1984 chapter 1 quotes analysis

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

A bright day in April ought to be pleasant, but the adjective cold and the "unlucky" number thirteen combine to give this opening sentence an unsettling, ominous vibe. The image of a clock striking thirteen, a juxtaposition of very old (chiming clocks) and very new (the 24-hour clock) technology, is among the most famous in the book. It marks a break with contemporary (1948) society and implies a sharp discontinuity with the past. Later in the novel, Winston will rent a flat in an antique shop, whose bric-a-bracs saved from pre-totalitarian England will enchant and compel him. The flat features an "old-fashioned clock with the twelve-hour face."Party seeks to abolish both the past and the future, or rather to put them both at the service of a tyrannical present. And the result is that wherever it exercises power, time is uncertain; Winston can't be sure what the actual year is (he guesses that it's 1984), and when he is imprisoned in the Ministry of Love at the end of the novel he is never sure when days, weeks, and months have passed. The space of totalitarian power is a space beyond time.

Which, when the flats were built, had probably been intended to hold bookshelves

A free society and a literate society seem to have disappeared at the same time. The condensation of language via the rise of Newspeak and the fact that information now comes solely from the telescreens have destroyed the need for reading. There are are also probably very few books around at this time, either, as everything the people need to know comes from the state, and thus there is no need for books. Orwell will return in later chapters to this correspondence.

They'll shoot me in the back of the neck

A method of execution, not commonly recorded in the Soviet Union. A shot to the back of the head was more common. Writer George Orwell was also shot in the neck during combat in the Spanish War, 1937.

In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol

After being immersed in the poverty and commiseration of working-class life, we now get an indication of where the money in the society has gone: to the fortification of a mammoth police state, with state-of-the-art technology for citizen surveillance. The simile in "like a bluebottle" also shows this is an everyday annoyance the citizens are simply used to, reiterating the notion that surveillance is a part of everyday life

A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police. He was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State.

An allusion to the "show trials" of the Soviet Union, whereupon various crimes were blamed on sabotage. It could also correspond with the Soviet crime of "wrecking": attacks against the state. Essentially, the arrested "spies and saboteurs" are likely not guilty of any crime related to Goldstein and Orwell is subtly challenging the idea.

A kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work

And now we find out that Winston Smith is not part of some despised or oppressed sub-group; he works for the government, albeit at a middle level. Thus we can assume that poverty, degradation, and surveillance characterizes the entire society, and not just a narrow caste.

Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable.

As North Korean law and conditions aren't readily available online (or anywhere else for that matter), this information is unconfirmed; however, citizens and tourists of North Korea have claimed that many homes (and hotels) are installed with radios that cannot be turned off or muted, only turned down. Eric Lafforgue posted a photograph of one of the alleged radios on Flickr in 2011.

It was curious that he seemed not merely to have lost the power of expressing himself, but even to have forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say.

Big Brother's Newspeak was made exactly for this purpose: not letting the citizens express themselves. Other than the strict Laws, which would not allow free expression, this language itself was made with a reduced amount of words — which made of expressing ideas a hard task.

DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER

Even though Winston holds a dissenting opinion - opposing the Ingsoc party - his method of thought is still programmed by the state, as shown by this diary entry, to be obsessive and fanatic. This is in line with Winston's earlier reflection during the Two Minutes of Hate: And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp. And yet: it is only in the redirection of these animal energies against the Party itself that anything like a revolution can be contemplated.

Emmanuel Goldstein

Goldstein is most readily comparable to real-world Bolshevik Leon Trotsky (note the very Jewish name). Like Trotsky, Goldstein was a former high-ranking party member turned into an enemy of the state when power passed to his rival, Stalin. Trotsky was, of course, not an invention of the USSR, as Orwell implies Goldstein is.

To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984

Here time itself has been obliterated—Winston has to piece together the year (with a great deal of uncertainty) from scraps of information and hazy memories about the past, which he struggles to do because history has been rewritten so many times (something Winston knows about intimately through his work at Minitru) that it is difficult to know what is real and what is fiction. In a savvy move on Orwell's part, this also makes clear that the nightmare of 1984 is not tied to a specific year. Its dystopic future could arrive at any time...

