1984 Quotes and Analysis4
PART 1
Quote
It was a bright cold day in April,
and the clocks were striking
thirteen.
Techniques
Contrasting imagery, striking first
lines, disruptive and demonstrates
that setting unnatural and distorted
from normality, foreshadowing,
24 hours clock represents
modernisation and sharp
discontinuity with past
The black moustachioed face gazed Historical allusion to Stalin,
down from every commanding
makes image relevant to audience
corner…BIG BROTHER IS
by connecting it to reality,
WATCHING YOU
capitalisation demonstrates
authority and the notion that many
voices have been drowned out into
singular narrative, second person
intimidates reader, feel sense of
insecurity and uncertainty
alongside Winston, commanding
tone
You had to live – did live, from
Internal focalisation on Winston,
habit that became instinct – in the
motif of darkness with meaning
assumption that every sound you
upended to demonstrate its value,
made was overheard, and except in sense of insecurity, imagery of
darkness, every movement
‘habit’ suggests lack of agency
scrutinised
The Ministry of Truth…was
Imagery of modernism is
startlingly different from any other undermined by impersonal nature,
object in sight. It was an enormous reversal of machine age optimism
pyramidal structure of glittering
white concrete, soaring up terrace
after terrace, three hundred metres
into the air.
Winston who was thirty and had a
Emaciated imagery, degradation
varicose ulcer above his right
of society is reflected in the bodies
ankle…a smallish frail figure, the
of the people, Winston subverts
meagreness of his body merely
the hero at the centre of the hero’s
emphasised by the blue overalls
journey
which were the uniform of the
Party
To begin with, he did not know
Undermines the certainty of the
with any certainty that this was
title and further disconcerts the
1984.
reader, ambiguity demonstrates
the perversion of truth and reality,
connotes potentiality of this
occurring at any point in history
Relevant human
experiences
Normality
Truth
Insecurity
Lack of agency
Power of narrative
Insecurity and lack
of agency
Insufficiency of
technology
Individuality
Hero’s journey
Insecurity
Truth
Satiric warning
against
totalitarianism
His small but childish handwriting
straggled up and down the page,
shedding first its capital letters and
finally even its full stops
A hideous ecstasy of fear and
vindictiveness…seemed to flow
through the whole group like an
electric current, turning one even
against one’s will
Goldstein in spite of his isolation,
his helplessness and the doubt that
hung about his very existence,
seemed like a sinister enchanter,
capable by the mere power of his
voice of wrecking the structure of
civilisation
HE was the primal traitor, the
earliest defiler of the Party’s unity.
It resembled the face of a sheep,
and the voice, too, had a sheeplike
quality
The dull rhythmic tramp of the
soldier’s boots formed the
background to Goldstein’s bleating
voice.
She had some mechanical job on
one of the novel writing machines
The Hate rose to its climax
Vivid beautiful hallucinations
flashed through his mind…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.
She picked up a heavy Newspeak
dictionary and flung it at the screen
Images of writing are messy and
imperfect, stream of
consciousness comes into play,
writing becomes an emotional
release and therefore freedom
Juxtaposing emotions highlight
the contradictions between action
and thought in oppressive regime,
simile suggests the mechanisation
of humanity, lack of freedom
Prophetic of Winston’s goal,
words transcend the lives of their
creators, is Goldstein even a real
person or just a fictional creation
of the party, simile conveys this
power of language
Winston as
storyteller
Sound imagery, metaphor, all
mobilised by the party to create
narrative with fictitious character
at centre
Party’s reliance on
narrative
Agency
Individuality
Inconsistencies
Storytelling
Reality and truth
Ironic simile since Goldstein
defies the symbolism of the sheep
– shows party control over
narrative
Irony, mechanical imagery again
becomes symbolic of lack of
individuality and true expression,
suggests the political function of
narrative but its lack of value
Sexual innuendo, power
connected to sexuality,
capitalisation of Hate
demonstrates manipulation of
language to weaponise human
emotion rather than experience it
Juxtaposition of ‘beauty’ with
shockingly violent sexual
imagery, subverts understanding
of Winston as everyman,
individual power can be exercised
even in totalitarian over women,
sexual fantasy entwined with
fantasy of power
Symbolism of degradation of
language
Party reliance on
narrative
Individuality
Power constructs
human emotion
Gender
Gender
Individual power
Language
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
He had committed – would still
have committed, even if he had
never set pen to paper – the
essential crime that contained all
others in itself. Thoughtcrime they
called it.
