Part I:
Summarization
1984 by George Orwell is set in a world where a totalitarian
government exercises complete control over its citizens. Winston and Julia are
caught by the Thought Police and sent to the Ministry of Love, where Winston is
tortured to the point that he loves Big Brother completely.
Part II:
Question Development
LEVEL
II
What do the rats symbolize
that appear throughout the book?
Rats
are seen several times throughout 1984. First, a rat appears in Mr. Charrington’s
room as Winston and Julia are having sex. Next, and perhaps more strikingly,
Winston is tortured with the threat of sticking his head into a cage full of
rats to the point that he sacrifices Julia to endure the punishment instead of
himself. It is safe to say that the rats carry more symbolic meaning than just
creepy rodents. To Winston, rats are representative of everything that is bad
about his society. First, rats are associated with pestilence and disease. They
have been known to eat dead bodies and scavenge around garbage, and were
responsible for spreading the Black Plague across Europe and Asia. In short,
rats are the essence of non-humanity; the perfect example of beasts who have devolved
so far from being human that they would never be considered intelligent or
“man’s best friend.” Thus the image of rats scares Winston so much because he
fears that this is the fate that his own society is plummeting towards as well;
in Book II he tells Julia that “we are not human” (137). He is worried that the
level of insensitivity and mindlessness will eventually change humans to the
point that they are no longer human, and he has seen the process begin to take
place during his own lifetime. For this reason, although the rats are on the
surface level simply carnivorous animals, on a deeper level they provoke a fear
response in Winston because of what they symbolize in terms of his own hopes
and forebodings about the future of himself and of humanity under the
totalitarian rule of Big Brother.
RHETORICAL
DEVICE: Logos
What is the significance of
the phrase “the place where there is no darkness”?
When
Winston meets O’Brien at his apartment in Book II, he tells him that they will
meet again in “the place where there is no darkness,” a line he remembers from
a dream, without really having any idea what it means. In Book III, the
significance of the phrase becomes clear: the place without darkness is the
Ministry of Love, where the lights are kept on every hour of every day in order
to constantly monitor the prisoners. However, symbolically “the place where
there is no darkness” carries a deeper meaning. If darkness is to represent
traditional anti-governmental activity; “shady” behavior, as it is colloquially
referred to, more commonly described as subterfuge or betrayal, then the
Ministry of Love is the place where darkness is truly eradicated. As O’Brien
describes, “We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us; so long as he
resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we
reshape him” (210). Here it is seen that “darkness” in the form of thoughts of
sabotage are not only punished in the Ministry of Love, but are completely
reversed and ultimately done away with. Thus it can truly be said that the
Ministry of Love is the place where there is no darkness; when people who once
conspired against the government leave the Ministry of Love, they have no more
desire to work against Big Brother and instead love him fully and completely,
like Winston at the end of the novel.
What does Winston’s
eventual sacrifice of Julia say about the role of the individual in 1984?
Winston’s
eventual sacrifice of Julia reinforces Orwell’s implied message that to be a
member of a communist society is to give up your individuality. Throughout the book,
parallels to Communist Russia are made painstakingly obvious, including the
shortage of goods and the persecution of former leaders of the Party that
mirrors the treatment of Trotsky by Vladimir Lenin. One of the principal tenets
of communism is the communal sharing of land and property, something that
greatly disturbed most capitalist consumers and governments. Here Orwell tells
his reader that even in a society that purports to be equal, there will never
be true equality. The individual will always hold himself above all others, and
act in a way to save himself even if it costs the life or liberty of others,
like Winston’s screaming to put Julia in the cage with rats instead of himself.
Winston’s actions prove that there is only so much a person can do to save
themselves when their lives are in the hands of another, because if there is a
choice between your own life and someone else’s, for many the answer is
painfully obvious. This, Orwell argues indirectly through the actions that take
place in the book, means that in a communist society individual relationships
between people, though they are supposed to be stronger because of the sharing
of property and labor burdens, are actually weakened. For this reason, affection
between the members of the society in 1984, especially Party members, is
strongly discouraged. If everyone is equal, then everyone must have equal
affection for everyone else as well; having stronger bonds between some people
than between others would tip the already fragile balance between alleged
equality and the necessity of some higher organizing power that must command
loyalty above all else.
