George Orwell's "1984" : Dialectical Notes

Gonzales, Analysa Marie Dialectical Notes: 1984 Part One:

Chapter 1 “…the “…the clocks clocks were were striki striking ng thirtee thirteen,” n,” (pg (pg 1). “On each landing… the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall,” (pg 1).

The use use of military military time time hints hints politic politics. s. Right away I thought of the word ‘dictator’ as I remembered the Nazi posters of Hitler. I instantly thought of Joseph Geobbel’s “Big Brother is Watching You,” (pg 2). successful use of propaganda during WWII* I noticed the capitalization of this word, and I “…the Party,” (pg 2). knew then that it referred to a political party. *Under Hitler’s rule only certain things were “Thought Police” (pg 2). safe to think. “Any sound Winston made… would be There is a lack of privacy here. This is my first picked up by it… [and] he could be seen as hint toward the government type. –When a well as heard,” (pg 3). personal life is no longer personal. “You had to live –did live, from habit that In other words, living in perhaps became instinct –in the assumption that unrecognizable (by many) fear that if you said every sound you made was overheard, and, anything even slightly incriminating, whether  except in darkness, every move you believed it or not, you’d be dead pretty scrutinized,” (pg 3). soon. Totalitarian- pertaining to a centralized govt. that doesn’t tolerate differing opinions and exercises dictatorial control over many aspects of life. Ex(s): Hitler’s Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and Mao’s China. (use in oxymoron’s) -> Doublethink “War is Peace *Through the use of propaganda-induced fear, Freedom is Slavery the Party is able to force its subjects to accept Ignorance is Strength,” (pg 4). anything and everything they say as true (psychological control). Why? –My thought to this is that the “…it was never possible nowadays to pin government hides info from the people… down any date within a year or two,” (pg 7). (Going off previous entry, ‘ignorance’ comes with a lack of knowing). “Audience much amused by shots of a… This quote alone told me a lot about the man trying to swim away with a helicopter  people… It was mortifying enough that they after him… Audience shouting with laughter  laughed when the helpless man was killed. It when he sank… There was a middle aged was truly sickening, however, when the woman… with a little boy about three years audience erupted with laughter at the sight of  old…and then the helicopter planted a 20 a woman and a child, two innocents, being kilo bomb… and there was a lot of applause killed. Their actions are appalling and it would from the party seats,” (pg 8-9). seem dehumanizing. During these two minutes, a program in the “Two Minutes Hate” (pg 11) form of a film, of which is clearly propaganda, is played. (see pg’s 11-16) “O’Brien’s political orthodoxy was not This occurred during or around the two perfect… And again, perhaps it was not minutes hate in which his distinct and clearly even unorthodoxy that was written in his different viewpoint was clear upon his face face, but simply intelligence,” (pg 11). because of knowledge. (no ignorance) I find it interesting how in all the seemingly negative description of Emmanuel Goldstein, I am left wondering if he if he is truly the ‘evil’ one… His speech makes a lot of sense to me, being that I, unlike those under the influence of the Party, actually have those same freedoms as he. “…when Oceania was at war with one of  ***Refer back to ‘war is peace’ in the first part these powers it was generally at peace with of the slogan. The oxymoron itself makes no the other,” (pg 13). sense, until broken down… Psychological “The horrible thing… was not that one was was Winston did not understand what made him Control

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Gonzales, Analysa Marie Dialectical Notes: 1984 obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid jumping in… A hideous ecstasy to of fear… a desire to kill, to torture… seemed to flow through the whole group…. turning one even against one’s own will... The rage that one felt was undirected.” (pg 14) “Thought crime” (pg 19). “…every record of everything you had ever  done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten,” (pg 19).

 join in with the others during Two Minutes Hate. Then, when it was explained that his rage was indirect and switched suddenly from Goldstein to Big Brother, and then turned to adoration for Big brother, one he loathed, I concluded that within the program, there must be some form of subliminal propaganda. Implies totalitarianism. (no differing opinions) The moment there became available in history a single record of one person believing something different could always trigger the same thoughts to another person.

Chapter 2 “’Want to see the hanging!’ … Children always clamored to be taken to see [the hangings of Eurasian prisoners, guilty of war  crimes],” (pg 23). “It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children,” (24). “Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull,” (pg 27 ). “Thoughtcrime does not entail death; thoughtcrime IS death,” (pg death,” (pg 28).

Again, I find the dehumanizing and the loss of  innocence on the behalf of the children is mortifying. I find it sad that children are placed in the lines of the war at all. (also pg 24) “|“ | A lot of irony present here… Even the space in your head wasn’t safe (though police). To think otherwise what the government tell you would mean you were going to die.