London, chief city of Airstrip One

Here we find that the UK, once master of the globe, has been degraded to a mere province of Oceania, and not even the largest one. This is meant to be jarring and sad, a symbol of British decline (and a turn-about of British colonisation) amidst the greater sadness of rampant fascism in the Atlantic world.

The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely

Information has existed forever, but in the Internet it has found its ultimate source of power. And that is probably why, in recent years, we have seen so many attempts from governments all over the world to regulate its use and its contents. What we have seen is arguably their attempt to turn the Internet into the telescreen of the twenty-first century. And even though we can still navigate freely, it's impossible to deny they have had a certain success. This line is a direct allusion to the constant surveillance of the government. We learn that the citizens of Oceania are watched at all times and their thoughts are also tracked, and it is difficult to escape their surveillance (as Big Brother is always watching). You can try to lessen how much of your real life they see but you can't stop the surveillance completely, the same as how the telescreen can be dimmed, but not shut off completely.

Novel-writing machines

It is often said about mass-market best-sellers that "they could be produced by a machine," due to their predictable, mechanical plotting, and their uninspired vernacular writing style. In a genuinely funny bit of satire, Orwell makes that idea literal here, while also pointing at the sadness of novel-writing losing any of its potential human quality in order to squeeze out any potential for emotional response. Links back to the party controlling all ideas. Human expression has all but surceased, that even the intimate process of novel writing has been reduced to being written by machines

A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.

Mobs and crowds with a focused target of hate have their own intelligence and desires. An obsession with this theme dominated the first part of the twentieth century, as Elias Canetti highlighted in the seminal book, Crowds and Power. Fear as an ecstasy is an oxymoron.

His skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended

More markers of a poor society. This would have hit close to home for readers throughout a devastated postwar Europe (though it would have registered as sci-fi for readers in a prosperous United States). Wartime rationing didn't end in Britain until the mid-1950s.

Newspeak

Newspeak is convoked by Big Brother to restrict the breadth of human expression and hence the exchange of ideas beyond Big Brother's direct control, which obviously breaches dogma. In example; Good and 'Ungood'(bad) Cold and 'Uncold' (warm) Or; Great and better becoming 'Plusgood' and excellent and best becoming 'Doubleplusgood' There are many more examples in the novel itself

The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.

One of the first mentions of the Thought Police in the book. It's later learned that this is largely based on the NKVD, which arrested people for random "anti-soviet" remarks. ^1 There is very little overt "crime" in this society—at least on the part of the "educated" clerical class. Rather, "crime" consists of micro-indications of disloyalty or second-guessing, which are the province of the feared Thought Police.

See Appendix.

Orwell appears to treat Newspeak as if it's an actual language, giving it an appendix that reads like a non-fiction fact-book. It's not certain why he does this, but perhaps it is to make the world of Oceania seem, however unfamiliar and disconcerting, somewhat realistic. Much of the book's agenda lies in criticism of Stalin's regime in the Soviet Union, so it appears to draw a parallel between the fictional Oceania and the very real USSR.

He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax. Better than before, moreover, he realized why it was that he hated her. He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so, because round her sweet supple waist, which seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there was only the odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chastity.

Orwell makes explicit in the second part of the passage what is implicit in the first, namely that Winston's resentment and fantasies of violence are wrapped up with his sexual desire. It could be that the violence and hatred he feels for Julia is just his displaced sexual desire; on the other hand, by staging his sexual fantasy in the midst of a social fantasy of power, Orwell may be introducing the more subtle possibility that the desire to rape and harm is a subset of the overarching desire the state produces in its citizens to harm and humiliate the vulnerable.

Party members were supposed not to go into ordinary shops ('dealing on the free market', it was called), but the rule was not strictly kept, because there were various things, such as shoelaces and razor blades, which it was impossible to get hold of in any other way.

Party ideals are contrary to the real-world situation, to the point where they are not strictly maintained. This also undermines Big Brother's watch, highlighting that 'only the Thought Police mattered'.

Blue overalls

Some totalitarian regimes impose a dress code to guarantee or formalise conformity. This can be (and often is) militaristic in nature. In uniform, each member of the society is not her/himself but rather a member of The Party.