RHETORICAL
DEVICE: Logos
What is the significance of
the song that plays in the Chestnut Tree Café?
The
song that plays in the Chestnut Tree Café, though seemingly lyrical, has a
threatening tone. It blares, “Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and
you sold me” as the changed Winston sits alone at his table (page 241). Both
the lyrics and the incidence of the song itself have deeply personal meanings
to Winston. The song being played reminds Winston of his days as a rebel, when
he heard it in the context of the three enemies of the state in the Chestnut
Tree Café and found concrete evidence that Big Brother was falsifying the facts
of their betrayal. On this level, hearing the song play in the Chestnut Tree
Café is painful because it is a reminder of the life that Winston has left
behind, and a life that now he no doubt finds gravely disturbing because of his
forced conversion to belief in Big Brother. On another level, the fact that it
is a song at all displays a perversion of the other songs that Winston was
fascinated with, such as the one that both Mr. Charrington and O’Brien sing to
him about the old churches in London, which remind him of the older past and
his own childhood. Instead of being a happy memory of childhood and the way
life once was, however, this song is a corruption of the classic positive tunes
and instead endorses the authoritarian government’s values of betrayal.
Finally, the theme of betrayal in the song is important because Winston’s
betrayal of Julia is one of the pivotal moments in the book, and one that
drives apart a relationship that had the potential to be revolutionary. Thus
the song and its lyrics about selling each other has a personal meaning for
Winston about the selling he has done and the sacrifices he has made to be
where he is.
RHETORICAL
DEVICE: Ethos
Is it implied that the
Brotherhood exists or not? Why would the government purposefully keep the
details of its possible existence so vague?
When
Winston asks about the existence of the Brotherhood, though O’Brien readily
answers the rest of his questions with gusto, he does not provide a clear
response. He tells Winston, “’That, Winston, you will never know. If we choose
to set you free when we have finished with you, and if you live to be ninety
years old, still you will never learn whether the answer to that question is
Yes or No. As long as you live, it will be an unsolved riddle in your mind’”
(214). This statement reveals one of the deepest perversions of the Party,
which O’Brien later describes in plain terms to Winston: the reason that the
prisoners in the Ministry of Love are being tortured is not really for anything
they have done wrong, but for the sole purpose of torturing them and for the
power that it gives. There is no enjoyment to be found in torturing a person
who has already given up, because their spirit is already broken. The power
that Big Brother and people like O’Brien find from their work at the Ministry
of Love is in breaking the spirits and revolutionary mindsets of people that
truly believe that there is action that can be taken against the government,
that there is hope for a better future. For this reason, it does not really
matter in the context of 1984 whether the Brotherhood exists or not. If
it does exist, it is because the government is allowing it to exist but keeping
it under close tabs whenever it threatens to do anything potentially damaging,
because the idea of hope existing within the government of Big Brother is
ultimately the only thing that gives them the ability to take hope away.
Similarly, if the Brotherhood does not exist then it has been fabricated by the
Party for the exact same reason: to provide a false source of hope that allows
them the release and expression of power of torturing and changing those who
truly believe in the message of possible rebellion.
RHETORICAL
DEVICE: Logos
What is the significance of
the different prisoners that Winston sees in the Ministry of Love, specifically
Parsons and Ampleforth?