Chapter 3 “[His parents] must evidently have been swallowed up in one of the first great purges of the Fifties,” (pg 29). “He could not remember what had happened, but he knew… the lives of his mother and his sister had been sacrificed to his own,” (pg 30). “Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to an ancient time…where there were still privacy, love, and friendship, and the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason…Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, or deep or complex sorrows,” (pg 30). [Shakespeare quote] (pg 31). “…clutching his hand as they hurried down, down, down into some place deep in the earth,” (pg 33).

I’m beginning to notice a pattern; anything and everything that provides a link to the truth of  the past is being destroyed. The book often refers to this. I’m a bit confused as to what exactly the importance of  this line and/or story is. Does it provide with the effect on memories of everyone? Of course, tragedy is defined by having loved first what was lost. A loss cannot be a tragedy if it is not ‘heart felt’ by another in some way, whether that be through love or sympathies. I find this very interesting as it was phrased just right. It is possible to say things like love no longer existed. They must have burned all of his works… He said the atomic bomb had been dropped upon Colchester, his city of residence. I think this place was a bomb shelter.

“The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible,” (pg 34). “’Who control the past controls the future; who controls the future controls the past,’” (pg 35).

With only three political parties, each having conquered about a third of the world, it would nearly impossible to end the fued. And war is necessary. (Read on). People can look at the past as an example for  themselves. Altering the past can grant that people will never learn. IGNORANCE

Psychological Control

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Gonzales, Analysa Marie Dialectical Notes: 1984 “Reality Control” = “doublethink” (pg 35)

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Chapter 4 Pages 38-41 interestingly deal with the true ‘foreshadowing ability’ Big Brother claims to have. Things happen and then they report them as if it’s future news and/or if they’re wrong corrections are made to the history to meet the demand/criteria of the so called ‘predictions.’ (ex 1) “Books, also, were recalled and Books were altered and burned. This is just rewritten again and again and were like the Nazi Regime. It is clear that the quote, invariably reissued without any admission “Who controls the past control the future…” is that any alteration had been made,” (pg 40). true in so many ways. (Stunt on knowledge)** (ex 2) “Statistics were just as much fantasy Does this quote suggest statistics of the in their original version as their rectified [past/present] are merely a man’s use of  version,” (pg 41). imagination? I find page 47 interesting… Winston makes up this entire life of a non existent man. And he does it well; there are many hints at propaganda in this piece… “Comrade Ogilvy, who had never existed in The evidence is there, obviously. We know the present, now existed in the past, and Charlemagne and Julius Caser were real when once the act of forgery was forgotten, simply because of documentation… But with he would exist just as authentically, and false documentation it is completely possible upon the same evidence as Charlemagne or  to forge an existence in history that was never  Julius Caesar,” (page 48). truly there.

Chapter 5 “’I like to see them kicking. And above all, at the end, the tongue sticking right out, and blue-a quite bright blue. That’s the detail that appeals to me,’” (page 50). “’We’re destroying words… hundreds of  them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to bone,’” (pg 51). “’…Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning,” (pg 52). “’Don’t you see the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?’” (pg 52)

“’…Freedom is slavery,’” (pg 53). “Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had the right to,” (pg 59). “…the physical type set up by the Party as an ideal-…blonde-haired…-existed and even predominated,” (pg 60).

This quote disturbed me… What is accepted in their society is very different from our own; and it would seem those, other than Winston, are both ignorant and inhumane… I realize why they are cutting down the language (to limit what people have the capability to think). This appeals to me in so many ways. Oldspeak, as they call it is anything but vague; vagueness itself defines the destruction of words… (As of the last quote, I rest my case).  I think I understand this quote now. To be under their control is ‘freedom’ though it is, in reality, psychological slavery. (works oppos.) As the reader we know this is true (ironic). I find it peculiar as to whether their memories have slipped because of just age or h orror. One must wonder if the other characters, besides Winston, have this feeling… Blonde-haired was Blonde-haired was the detail that clued me in; I specifically remember, during Hitler’s regime, he believed blondes were of a ‘supreme race.’

Chapter 6 This chapter is composed of a diary entry; a painful memory he has of once paying a prostitute. It provides insight to his character history with women and his wife.

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Gonzales, Analysa Marie Dialectical Notes: 1984 Chapter 7 “[The evidence] was enough to blow the Party to atoms, if in some way it could have been published to the world and its significance made known,” (pg 78). “If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable-what then?” (pg 80).

Clearly if Winston had the chance to make this one slip known, the chance to leak out this vital piece of information, he would. His fear, however, is the only thing that roots him. This suggests helplessness in everyone, including you. You could never deny something even if you knew it to be false.