He was a lonely ghost uttering a
truth that nobody would ever hear.
But so long as he uttered it, in
some obscure way the continuity
was not broken.
From the age of uniformity, from
the age of solitude, from the age of
Big Brother, from the age of
doublethink – greetings!
Repetition, capitalisation, mimics
the form of slogans showing grasp
on language prevents Winston
thinking independently
Turns attention to internal
focalisation, casts doubt on the
privacy of that emotion
Control of language
Despondent metaphor that
suggests the death of truth, yet reafforms power of storytelling and
retaining humanity, personal
power gained through
individuality
Anaphora, empowered tone,
addressed to future audience
demonstrating longevity of words,
responds to despair of:
Storytelling
Individuality
Hero’s journey
‘And what way of knowing that the
dominion of the Party would not
last forever?’
To know and not know, to be
Long sentence, accumulation of
conscious of complete truthfulness paradoxes demonstrates
while telling carefully constructed
irrationality of doublethink that
lies…to use logic against logic, to
disconcerts the audience, as they
repudiate morality while laying
try to conceptualise it they are
claim to it…Even to understand the made victims of it by Orwell,
word ‘doublethink’ involved the
showing how one can manipulate
use of doublethink.
truth
For, how could you establish even
Internal focalisation explicates the
the most obvious fact when there
power of knowledge and the
existed no record outside your own personal, rhetorical question
memory?
elucidates Winston’s individuality
and value of knowledge
You did not have friends
Control of language, allusion to
nowadays, you had comrades
Stalinist Russia
‘It’s a beautiful thing, the
Gleeful tone but paradoxical
destruction of words’
statement disconcerts audience
It was not the man’s brain the was
Synecdoche, the man, as an
speaking, it was his larynx. The
individual, collapses into a series
stuff that was coming out of him
of metonyms, medicalised
consisted of words, but it was not
imagery, disdainful simile
speech in the true sense: it was
invoking animalistic imagery of
noise uttered in unconsciousness,
the duck demonstrates the
like the quacking of a duck
dehumanisation that comes with
losing expression
Individuality
Storytelling
Truth
Truth
Individual power
Winston as a
storyteller
Relationships
Language
Language
Language
Individuality
…the cold water, the gritty soap,
the cigarettes that came to pieces,
the food with its strange evil
tastes? Why should one feel it to be
intolerable unless one had some
kind of ancestral memory that
things had once been different?
Your worst enemy, he reflected,
was your own nervous system.
So the performance continued to
happen, once a week quite
regularly whenever it was not
impossible.
The sexual act, successfully
performed, was rebellion. Desire
was thoughtcrime.
It struck him that the truly
characteristic thing about modern
life was not its cruelty and
insecurity, but simply its bareness,
its dinginess, its listlessness.
The ideal set up by the Party was
something huge, terrible and
glittering – a world of steel and
concrete, of monstrous machines
and terrifying weapons
Three hundred million people all
with the same face
Rhetorical question once again
focuses of Winston’s internal
focalisation and its value,
degraded imagery accumulation,
questions if there is a common
human spirit
Collective humanity
and shared
experience – can it
be wiped out by
power?
