George Orwell - Nineteen Eighty-Four - Summary, Appunti di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica George Orwell - Nineteen Eighty-Four - Summary e più Appunti in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! GEORGE ORWELL - NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR - SUMMARY GEORGE ORWELL - NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR - PART 1 - 1 The narration begins in ‘a cold day of April’ with the image of Winston Smith entering ‘the glass doors of Victory Mansions. Inside of that place, ‘The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats’. Attacked to one wall Winston saw ‘a coloured poster, too large for indoor display’ which depicted ‘an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache’. Once inside the building Winston decided to take the stairs instead of the lift since it was out of order. For each floor, there was a copy of the poster he saw at the entrance with a caption beneath it: ‘BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU’. Once Winston reached the flat, inside of it, an instrument called telescreen, similar to a metallic plaque attached to a wall, was reading something that had to do with the production of pig-iron; he turned down the volume since it was impossible to turn it off. Winston was wearing a blue uniform. Outside of the flat a police helicopter was patrolling the neighbourhood. The telescreen could at the same time transmit messages and spy people’s movements in any moment and was controlled by the so-called Thought Police. Winston was looking through the window towards the Ministry of Truth, the place where he was working. He started thinking about the city in which he lived, London, located in the province of Airstrip One, in Oceania. He asked himself whether London had always been like this, especially taking into consideration its post-apocalyptic features. He then started describing the main features of the Ministry of Truth, which was also called Minitrue in the language of Newspeak: it was ‘an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, three hundred metres into the air’. Even from a considerable distance, on the front wall of the building it was possible to see the slogan of the party: ‘WAR IS PEACE / FREEDOM IS SLAVERY / IGNORACE IS STRENGHT’. Scattered around the city there were the other three main buildings of the entire governmental apparatus: the Ministry of Truth, concerned with news entertainment and education; the Ministry of Peace, concerned with war; the Ministry of Law, concerned with order; and the Ministry of Plenty, concerned with economic affairs. Their names in Newspeak were respectively Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv and Miniplenty. The Ministry of Love had no windows and was undoubtably the most patrolled and scary. Winston went to the kitchen, drank half a tea cup of Victoria Gin and then lighted a Victoria cigarette. He then took a very old book and sat hidden in an inlet on the same wall of the telescreen, opposite to the window, probably designed to 1 be the place for a bookshelf. In that place there was no way the telescreen could see him. The book itself was a compromising object to own since the government did not allow what was called free market. Writing a diary was not regarded as a crime by the Though Police, but just because laws had ceased to exist a long time before. Winston knew that if the Thought Police would have discovered his diary, he would have been sentenced to death without any doubt. He was not used to write by hand since people used to write with an instrument called speak-write, which of course he could not use in this context. He began his diary: ‘April 4th, 1984’. Nonetheless, he did not know exactly which day it was, he just believed that he was born in 1944 or 1945 and that he was thirty- nine years old. He convinced himself that the diary he was writing would be useful for the people of the future. Winston started writing in a sort of stream of consciousness. He started describing a movie he had seen on the previous day. The movie depicted a Jewish woman and her son on a ship, which was suddenly bombed by an helicopter. The two protagonists of the movie belonged to the social class of the proles. Winston stopped writing and remembered the reason that lead him to start writing the diary. On the same day, when he was at work, wight before the Two Minutes Hate, he saw two of his colleagues, a woman and a man. The black-haired woman was wearing a scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex league. The large and intelligent-looking man was called O’Brien, he sat near Winston. The Two Minutes Hate began and the crowd started insulting the displayed image of Emmanuel Goldstein, the man who was commonly regarded as the historical main traitor and enemy of the party. Goldstein was criticising the doctrines of the party and claiming for freedom of expression. Goldstein was the ruler of the region of Eurasia, one region of the world which was periodically in war with Oceania, just like the region of Eastasia. There was a group of subversive people known as the Brotherhood, whose supposed aim was to overthrown the system of stability. The image of Goldstein’s face soon gave way to the one of the Big Brother and finally to the motto of the party. During the Two Minutes Hate, Winston thought about the fact that all his hatred towards Goldstein could be channelled towards something else someday, for instance, towards the woman with the black hair. In that same moment, for some seconds, Winston perceived some kind of complicity in the gaze of O’Brien, like he knew exactly which were the feelings of Winston. While he was thinking about