Chapter 8 “The older generation had mostly been wiped out in the great purges of the Fifties and Sixties, and the few who survived long ago been terrified into complete intellectual surrender,” (pg 87). “The hunting-down and destruction of books had been done with the same thoroughness … everywhere else,” (pg 97). “He thought with a kind of astonishment of  the biological useless of pain and fear, the treachery of the human body which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment when a special effort is needed,” (pg 102). “The place where there is no darkness was the imagined future…” (pg 104).

I bet they were killed because they were a link to the past; the REAL past and the truths of  the true history.

The burning of the books by the Nazis… ** When a person of today is asked what kind of  weapons governments use against people, fear is the one thing they forget. Once a person falls into fear’s grasp, they can’t remove themselves. They are forever trapped. Poetic almost. The light is a world he loves… (at least in the end…)

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Gonzales, Analysa Marie Dialectical Notes: 1984 Part Two:

Chapter 1 “In front of him was an enemy who was trying to kill him; in front of him, also, was a human creature… He had instinctively started forward to help her,” (pg 106).

It’s interesting to see so early on that even thought Winston lives in a time of hatred, he still maintains those few things that make him humane, that separates him from eve ryone.

Chapter 2 “’I hate purity, I hate goodness. I don’t want virtue to exist anywhere…’” (pg 126). “No emotion was pure b/c everything was mixed up with fear and hatred,” (pg 126).

Isn’t that backwards? –What one strives for in their world is what gives them their virtue. People’s lives were overrun with the practice of hatred toward others rather than love.

Chapter 3 “There was a direct, intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy,” (pg 133). “…People were encouraged to be fond of  their children in almost the old-fashioned way. Their children… were systematically turned against their parents,” (pg 133). “The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police.

The Party must truly fear what comes out of  the act of sex… This quote is one one I find most interesting as it’s apparent in the story. People were encouraged to trust in their  children, telling them much, however, they’re living in complete fear that their children will give in their name. This is powerful as family is something you would think would be so strong…

Chapter 5 “Another bomb fell… and several dozen Why ‘children?’ Why not ‘people?’ Is the a children were blown to pieces,” (pg 149). sign of innocence being taken away? Some of the lines in the story do surprise me. For instance on page 152, Julia talks about how she thinks the Party makes up a lot to get you to think a certain way. She says the most important thing one must do is ‘pretend to believe in [it].’ I wasn’t sure if there were more people like Winston, who realized the use of propaganda. “It was true that she regarded the whole war  How could someone not notice that? This kind as a sham; but apparently she had not even of thing makes me wonder how the system noticed that the name of the enemy had works. If a war was going on, you would think changed,” (pg 154). one would remember the enemy… “’History has stopped. Nothing exists except The Party extends its power in a way that it an endless present in which the Party is controls time through media and propaganda. always right,” (pg 155). And whatever they say happened, happened. “By lack of understanding they remained Had they known what the Party was doing, or  sane. They simply swallowed everything, rather, had they been fully aware, the just and what they swallowed did them no harm, might have gone insane. Perhaps the only because it left no residue behind,” (pg 156). thing keeping their sanity was indeed the lack.

Chapter 7 “The proles had stayed human… They had held on to primitive emotions,” (pg 165). “’ If you can feel that staying human is worth feel that staying

I wonder if the proles knew what was happening. This explains prole law. It makes sense. sense. –Everyone –Everyone has ultimately lost

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Gonzales, Analysa Marie Dialectical Notes: 1984 while hile… … you you’’ve beate eaten n th them, em,’” (pg16 pg166) 6)..

thei heir hum human anit ity y to to the the Part arty.

Chapter 8 Page 168 describes the rich lives of those in the Inner Party. I find this interesting mainly because I was given the idea that the Party disliked having everyone poor except a few… The irony involved in the following pages of Winston meeting with O’Brien is so great. His questions and his overall observing of Winston and Julia works both ways, whether one knows he’s against them or not…(*) *Ex: “’I assume that you have a hiding place O’Brien asked this simply so he would catch of some kind?’” (pg 177). them later in the story.

Chapter 9 “…when the general hatred of Eurasia had boiled up… it had been announced that Oceania was not at war after all with Eurasia. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Eurasia was an ally. There was, of course, no admission that the change had taken place,” (pg 180). “Any detailed report of events demanded care and imagination,” (pg 183). “Secondly, there is no longer, in a martial sense, anything to fight about,” (pg 187). “The world of today is a bare, hungry, dilapidated place compared with the world that existed before 1914, and still more so if  compared with the imaginary future to which the people of that period looked forward,” (pg 188). “It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in a sense of  personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste,” (pg 190). “In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance,” (pg 190).