Bitter irony, pathologizes own
body, disjunct between external
and internal self
Performance imagery, routine
language + plainness of prose
becomes impersonal
Individuality
Truth
Emphatic tone (which implicitly
arises from Winston), truisms
Gender and sexuality
Barren imagery, lack of
individuality is centre of
totalitarianism, lack of individual
power
Individuality
Reversal of machine age
optimism, impersonal nature of
technological imagery
Individuality vs
technology
Face is symbolic of individuality
and erased in collective, collective
imagery, inspires fear in audience
of collective
The immediate advantages of
Writing becomes process of
falsifying the past were obvious but clarification and enlightenment,
the ultimate motive was
capitalisation of the interrogative,
mysterious. He took up his pen
internal focalisation,
again and wrote:
I understand HOW: I do not
understand WHY
The hypnotic eyes gazed into his
own. It was as though some huge
force were pressing down upon you
– something that penetrated inside
your skull…
Truisms are true, hold on to that!
The solid world exists, its laws do
not change. Stones are hard, water
is wet…’
Gender
Individuality
Winston as
storyteller,
individuality
Fictitious character impresses
huge power, body affected by
power, simile
Party as storyteller
Exclamatory language, addresses
the audience implicitly, truisms
are undermined finally
Truth
Freedom is the freedom to say that
two plus two make four. If that is
granted, all else follows.
ownlife
Mathematical creates sense of
objectivity, aphorism, freedom
associated with truth in the
individual, writing in his diary
Jargon dehumanises individuality,
becomes more impersonal
When he got up to it, he saw that it Ironically Winston dehumanises
was a human hand severed at the
body parts while claiming to be an
wrist. Apart from the bloody
individual, individuality is always
stump, the hand was so whitened as subjugated to survival
to resemble a plaster cast. He
kicked the thing into the gutter.
The thing was doubly attractive
Objects are symbols of the past –
because of its apparent uselessness, concrete, beauty becomes valued,
though he could guess that it must
represents preserved past
once have been intended as a
paperweight.
‘Oranges and lemons’
Motif – represents preserved past
in language, ironic because it’s a
Ironically undercut by ‘Here comes childish game yet represents such
candle to light you to bed, Here
significance
comes a chopper to chop off your
head.’
Foreshadowing creates sinister
undertone to the preservation of
the past
‘like a leaden knell the words came Referring to the slogans, sound
back to him’
imagery, shows the their
overwhelming nature
PART 2
I love you
Italicisation, lineated in a similar
way to the slogans but not
capitalised and familiar to readers,
simples sentence, shows how
plain prose communicates truths
At the sight of the words I love you Communication/language inspires
the desire to stay alive had welled
new emotion, contorts our
up in him, and the taking of minor
individual experience owing to
risks suddenly seemed stupid.
our responsibility to loved ones
It was like trying to make a move
Metaphor of manipulation but
at chess when you were already
does not level the playing field,
mated. Whichever way you turned, ubiquity of the party through
the telescreen faced you.
technology
It occurred to him that he did not
Foreshadowing, eyes represent the
know what colour the girl’s eyes
soul and personality, denied by the
were…To turn his head and look at Party, true connection is unable to
her would have been inconceivable be fostered and one cannot truly
folly.
know the other
Winston as a
storyteller
Truth
Associations
between power and
truth
Individuality and
conformity
Individuality
History
History
Truth
Storytelling
Love
Inconsistencies in
human experience
Storytelling
Individuality
Agency
Love
Individuality
With their hands locked together,
invisible among the press of
bodies, they stared steadily in front
of them, and instead of the eyes of
the girl, the eyes of the aged
prisoner gazed mournfully at
Winston out of nests of hair.
To look around was to show guilt
The sweetness of the air and the
greenness of the leaves daunted
him.
Already on the walk from the
station, the May sunshine had
made him feel dirty and etiolated, a
creature of the indoors, with the
sooty dust of London in the pores
of his skin.
