said this to him was O'Brien, but he simply does not know why O'Brien should even be on his mind; he had never spoken to him and had only seen him casually. What is "the place where there is no darkness?" Winston does not know, but he is sure the dream will come true, although he does not know how or when. He will meet O'Brien. Nothing is one's own property any more except one's private thoughts. And, as we shall see, the Party is continually working on ways to find out what a person is thinking. It may be that Winston is already the subject of an experiment along this line, although he has no knowledge of this.

As Winston returns to his apartment for a few minutes before going back to work, he thinks that he has passed his point of no return. He is already dead, for "Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime is death." And he has committed Thoughtcrime.

Comment

In this section, Orwell alternates further specific, and sordid, details with further abstract reflections on the part of Winston. This is still part of Orwell's dramatic exposition, for he is better able to show the conditions of Winston Smith's life than simply to tell about them. The blocked-up drain, the horrible children dressed in uniforms that are no doubt meant to remind one of the Hitler Youth (an organization similar to that of the Spies to which the two Parsons children belong), and the general rundown nature of the housing all suggest the decay of society.

Winston's dream involving O'Brien will not be made entirely clear until the third Part of 1984. Briefly, however, what Orwell means to suggest-at least this seems by far the most logical interpretation-is that the Party, of which O'Brien, of course, is a major functionary, has had its eye on Winston Smith for years, even examining his facial expression to see if there is a possible lapse from orthodoxy on his part. O'Brien has been studying Winston at exhaustive length. This is proven later in the book. The dream, in other words, is not supposed to be a prophecy or to partake of the supernatural-it is simply the point at which Winston has been made subconsciously aware, perhaps by Party psychological techniques, that he is being watched. Perhaps the Party wanted him to know this. But at this time Winston does not fathom the connection between himself and O'Brien. As to the girl at the office, he is suspicious and thinks that she may be spying on him.

Winston has, in this section, begun to formulate the objectives of his revolt. He wonders how he can appeal to the future when his own work in the Records Section of the Ministry of Truth demonstrates to him that unorthodoxy in political outlook simply is vaporized; that records, even newspapers and magazines, are systematically altered by the policy of the Party, so that there will be no written record of anything in the past which the Party does not wish to have on record. But he addresses himself, in defiance of all his training and conditioning, and in defiance of Big Brother and the Thought Police, to ". . . the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone-to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone . . . greetings!"

As he finishes writing in his dairy, Winston notices that two fingers of his right hand are stained with ink. He washes it off; using an old-fashioned pen, again, is not illegal, but the fact that he has been doing this may set people to thinking that his behavior is odd, and this might lead to a report to the authorities that his orthodoxy is suspect. He must be on his guard constantly against the one tiny slip that will betray him.

Science in 1984 is largely the search for new and more destructive weapons, or else it is psychological research of a limited kind, aimed to increase the ability of the Party to control individual behavior and, even more important, to find some way of reading a person's thoughts at any time and against his will. As yet, the Party's efforts have not been totally successful in either area, but Orwell implies that inevitably they will succeed, given the enormous resources they are pouring into these projects. As for disinterested scientific research in pursuit of objective truth, this has vanished, along with the creation of all art worthy of the name, as it is in conflict with the objectives of the Party.

Part One: Section Three

Section three begins with a dream sequence that provides further expository material, principally about Winston, but secondarily about the corruptive effects which the society of 1984 has on both the individual's standard of values and on his normal emotions. To achieve his effects Orwell, of course, uses the Freudian techniques of free association, the reporting of dreams, and the symbolism of dreams. These are especially appropriate given his subject, for in the totally repressed society of 1984, where it is mortally dangerous to express one's private thoughts during waking hours, these thoughts spill over into the unconscious. It is a basic part of Freudian theory (see especially The Interpretation of Dreams) that material which is repressed in or by the conscious mind will find expression in dreams. This, in short, is why the various dreams which Winston Smith has are of significance in our effort to understand him.

Winston's dream is of his mother. She is a hazy memory to him, because he was only ten or eleven years old at the time she "disappeared." She was probably imprisoned without trial, or simply vaporized by the Thought Police. This is a minor point in the consideration of Winston himself, but it may prove important, because the Thought Police were likely to keep a special watch on those whose relatives had been vaporized. Winston's father, also, had disappeared, probably in one of the great purges of the 1950s. But he retains only a shadowy memory of his father. The dream sequence, at any rate, concerns his mother and infant sister, and his memory of them drowning-sinking deeper and deeper into darkening water, as they sit in the salon of a sinking ocean liner. Their deaths are terribly tragic to him in the dream. Although Winston has no idea of how his mother really died, he is sure that she died for love of him, to save him, and he is equally as sure that at the time of her death he was too selfish to understand what a sacrifice she had made. In those days, death had a certain tragic dignity, which the Party has since taken away. The thought that there was only pain today, but no dignity, crosses Winstons' mind and he seems to see this "in the large eyes of his mother and his sister, looking up at him through the green water, hundreds of fathoms down and still sinking."

After this dream, the scene shifts to a place to which Winston will return frequently in his dreams: what he calls the Golden Country. It is simply landscape, with deep pools, clear, slowmoving streams in which fish swim surrounded by pasture, hedge, and forest. What is remarkable about the dream is that the "girl with dark hair." the girl at the office, is approaching him - and as she comes near, with a disdainful gesture she throws off her clothes and stands before him naked.

Winston awakens with the word "Shakespeare" on his lips, only to find that he is late to participate in the daily calisthenics (performed in front of the telescreen), which are a requirement in the lives of all the residents of Oceania. They are too much for him; he coughs, but frantically keeps on with the exercises, because they can see him, and he may be suspect if he does not do the required morning exercises with sufficient enthusiasm.

As he does the exercises, Winston thinks of the state of perpetual war in which Oceania finds itself - he cannot remember when the country has not been at war with someone - and he thinks of his mother and sister again. What is the truth? Who is Oceania actually fighting? He should know the history of Oceania but he has difficulty in remembering which country she had fought in what year. Even during the physical exercises in the morning. Winston continues his dream or trancelike state. Now he remembers the time an atomic bomb fell on Colchester (a town about sixty miles from London), apparently in a war of the 1950s. He and his father and mother had hidden in a tube (subway) station because it served as an air-raid shelter. But Winston could not remember who they were fighting. And he thinks, while doing his exercises before the telescreen, that warfare had been almost continuous since the time he was a young child. At this very moment, Oceania is in alliance with Eastasia, and at war with Eurasia. But Winston knows that this alignment of the great Powers of the world is only temporary, although it is Party doctrine that the alliance is absolutely permanent and that the Eurasians are monsters for wickedness (Eurasia probably encompassing Russia and Eastern Europe), because only four years earlier, in 1980, Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia.

(CONTINUED)

1984 Main Page