it, he did not realise he was subconsciously repeatedly writing on the book the words ‘DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER’. The only act of thinking about such thing was a crime sanctioned by the Thought Police known as ‘thoughtcrime’ and the punishment for that was to be annihilated or ‘vaporised’. In that moment someone knocked at the door. GEORGE ORWELL - NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR - PART 1 - 2 2 is granted, all else follows’. This kind of freedom obviously referred to the freedom to use rational thinking instead of believing in everything the party told you to believe in. GEORGE ORWELL - NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR - PART 1 - 8 The simple act of being alone, called ‘ownlife’ in newspeak, was seen as a potentially dangerous activity for the individual. One day Winston was wandering in a prole neighbourhood when suddenly a bomb blasted some nearby houses. In that neighbourhood some proles were talking about the lottery; Winston knew how the lottery was organised by the Ministry of Plenty: in most of the cases the prices were fictitious. At one point Winston decided to follow an old prole into a pub in order to ask him how life was before the communist Revolution; this was a possibly dangerous action. He started asking the old man whether life was better before the Revolution but the old man did not seem to be in the condition of answering. Winston ended up in the same junk-shop he had bought the diary. The owner was an old benevolent-looking man called Mr. Charrington. Winston’s attention was immediately attracted by a curved lump of glass with red coral inside, looking like a paperweight, and decided to buy it for the price of four dollars. Winston was mainly attracted by the uselessness o the object as well as by its antiquity. The owner of the shop brought Winston to an upper room which used to be his house. It was full of antiquities prior to the Revolution. After exiting the shop, Winston saw his female colleague with dark hair, she was probably spying on him; he even though about killing her with the glass object. Winston kept writing his diary, now hypothetically addressed to his colleague O’Brien. GEORGE ORWELL - NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR - PART 2 - 1 One day at work Winston saw the girl with the black hair falling; he helped her recovering from the fall and she gave him a piece of paper. Later he secretly opened the piece of paper, she had written him ‘I love you’. One day, in the canteen, they managed to sit together and arrange a meeting for the evening. GEORGE ORWELL - NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR - PART 2 - 2 They met and arranged another meeting in a secret safe place surrounded by woods. Winston and, the girl with the black hair, now known as Julia, talked about sex; he liked the fact that she had had an active sex life since it was a sign of her opposition to the party’s sexual constrictions regarding a life of chastity. GEORGE ORWELL - NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR - PART 2 - 3 5 Julia was 26, she was living in an hostel with other girls. Dates between Winston and Julia were difficult to arrange because of the party’s control over these kinds of love relationships. Sex was not fomented at all by the party, people had to focus on hate and the entire family system had substantially been abolished in favour to system of familiar espionage. During one meeting with Julia, Winston recalled one time ha had the possibility of killing his wife Katharine shoving her from a cliff but did not take advantage of the opportunity. GEORGE ORWELL - NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR - PART 2 - 4 Winston finally decided to hire the flat owned by Mr Charrington to secretly arrange some meetings with Julia. To the first meeting in the flat Julia brought some coffee, sugar, and tea; all goods for exclusive use of inner party members. She even put some makeup she bought from the proles market and that she was not allowed to wear theoretically. The couple looked at the glass object with coral inside, according to Winston its beauty lied precisely in its uselessness. Surprisingly Julia knew by heart the same song about St Martin’s church, portrayed in a picture hanged in the flat, which Mr. Charrington had told Winston about. GEORGE ORWELL - NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR - PART 2 - 5 Julia started questioning the real existence of Goldstein as well as the countless wars perpetrated by the party during the preparations for the Hate Week. Winston, instead, had a clearer idea of how the party used to manipulate history. GEORGE ORWELL - NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR - PART 2 - 6 O’Brien gave Winston his address with the excuse of lending him his dictionary of Newspeak. Winston began to believe that the Brotherhood could really exist. GEORGE ORWELL - NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR - PART 2 - 7 Winston remembered one dream in which he used to steal food from his mother and from his ill sister until the day the two disappeared, probably sent to a reformatory and to a labour camp. This dream was quite similar to the movie Winston had seen. Winston and Julia at this point seemed to be conscious of the fact that soon or later the Thought Police would catch them and they promised each others that they would never truly believe in the values of the party, even under the threat of torture. 