‘Always yell with the crowd, that’s
what I say. It’s the only way to be
safe’ Julia
Internal monologue, actions
curtailed for survival
Juxtaposition, feels displaced in
nature which is not governed by
authoritarianism
Party’s control reflected in the
body of its citizens, dehumanises
self to show how technology
which symbolises party has
fashioned his being
Colloquial language, maxim, Julia
prioritise individual safety over
rebellion, performance of
conformity
Them it appeared, meant the party, Disdainful tone, separation
and above all the Inner Party, about through pronoun, ironically
whom she talked with an open
delineates herself yet performs
jeering hatred…
conformity for safety
No mate, no rival was watching it. Rhetorical question in internal
What made it sit at the edge of the
monologue creates suspicion in
lonely wood and pour its music
audience, nature is foil for the
into nothingness?
constraints of humanity, it does
not perform, it only acts as it
pleases
Perhaps at the other end of the
Metaphor, dehumanises Party
instrument some small beetle like
members, repetition highlights
man was listening intently –
momentousness of bird’s beauty
listening to that.
Anything that hinted at corruption
Paradoxical human desires under
filled him with wild hope.
oppression, juxtaposition
‘I hate purity! I hate goodness! I
don’t want any virtue to exist
anywhere. I want everyone to be
corrupt to the bones.’
But you could not have pure love
or pure lust nowadays. No emotion
was pure because everything was
mixed up with fear and hatred
Their embrace had been a battle,
the climax a victory. It was a blow
Exclamatory language,
demonstrates strength of emotion
when it has been suppressed and
only now voiced
Internal focalisation, Winston sees
how emotion is distorted by the
Party, how it becomes constructed
by power
Metaphor, declarative statements,
emphatic tone makes political
statements, anaphora,
Agency
Agency
Individuality
Individuality
Agency
Individuality
Performative
conformity
Individuality
Agency
Individuality
Constraints of
technology
Individuality
Individuality (its
paradoxes)
Individuality
Emotion
Gender and sexuality
struck against the Party. It was a
political act.
…accepting the Party as something
unalterable, like the sky, not
rebelling against its authority but
simply evading it, as a rabbit
dodges a dog
With Julia, everything came back
to her sexuality.
Oh rubbish! Which would you
sooner sleep with, me or a
skeleton? Don’t you enjoy being
alive? Don’t you like the feeling:
This is me, this is my hand, this is
my leg, I’m real, I’m solid, I’m
alive! Don’t you like this?
‘We are the dead’ he said
‘We’re not the dead yet,’ said Julia
prosaically
‘The old-fashioned clock with the
twelve-hour face was ticking away
on the mantelpiece.’
The improvement in her
appearance was startling. With just
a few dabs of colour in the right
places she had become not only
very much prettier, but, above all,
far more feminine.
‘I’ll wear silk stockings and highheeled shoes! In this room I’m
going to be a woman not a Party
comrade.’
‘I wonder what a lemon was,’ she
added inconsequentially.
The paperweight was the room he
was in, and the coral was Julia’ life
and his own, fixed in a sort of
eternity at the heart of the crystal.
Simile, Julia becomes a foil for
Winston’s intellectual rebellion
against Party authority, simile is
rather scathing of this attitude
Rebellion against
authority
Julia as foil for Winston, Julia’s
rebellion tied up in sexuality and
politicisation of her femininity,
polticisation of personal identity?
Stream of consciousness,
anaphora, manifesto against party
of unconsciousness, emphatic
tone, despite not being political
becomes politicised, contrasts
Winston’s intellectualising
Gender
Polticisiation of
personal identity
Foreshadowing, ominous tone,
Winston’s pessimism
Power
Individuality
Agency
Contrast to opening lines, return to Humanity over
past and human beauty
technology
Limited perspective of Winston
invites the male gaze, femininity
as performance for male gaze
becomes a form of power and
entrapment
Gender
Signifiers of a specific type of
femininity, identity as female
separates her from conformity, but
ironically still speaks to a
feminine conformity existing in
Orwell’s context, women still
constrained by power
Past tense, blasé tone, disconcerts
audience, use of familiar object as
symbol of lost truths, natural
imagery
Paradoxically beautiful and
sinister imagery, denotes beauty
of human connection yet their
entrapment, motif of paperweight
illustrates the humanity not
condoned by Party, romantic
imagery is metaphorical BUT
entrapping, symbolism
Gender
Truth
Individuality
Connection
It was enough. Syme had ceased to
exist: he had never existed.