During the first
scene in the Ministry of Love, Winston sees two people that he recognizes from
his old life: Parsons and the poet Ampleforth. Though they have all ended up in
the same place and will likely undergo largely the same treatment, the reasons
for their capture are gravely different. Parsons, still a loyal Party member to
the core, has been turned in by his daughter for purported thought-crime; she
accused him of saying “Down with Big Brother” in his sleep while listening at
his door with surveillance devices. Unlike Winston and perhaps Ampleforth,
Parsons feels nothing but regret at his detainment, and even in the dire
circumstances he is in, he continues to believe that he has a duty to obey and
respect Big Brother. He tells Winston that when he goes before the tribunal, he
will tell them “‘thank you for saving me before it was too late’” (192). The
optimism in the comment about the tribunal—although he is locked up in such
dismal conditions, he still believes that he will be treated with justice and
fairness—displays Parson’s lingering loyalty to the Party. He is truly one of the
mindless drones that Winston most fears becoming, unable to process any
possibility that the Party could be bad or that any action purportedly taken to
help the Party could be false. But Parsons also represents Winston’s future; as
much as he disgusts Winston, he is the very model of what he will become after
his treatments by O’Brien. Ampleforth, on the other hand, has perpetrated true
rebellion against the government, but not for the same reasons as Winston.
Unlike Winston, who disagrees with every aspect of the society he lives in and
has disobeyed wholeheartedly, Ampleforth seems focused on only the minute
details and indeed it is unclear to what extent he actually has rebellious
thoughts about Big Brother. His infraction is one caused because of his love
for language; he tells Winston “’I allowed the word God to remain at the end of a line,’” but maintains that it was
only because of the utter lack of any other rhyme for the word (190). Here we
see that Ampleforth represents the third type of person in Orwellian society besides
the completely revolutionary Winston and the mindless lackey Parsons. He skirts
in between the lines of both of them, neither disobeying nor completely obeying
Big Brother except when it suits him best. Ultimately Orwell uses the three
prisoners to describe the different reactions that members of society can have
to authoritarian rule.
RHETORICAL
DEVICE: Ethos
LEVEL
III
In 1984, Winston is tortured
mercilessly until he admits to every crime he can think of and ultimately is
forced to love the government he once swore to overthrow. Could anything like
this ever happen under the United States government?
Before this
year, I probably would have answered this question with a vehement “Of course
not!” However, my experiences in debate and the independent book project have
given me a very different viewpoint on the United States’s prison and legal
system. In the autobiography of Assata Shakur, the independent book that I
chose to read in this unit, a member of the Black Liberation Army tells of the
horrible treatment she had to face in prison—being beaten by prison guards even
when she was pregnant, put in solitary confinement for months at a time, having
to participate in juries where all of the evidence against her was falsified
and the jury had been chosen unfairly by the prosecuting side. Reading 1984
and the scenes where Winston is imprisoned in the Ministry of Love, all that I
could think about what the treatment that Assata had to endure and how similar
it was to Winston’s—and much more frightening and disturbing because of the
fact that all of it is true. I think that as citizens of the United States we
are trained to think that our government is perfect and fights for democracy
and liberty selflessly, both abroad and among its citizens. We see images of
the happy people across the country every day juxtaposed with stories about the
terrors of life in North Korea or war in the Middle East, and we think about
how lucky we are that we live here and not there. But there is an underground
war going on in our backyards, right down the street from us, sometimes even in
our own homes, and it is perpetrated by the United States federal government
against its own citizens. Reading about Assata and other Black Panthers and
members of the Black Liberation Army that shared her fate or worse makes me
more reluctant to exalt the virtues of the country I live in, even in comparison
to the totalitarian world of 1984.
RHETORICAL
DEVICE: Logos
At one point during the torture, O’Brien
plays a recording for Winston of the time he said he was willing to throw acid
in a child’s face, murder, and deceive to support the party. Do you think that
actions such as this are objectively wrong, or can they be justified depending
on the circumstance?