6 GEORGE ORWELL - NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR - PART 2 - 8 Winston and Julia finally managed to reach O’Brien’s house. O’Brien turned off the telescreen, he was a member of the inner party and apparently he had the right to do so. O’Brien confessed Winston and Julia his membership to the Brotherhood, the real existence of Goldstein, and offered them the possibility to join the criminal organisation. The three drank red wine, Winston and Julia never had the opportunity to drink it before that moment. Winston and Julia agreed to join the Brotherhood, which could be defined as an ‘organisation without organisation’ since in many cases its members did not know other members. O’Brien told them that there was no way to escape the Thought Police, soon or later they would end up in jail. He even promised Winston a copy of the book, written by Goldstein in person. GEORGE ORWELL - NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR - PART 2 - 9 During the Hate Week, the party declared war to Eastasia while Eurasia became allied to Oceania. After Winston had received the copy of Goldstein’s book titled The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, he began to read it in the secret flat of Mr. Charrington. The third chapter of the book was particularly interesting since it portrayed the inner division of the entire globe, split between the powers of Oceania (which included the United Kingdom, the American continent and the Oceanian continent); Eurasia (which included Russia and the European continent); and Eastasia (which included China and the Asian continent). According to the book, the reasons that lied behind the constant state of war between these superpowers is the control over a specific quadrilateral disputed area with its corners in Tangier, Brazzaville, Darwin and Hong Kong and characterised by cheap labour and raw material as well as the control over big portions of the North Pole. The book also described how after an atomic war which took place during the 1950s, and after which the society regressed to a sort of pre-industrialised condition. This state of perpetual war was the main instrument of the party for keeping its power since during a conflict people were much more inclined to give up their own rights. In the same way, they were much more inclined to accept the system of narrowness imposed by the party itself. Even the scientific progress was regarded as something to avoid completely since it was not aligned to the Socing regime. According to the book, the predominant political systems in the world were respectively: the Socing in Oceania, the Neo-Bolshevism in Eurasia, and the Death-Worship also known as Obliteration of the Self in Eastasia. The living conditions in these three superpowers, too vast to be conquered, were surprisingly similar. The most important thing to understand is that since war had ceased to entail the possibility of a territorial appropriation, its unique purpose was the maintenance of power. War 7 O’Brien started threating Winston better when he began to force himself to believe in the preachments of the party. One day, however, Winston confessed O’Brien that he did not love the Big Brother at all, O’Brien decided to take him to the room 101. GEORGE ORWELL - NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR - PART 3 – 5 When inside the room 101, O’Brien told Winston that inside that room could be found the object a person feared the most and therefore that the content of the room could vary from one individual to another. O’Brien came back with a cage full of furious rats and a sort of mask attached to it. Right before O’Brien could start torturing him with that device, Winston said O’Brien they could torture Julia instead of him; he finally betrayed his beloved. GEORGE ORWELL - NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR - PART 3 – 6 Winston was drinking in a bar, and watching news about the war between Oceania and Eastasia. Winston thought about Julia, she was wrong, the party could change people from inside; O’Brian was instead right. One day Winston met Julia, they confessed each others the respective betrayals. Back inside the bar Winston heard about the victory of the Oceanian troops over the Eastasian troops and cheered with happiness. He started daydreaming about being inside the Ministry of Love and receiving a shot in his head. Sitting in the bar Winston finally realised he finally loved the Big Brother. APPENDIX –- NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR – THE PRINCIPLES OF NEWSPEAK In this section of the book we are told about the party fight for the implementation of a new kind of language to be used by the society depicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The new language is known as Newspeak and one day is supposed to substitute the lingua franca of English, known as Oldspeak. The party’s inteligencija estimated that a final version of the dictionary of Newspeak, and the subsequent application of this language to a much larger scale of individuals would be fixed approximately by the year 2050. According to the Ingsoc, when Newspeak had been adopted in a larger scale, a though diverging from the principles of Ingsoc itself would be practically impossible. The language of Newspeak was made up by three layers of vocabulary. The first layer, or ‘A vocabulary’ was made up by very simple words and meant for the description of very simple actions. The second layer, or ‘B vocabulary’ consisted in words deliberately constructed for political purposes, they were usually compound nouns such as Minitrue. The third layer, or ‘C vocabulary’, consisted in scientific technical terms. One of the purposes of Newspeak was also to 10 render any kind of literary text of the past into the new language, it was a very difficult task, that is why the final adoption of Newspeak had been fixed so late a date as 2050. 11