INGSOC

The 'Newspeak' contraction of the words English Socialism. This is the official Party ideology but due to the constant rewrites of history, it is impossible to know where the ideology originated.

WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

The Party slogans, which may at first seem like an elegant or intriguing paradox (think "less is more"), are really intended to render the concepts of "peace," "freedom," and "strength" utterly meaningless - to replace them with their opposites. This is part and parcel of the technique known as "doublethink," explained at length in the book.

Nothing remained of his childhood

The Party's obsession with re-writing history extends to the citizens' brains. This is a first glimpse of the Party's power and control over media and other documents. They can edit and delete anything, so citizens don't remember much of the past-including better times before the Party's ascent to power. Therefore, most of them apart from the cleverer among society (e.g Winston) cannot rebel.

Hate Week

The idea that a society would have a Hate Week—a festival of anger, bile, and rage—is, well, hateful. Societies rarely describe themselves as given over to "hate" —rather, they typically cloak their violent actions in the language of reluctance, or humanitarian assistance to those they are bombing. While Orwell usually depicts Oceania as much more insidious and dishonest than the governments of his own day, this is one example of Oceania purging the contemporary English language of its hypocrisies, and owning up honestly to what the state is doing.

He was abusing Big Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, he was crying hysterically that the revolution had been betrayed

The irony of this passage is that Goldstein is in fact presenting very agreeable propositions. The right to freely express oneself, to end Oceania's wars (the state is in perpetual war, and in regards to whether or not it is with Eurasia and Eastasia is very ambiguous in the novel), etc. Regardless, the people of Oceania violently reject his speech as antics, having been essentially hypnotised via propaganda by The Party to oppose Goldstein. Despite not being said by Winston himself, this is observed from his perspective, and serves as emphasis on how he is fully aware Oceania is an utter dystopia.

April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films.

The line between entertainment and propaganda, thin even in the freest of societies, has been totally dissolved. The Ministry of Truth is responsible for producing both, and this reflects what was happening in the USSR, where foreign films were largely banned or heavily censored, while Russian ones were filled with pro-communist propaganda.

On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall.

The poster of Big Brother appears on each floor of the building, and is a common sight throughout Oceania. It is a sign of manipulation, and it serves as a constant reminder that the citizens are being watched, and helps dispel any thoughts the citizens may have of revolting against The Party.

A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her hips.

There is a degree of irony within this line, as an anti-sex symbol is actually making her seem more sexually suggestive by bringing out her hip-shape. It contrasts significantly with the girl's later sexual activity, and red is often linked with passion or desire. A poster displaying the collective farming drive; however, Young Pioneers were encouraged to support this. Historically, the Junior Anti-Sex League is most likely based upon the Young Pioneers within the Soviet Union. Both groups were aimed at the youth, and both featured a red sash as part of the uniform, though the Young Pioneers were more commonly recognised by their red neckties

And flung it at the screen. It struck Goldstein's nose and bounced off; the voice continued inexorably.

These sentences ("The dark-haired ... inexorably.") detail the effects of Ingsoc's Two Minutes and identification of a singular enemy as lucidly as Winston's own later account. That the girl, after dehumanizing the Other as a pig, throws a Newspeak dictionary - all that the party of Oceania has worked toward in making words meaningless - and it hits Goldstein's nose while the authoritarian voice drones on and on; this suggests that the paralysis of thought created by the destruction of language leaves people only capable of primal gesticulating and emoting - in this case, hate.

Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time.

This highlights the Thought Police's powers of surveillance. Even a "low whisper" can be detected by the telescreen, and it's impossible to know whether they're spying on you or not, so you have to assume they're watching and listening all the time. Combined with knowledge of harsh punishments for disobedience, this constant surveillance intimidates the citizens into obedience and caution.

Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses? But it was no use, he could not remember

This introduces one of the main themes of the novel. Winston ponders London's condition, whether or not it has always been so desolate and war torn, but since there exists no unaltered record, that he cannot remember personally, and that asking any such question aloud is out of the question, he can never truly know. Here we begin to understand the power of Big Brother, not so much in absolute governmental power, but in the control of ideas. Big Brother controls the present, and molds the past by altering written record, that he may use it to justify his future course

One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean. Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights, then he was full of holes and the sea round him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though the holes had let in the water, audience shouting with laughter when he sank. then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a helicopter hovering over it. there was a middle-aged woman might have been a jewess sitting up in the bow with a little boy about three years old in her arms. little boy screaming with fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting her arms round him and comforting him although she was blue with fright herself, all the time covering him up as much as possible as if she thought her arms could keep the bullets off him. then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in among them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood. then there was a wonderful shot of a child's arm going up up up right up into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose must have followed it up and there was a lot of applause from the party seats but a woman down in the prole part of the house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting they didn't oughter of showed it not in front of kids they didn't it ain't right not in front of kids it ain't until the police turned her turned her out i dont suppose anything happened to her nobody cares what the proles say typical prole reaction they never - -

This is an astonishing passage, on several levels. Let's break it down. First, at a formal level this is the first time we hear Winston's voice in the novel. It is not wholly illiterate — the description of suffering is actually sort of moving, and there are a few literary devices and techniques (similes, efforts to enter into the psyche of those he sees onscreen). But the first thing we discover is that Winston is not as opposed to the norms and values of Oceania as we might have guessed; the massacre of civilians makes him a bit uneasy, but it doesn't horrify him, and he dismisses the complaints of the woman at the end as a "typical prole reaction." Orwell is giving us a hero, then, who will only gradually emerge into political awareness and recognizable human feeling. Winston's apparent indifference towards such shocking events is also indicative of the way society has been radically de-sensitized to violence. The "war film" probably isn't a literal documentary (would they be able to train a camera on the gunsights at all times?), but the fact that this was produced as "entertainment" makes it that much more horrifying. In this tableau it is the most defenseless—refugees, the out of shape, children—who are the victims. The shot of an exploded child's arm flying through the air is called "wonderful." In the background, it serves to remind the reader of the very real tragedy of World War II, which had only ended three years before the book was written. The passage also reflects on class divisions in society; not coincidentally, the proles are the only ones who still retain a moral imagination, though note that the objection of this "prole" is not that the film is shocking and disgusting (an unthinkable, treasonous offence in this society), but that it is too violent to be shown to children. That's a very clever way of showing the reader how constrained the moral universe of Oceania really is, even for dissenters. And as we will see in the next chapter, the Party sees it as imperative to expose children to this kind of maliciousness.

It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features.

This is the face of "Big Brother". It is large, all encompassing, and powerful. A daunting reminder to all that "he" is always watching. This is one of the deliberate allusions that Orwell makes throughout the novel, one of Stalin's propaganda nicknames being "Uncle Joe", which, in the same way as Big Brother is meant to incite familiarity and security within the citizen in order to brainwash them into believing that he is not in fact their oppressor.

It was partly the unusual geography of the room that had suggested to him the thing that he was now about to do.

What affords Winston this small amount of privacy is something like a memory from the past—that is, the fact that the building he inhabits was built before the rise of INGSOC dictatorship. There are always limits to the control that even the most totalitarian state can exercise—tiny cracks where free life can start to emerge. The plot of the novel involves the discovery and sealing-up of one of these small cracks.

Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything,

Winston begins to paint in words the dystopian world he sees outside the window-pane. And whilst the sun was shining and the skies were blue, which would otherwise brighten up the streets, Winston describes how there's no colour in his grey world as it has been stripped away by Big Brother and replaced by his posters

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU

a ubiquitous maxim used to hammer the notion of total surveillance into the citizens of the state. Given that the novel was written after the Second World War, this corresponds with the image both Stalin and Hitler sought to create; that of the omniscient leader. The "WATCHING YOU" is nothing like "father figure" - here it stands for "CONTROLLING YOU" and not "taking care of", it's a clever word-play.

Victory Mansions

use language to control their citizens. The houses are old and broken down as seen in the following paragraph; however, The Party has named them "Victory Mansions."The words "Victory" and "Mansion" are used in an attempt to make the houses seem more appealing. We see later in the novel that The Party believes it can control thoughts by controlling language, and this is the first example of this ideology in effect.