Dirty or clean, the room was
paradise.
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.
The room was a world, a pocket of
the past where extinct animals
could walk.
Getting there was difficult and
dangerous, but the room itself was
sanctuary.
Often she was ready to accept the
official mythology, simply because
the difference between truth and
falsehood did not seem important
to her.
‘You’re only a rebel from the waist
downwards.’
They simply swallowed everything
and what they swallowed did them
no harm, because it left no residue
behind, just as a grain on corn will
pass undigested through the body
of a bird.
He moved from thoughts to words,
and now from words to actions.
The last step was something that
would happen in the Ministry of
Love.
He had the sensation of stepping
into the dampness of a grave, and it
was not much better because he
had always known that the grave
was there and waiting for him.
Winston’s dreams of his mother
If you loved someone, you loved
him, and when you had nothing
else to give, you still gave him
love.
Short sentences, shocks audience,
foreshadowing
Room becomes metaphorical
microcosm for private life and
human connection
Importance of survival over
individuality, foreshadowing
Terror
Metaphor, imagery is reminiscent
of the paperweight, extinct
animals represent the old human
emotions and experiences,
Ironically optimistic, does not
mesh with reality, reminiscent of
the hero’s journey
Foil to Winston, power shows
people don’t care between fluid
notions about truth and fiction
Privacy
Emotion
History
All themes
Hero’s journey
Privacy
Julia as a foil, femininity is Julia’s
method of rebellion but is
demeaned
Animalistic imagery, simile,
dehumanises them by not
understanding storytelling of
Party, encourages to deconstruct
normative narratives
Gender
Process of words becoming
actions and the importance of
language, hero’s journey
subverted
Storytelling/language
Hero’s journey
Foreshadowing, metaphor,
subversion of hero’s journey,
audience still retains optimistic
hopes for his success, bleak tone,
imagery
Represents the private emotions
and sacrifices on individuals in the
past, dreams connote the
immaterial nature of these things
Limitless nature of love
Hero’s journey
Failure
Connection
Privacy
Individuality
Truth
Party as storyteller
Individualism
Family
Individuality and the
loss of it
When the last of the chocolate was
gone, his mother had clasped the
child in her arms. It was no use, it
changed nothing, it did not produce
more chocolate, it did not avert the
child’s death or her own; but it
seemed natural to her to do it.
‘Confession is not betrayal. What
you say or do doesn’t matter; only
feelings matter. If they could make
me stop loving you – that would be
real betrayal.’ Winston
But if the object was not to stay
alive but to stay human, what
difference did it ultimately make?
They could not alter your feelings.
…the inner heart, whose workings
were mysterious even to yourself,
remained impregnable.
He began asking his questions in a
low, expressionless voice, as
though this were a routine, a sort of
catechism, most of whose answers
were known to him already
You are prepared to cheat, to forge,
to blackmail, to corrupt the minds
of children, to distribute habit
forming drugs, to encourage
prostitution, to disseminate
venereal disease
Nothing holds it together except an
idea which is indestructible. You
will never have anything to sustain
you except the idea.
Again O’Brien nodded. With a sort
of grave courtesy he completed the
stanza:
Winston was gelatinous with
fatigue. Gelatinous was the right
word. It had come into his head
spontaneously
The Theory and practice of
Oligarchical Collectivism
It said what he would have said, if
it had been possible for him to set
his scattered thoughts in order. It
Chocolate is representative of love
in the past era which has been
untainted by the Party
Emotions are valorised, betrayal
equated with losing connection,
externalising political thought,
political, short statements
Connections
Human emotion
Rhetorical question, dramatic
irony allows audience to remain
hopeful before it is crushed,
importance of emotion,
love/humanity essential to
rebellion
Emotion
Interior
self/individuality
Religious allusion, transforms
political movement into religious,
part of counternarrative that
empowers the rebellious
Party as storyteller
Individuality
Listing, undermining humanity
Winston stands for, chant-like,
repetition, irony in that rebellion
involves losing humanity, later
mobilised against him
Individuality
Truth
Fallibility of
language
Metafictively reflects the nature of
the Party, held together by
narrative that overwhelms
individuals
O’Brien ironically finishes the
rhyme that represents Winston’s
hope but ominously leads into the
final ‘chop off your head line’
Defies newspeak rules,
importance of language
Party as a storyteller
Oxymoron, complex intellectual
thinking allows one to think
independently, book encapsulates
power of storytelling
Power of storytelling, internal
focalisation
Power of storytelling
Party as a storyteller
Language, personal
storytelling
Storytelling is
politicised
was the product of a mind similar
to his own, but enormously more
powerful, more systematic, less
fear-ridden.