Does this mean that the three central parties change enemies and allies when their  populace’s hatred for the enemy has ‘boiled’ to a certain temperament? Also, why do they leave no record of ever having been enemies with the other party? I understand how but how but not necessarily why . I’m sure they had to make sure they didn’t add in details from earlier and now obsolete prints. Hadn’t each country a vast expanse of  materials for economical purposes? Why war? Perhaps the greatest imagery to the future would be the aspect of technology. But the chapter in Goldstein’s book explains clearly that technology didn’t ever really evolve. If the world came to such trash, then what other  reason than power kept it together? Clearly this paragraph speaks of communism. The Party states that this form of government could never work, yet isn’t that how their  system works in a sense? Nobody has anything and there is in a sense a caste system. You either have power or you don’t. True, any well educated populace would know this would never work and would of  against it. But a poor/uneducated pe rson would assume they would be granted more.

(Continued) “The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor,” (191). “…it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph,” (pg 192). “If [man] were allowed to contact with foreigners he would discover that they were creatures similar to himself and that most of  what he has been told about them is lies.

So the Party already has everything it needs economically but that’s not enough. Destroying the people won’t rid them of them. I take this as a way of saying the person must be sane, but barely, as if on the verge of going insane. –As if knowledge itself, if ga ined, would destroy their mind. The people must believe that those who are enemies of the Party are inhumane. Gaining this knowledge would destroy the imaginary world constructed around them. The Party

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Gonzales, Analysa Marie Dialectical Notes: 1984 The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred, and self  righteousness on while morale depends might evaporate,” (pg 196). “The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further,” (pg 205). “In a Party member… not even the smallest deviation of opinion on the most unimportant subject can be tolerated,” (pg 210). “For it is only through reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely… If human equality is to be forever averted… then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity,” (216).

probably fears an uprising that has happened throughout history… An example of this would be the Americas breaking off from Great Britain ( Common Sense by Thomas Paine). Clearly this is talking of the propaganda and its many forms. Technology was used solely for this purpose so when they came out other  forms might not have been needed. Everyone must agree with the leader says, with what is expected of them. This is the definition of a totalitarian state. If the “High,” as they are called, wish to maintain their places above all the rest of  society, using contradictions like ‘War is Peace’ and “The Ministry of Peace (involved in War)” is very much necessary.

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Gonzales, Analysa Marie Dialectical Notes: 1984

Part Three:

Chapter 2 “He confessed that he had murdered his wife, although he knew, and his questioners must have known, that his wife was still alive,” (pg 242). “’You are mentally deranged. You suffer  from a defective memory. You are unable to remember real events, and you persuade yourself that you remember other events which never happened,’” (pg 245). “It was the photograph. It was another copy of the photograph… he had chanced upon eleven years ago and promptly destroyed. For an instant it was before his eyes, then it was out of sight again… ’It does exist. You remember it!’ (Winston) ‘I do not remember it.’” (O’Brien) (pg 247).

Though it doesn’t really matter what’s true or  false, the point is to free them of all bad thoughts… I wonder if his confession was really was of what he did in his thoughts? I’m surprised as I am sure this would surely drive Winston mad. Yet until the very end, Winston managed to cling to the little bit that still made him human. He was able to hold onto what made him different from the drones. Right here it was made clear that the Party was built solely upon psychiatric p sychiatric control. Fear  and pain and hatred was induced physically and mentally. Keeping them somewhat uneducated and exposed to propaganda was the only power they truly have. Power over  one’s mentality equals strength over all.

Chapter 3 “’Power “’Power is not a means; means; itit is an end,” (p (p 263) (?) I’d I’d like to to discuss discuss this this quote. quote. “’…Power is power over humans. Over the They can only win over the people through he body-but, above all, over the mind,” (pg 264) minds through fear. “’Nothing exists except through human And when O’Brien states that he never saw consciousness,’” (pg 265). the picture, he demonstrates this matter. “’Power is in tearing human minds to pieces As I stated previously, keeping people on the and putting them together again in new verge of total insanity is the Party’s means for  shapes of your owns choosing,’” (pg 266). mentality of the populace. On page 269, Winston says “I know you will fail; there is some principle…’” I think this principle he believes exists is this: An ending to even the greatest of civilizations is inevitable. In the end, humans are, as O’Brien said, ‘destined to fail.’ In a sense both are right. On 271, O’Brien insists that though Winston might feel his morals make him more human, that he is alone as the only humane human left. Then he shows h im his reflection. It was a message to Winston that though he considered himself humane, he looked anything but human. “’If you are human, that is humanity,” (272).

Chapter 4 “Sanity wa was st statistical,” (p (pg 27 277).

He ac accepted ev everything. Th The de degradation of  of  this one man has haunted me.

Chapter 6 “The Chestnut Tree was almost empty” (pg 287)

Symbolism: “Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me.”

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