I don’t think
that throwing acid in a child’s face is permissible in any circumstance. I may
just be overly sentimental, but I don’t think that it is ever okay to hurt
someone who has not done anything wrong, and I cannot think of any situation in
which a child could do something that would be justifiably punishable with
torture. Murder and deceit, on the other hand, are more tricky subjects. I do
not believe that I personally would be able to murder someone, even if it was
in the name of the greater good. However, I don’t think that taking another
human life is always unquestionably wrong. Sometimes violence is necessary in
order to achieve happiness for the greatest amount of people to the point
where, although it may seem counterintuitive, it really is the best and most
ethical possible option. For example, the Haitian slave revolt would not have
been possible without the brutal killing of the slave owners themselves and the
loss of hundreds of lives, both enslaved and free. However, the sacrifice of
the lives of the bigoted landholders allowed a new and more righteous
generation of freed slaves to work the land, people that may not have been
freed for many years without their revolt. If the slaves had protested
peacefully, it would have been simple for the French army or the upper class
plantation owners to massacre them to shut down the resistance. Violence, even
murder, was necessary to prove that they were serious about what they were
doing, to send a message about their cause. I don’t think that murder in the
case of murdering a bigoted, racist slave owner that has indirectly or directly
caused the deaths of tens if not hundreds of people is objectively a bad thing.
RHETORICAL
DEVICE: Pathos
Room 101 is the place that each prisoner
in the Ministry of Love dreads the most because it contains their deepest fear.
What do you think would be in Room 101 for you if you were a prisoner? Is your
biggest fear necessarily the most influential force in torturing you?
If I were a
prisoner, I am honestly not sure what would be in Room 101 for me. My biggest
fears that I can think of are not things that can be put in a glass box, like
rats for Winston. They are more abstract constructs, like having people hate me
or failing at something I really want to do well at. I think that in some ways
this would make it more difficult for Room 101 to have a big impact on me,
because that type of situation—especially the first one—isn’t really possible
without the entire scene and atmosphere playing out, including the presence of
people I respected which would probably be a hassle for the Ministry of Love.
In other words, my fears are more situations or feelings than objects, so they
are a lot harder to fit into a box or even to use against me except for through
psychological warfare. This leads into my answer for the second question—I
don’t think that my biggest fear would necessarily be the most influential
force in torturing me, like rats are for Winston, or more essentially in
getting me to sacrifice someone else. Some things, even if I’m not afraid of
them per se, have a much greater effect on me than my biggest fears. For
example, I love my family very much and although I’ve never been afraid of
having them taken away from me, I think that I would probably be driven to
sacrifice someone else at the cost of having my family taken away from me. I
also don’t fear having my memory erased, but I would definitely sacrifice someone
else, depending on how close they were to me, if I was threatened with that
punishment.
RHETORICAL
DEVICE: Pathos
Part III:
Tracking Evidence
Page 190—“‘These
things happen,’ he began vaguely. ‘I have been able to recall one instance—a
possible instance. It was an indiscretion, undoubtedly. We were producing a
definitive edition of the poems of Kipling. I allowed the word God to remain at the end of a line. I
could not help it!’ he added almost indignantly, raising his face to look at
Winston. ‘It was impossible to change the line. The rhyme was rod. Do you realize that there are only
twelve rhymes to rod in the entire
language? For days I had racked my brains. There was no other rhyme.’”
Page 192—“‘Are
you guilty?’ said Winston. ‘Of course I’m guilty!’ cried Parsons with a servile
glance at the telescreen. ‘You don’t think the Party would arrest an innocent
man, do you?’ His froglike face grew calmer, and even took on a slightly
sanctimonious expression. ‘Thoughtcrime is a dreadful thing, old man,’ he said
sententiously. ‘It’s insidious. It can get hold of you without your even
knowing it. Do you know how it gold hold of me? In my sleep! Yes, that’s a
fact. There I was, working away, trying to do my bit—never knew I had any bad
stuff in my mind at all. And then I started talking in my sleep. Do you know
what they heard me saying?’ He sank his voice, like someone who is obliged for
medical reasons to utter an obscenity. ‘Down with Big Brother!’ Yes, I said
that. Said it over and over again, it seems. Between you and me, old man, I’m
glad they got me before it went any further. Do you know what I’m going to say
to them when I go before the tribunal? ‘Thank you,’ I’m going to say, ‘thank
you for saving me before it was too late.’”
No comments:
Post a Comment