Being in a minority, even a
minority of one, did not make you
mad.
There was truth and there was
untruth, and if you clung to the
truth even against the whole world,
you were not mad.
‘You are the dead’ repeated the
iron voice
Internal focalisation, emphatic
statement, aphorism,
Truth
Mirrors the first sentence, images
demonstrate the power against the
individual
Truth
Optimism is destroyed by iron
voice, inflexibility of the image,
impersonal image
It was starting, it was starting at
Final phase of journey, of failure,
last!
is expected
Motifs all shift as hope is destroyed Shatters the motif of hope and
security
‘The fragment of coral, a tiny
crinky of pink like a sugar rosebud
from a cake, rolled across the matt’
PART 3
He hardly thought of Julia…He
Impersonal language underscored
loved her and would not betray her; by mathematical allusion, short
but that was only a fact, known as
sentences, love is only response to
he knew the rules of arithmetic. He totalitarian power, ironic since he
felt no love for her
will betray her
In this place, he knew instinctively, Meaning of light is subverted,
the lights would never be turned
instead of hope it means torture,
out. It was the place with no
demonstrates the deceptive nature
darkness
of party storytelling
He thought: ‘If I could save Julia
Internal focalisation, Winston is
by doubling my own pain, would I incapable of feelings, perception
do it? Yes, I would.’ But that was
of the hero is distorted, archetypal
an intellectual decision.
hero journey/action
In the face of pain, there are no
Repetition, internal focalisation,
heroes, no heroes, he though over
violent imagery, Winston’s power
and over as he writhed on the floor, of storytelling is neutralised by
clutching uselessly at his disabled
greater power (pain)
arm
He became simply a mouth that
Metonymical images, synecdoche,
uttered, a hand that signed,
dehumanises Winston when
whatever was demanded of him.
subject to power, terror overcomes
the hero in journey
‘Sometimes they are five.
Equivocation, truth is fluid,
Sometimes they are three.
anaphora conveys the uncertainty,
Sometimes they are all of them at
paradoxical statements,
once. You must try harder. It is not disconcerts audience
easy to become sane.’
Truth
Hero’s journey
Security
Privacy
Personal connection
As superficial
Agency
Storytelling
Hero’s journey
Emotion
Connection
Hero’s journey
Hero’s journey
Individuality
Truth
Power of storytelling
‘Don’t worry Winston…I shall
save you. I shall make you perfect
‘You are the flaw in the pattern,
Winston. You are the stain that
must be wiped out.’
‘You will be hollow. We shall
squeeze you empty and then we
shall fill you with ourselves.’
‘You preferred to be a lunatic, a
minority of one. Only the
disciplined mind can see reality,
Winston.’
‘She betrayed you, Winston.
Immediately – unreservedly’
Paradoxical, biblical allusion,
O’Brien takes on the language of
religious god-like figure,
individuality is moulded by
power, conformity is deemed
‘perfection’
Similes make Winston individual,
the ‘hero’ non-conformist figure,
hope of audience continues but is
eventually stamped
Metaphor of vacuum, violent
imagery, individuality is removed,
Party replaces individual narrative
Ironically euphemistic, reverse
Winston’s words on themselves
Adverbs, short sentence, love and
connection irrelevant in face of
power
He had the air of a doctor, a
Irony since O’Brien is the torturer,
teacher, even a priest, anxious to
simile draws on nurturing figures
explain and persuade rather than
that are juxtaposed with the role of
punish
torture, exposing the paradoxes
and ironies in the Party’s system
that allow it to control citizens,
mentor to the hero role remains
but as a torturer
‘You remember it’
Contradiction and refutations bend
‘I do not remember it’ said O’Brien reality, short sentences epitomise
Winston’s heart sank. That was
defeat and despair
doublethink. He had a feeling of
deadly helplessness.
‘I wrote it. That is to say, I
Undermines the narratives
collaborated in writing it. No book established by Winston, Party’s
is produced individually, as you
storytelling supersedes the
know.’
individual, metafictvely meditates
on the political nature of text and
therefore the malleability of
language
Reality is in the skull
Suggests the postmodern theories
of multiple truths that are equally
valid, only to undermine with the
absolute control and dictatorship
over truth, ironic, critique of
multiplicity and flexibility of
truth, the need to re-articulate the
concreteness of truth
Individuality
Individuality
Hero’s journey
Individuality
Party vs individual
storyteller
Storytellers
Truth
Individuality
Connection
Emotion
Power
Storytellers
Hero’s journey
Truth
Truth
Language
Storytellers
Truth
If you want a picture of the future,
imagine a boot stamping on a
human face – forever.
‘We are the priests of power’
‘You are rotting away; you are
falling to pieces. What are you? A
bag of filth. Now turn round and
look into that mirror again. Do you
see that thing facing you? That is
the last man. If you are human, that
is humanity.’
‘You are a difficult case. But don’t
give up hope. Everyone is cured
sooner or later. In the end we shall
shoot you.’
The so-called laws of Nature were
nonsense. The law of gravity was
nonsense.
The arithmetical problems raised,
for instance, by such a statements
as ‘two and two make five’ were
beyond his intellectual grasp
Stupidity was as necessary as
intelligence, and as difficult to
attain.
…in the mind he had surrendered,
but he had hope to keep the inner
heart inviolate
To die hating them was freedom
Contrast with ending: loving BB
Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not
me! Julia!
Synecdochial boot has no identity
behind it but represents the
faceless collective, face is
symbolic of individuality, it is
erased by collective embodied I
the synecdochial boot, hyphen
creates pause that emphasises the
forever and heightens audience
tension
Metaphor invokes the power of
religion, religious texts are further
the dictators of truth to the
populace, heightening the potency
of the metaphor
Second person pronoun includes
audience and they feel similar
despair as Winston, emaciated
imagery reflects the state of
humanity, Winston becomes
symbol for society writ large,
mirror imagery
Dispassionate tone, grotesque
subversion of the hero’s journey,
euphemistic irony of ‘cured’,
curing is distortion of reality and
erasure of identity
Anaphora, dismissive tone,
rationality even its most
authoritative forms in scientific,
objective laws, are overcome by
totalitarian power
Internal focalisation remains,
thoughts that transform into the
irrational are still sincerely
expressed, motif shifts to show
how stupidity is needed by party
Truth
Individuality
Separation of mind and human
emotion as final frontier to
control, foreshadowing
Hero’s journey motif returns in
hope spot that foreshadows the
ending, emphatic tone, political
slogan
Exclamatory language,
fragmented sentences, repetition,
symbolic of splintered individual
Emotion
Love
Connection
Individuality
Truth
Power
Storytelling
Individuality
How power is able to
construct various
things – regardless of
individual
Hero’s journey
Truth
Individuality
Truth
Truth
Individuality
Connection
His soul as white as snow
He had won victory over himself.
He loved Big Brother.
Appendix
cracked apart by power, betrayal
of own internality
Represents purity of spirit,
religious connotations, simile is
bitterly ironic given the nature of
his beliefs
Short statement, definite tone,
disturbing lexical reversal and
negation, ironic
Big Brother does not get last word
and implies that he was defeated
through language, Newspeak din’t
take and as long as people have
speech they have freedom
Individuality
Individuality
Power
Truth
The lot