Britney Grant Chapter Summaries of “1984” By George Orwell
Book 1 Chapter 1 * It all starts on a cold, bright day in April 1984. At 1 p.m., Winston Smith, a small, frail man of 39 years drags himself home for lunch at his apartment on the 7th floor of the Victory Mansions. The face of Big Brother, the leader of the Party and a heavily mustached and ruggedly handsome man of about 45, appears on giant, colorful posters everywhere in Airstrip One, Oceania saying "BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU," runs the caption.
Book 1 Chapter 2 * Winston believes that the stability of the Party depends on having a lot of paralyzingly stupid people around like Tom Parsons, his neighbor and coworker. The Party decides everyone needs to love the Party and not anyone else. So the Party eliminated love among family members, actual lovers, friends, and one-night-stands. The Party trains and encourages children to monitor their parents for symptoms of unorthodoxy.
Book 1 Chapter 3 Since thinking about the future is really just depressing, Winston dreams about the past. More specifically, he dreams about his mother’s disappearance when he was age 10 or 11, the alluring brunette at his workplace, and Shakespeare. A whistle from the telescreen wakes Winston up at 7:30 a.m. Rise and shine, dear dystopian citizen.
Book 1 Chapter 4 * Apparently, the Party despises littering. Oceanians are to deposit every scrap of paper they find into the ominously named "memory holes," slits in and alongside buildings leading to underground furnaces where all documents are destroyed. Winston’s job consists of faking the truth. Seriously. He alters print sources to ensure that they are in agreement with the Party’s version of past and present events. Sometimes, this includes tracking down and forever erasing references to certain persons from historical documents once the Party has "vaporized" such persons.
Book 1 Chapter 5 * Winston has lunch in the canteen with coworker/comrade Syme, who works in the Research Department. Syme is a genius of sorts, but too smart for his own good. The brunette co-worker Winston fancies but hates suddenly stares at him in the canteen. Winston is so paranoid he confuses lusty looks with thoughtcrime suspicions. If this girl is a member of the Thought Police, he’s up criminal creek without an alibi paddle.
Book 1 Chapter 6 * He starts off by discussing his encounter with a prostitute in 1981, moves on to his fifteen month marriage to Katharine, and finishes off with the Party’s denouncement of physical attraction and sex for pleasure. Winston just wants someone to love and to break away from the chastity that is so deeply ingrained in Party loyalty.
Book 1 Chapter 7 * Winston looks through a children’s history book and copies the passage about capitalists into his diary. The Party claims in said passage that it has increased the standard of living from past times. But Sherlock Winston suspects this is a lie. Ultimately, there’s just no way to tell.
Book 1 Chapter 8 * Winston passes by the secondhand store in which he bought his diary. We meet Mr. Charrington, a 63-year-old widower who had owned the shop for about 30 years. Winston purchases a glass paperweight containing pink coral. He likes it because 1) it’s useless and 2) it has a link to the past. Chatting with the owner, Winston is soon led upstairs to a room in which Mr. Charrington and his deceased wife used to live, but that is now abandoned.
Book 2 Chapter 1 * Winston leaves his cubicle at work for the restroom. Four days have passed since we last saw Winston wandering the prole district. He encounters the brunette "spy" in the corridor – she falls, hurting her arm, and passes him a scrap of paper folded into a square. The note says, "I love you." Winston suddenly feels an intense desire to live. Then he doesn’t know what to do.
Book 2 Chapter 2 * Winston follows the brunette’s directions and the two meet in the countryside in some bushes, away from telescreens and hidden microphones. The brunette kisses Winston, and tells him that her name is Julia. Winston feels confident with the hiding place, given Julia’s apparent experience. Julia tears off her Junior Anti-Sex League sash and shares a small slab of luxury chocolate with him. They continue walking through the bushes and into the woods. In the woods, Julia tears off her overalls, flings them aside, and they do the deed.
Book 2 Chapter 3 * Upon waking up, Julia instructs Winston on how to return to London. Over the coming weeks, the two arrange several meetings but only succeeded in getting it on once during the month of May. Engaging in what they call "talking by installments" in prole districts after work, Julia reveals that she is twenty-six-years-old, lives in a hostel with thirty other girls, and had her first sexual encounter when she was sixteen with a sixty-year-old Party member who later committed suicide to avoid arrest.
Book 2 Chapter 4 * Winston rents the room above Mr. Charrington’s secondhand shop for private time with Julia. The pair has been preparing for Hate Week at work, and because of the longer hours, Winston has become increasing frustrated sexually. He daydreams about growing old and living a carefree life with Julia.
Book 2 Chapter 5 * Winston and Julia speak about politics and the Brotherhood. But Winston is annoyed by Julia’s selfish concerns and lack of lofty rebellious goals. He speaks of questioning the Party’s authority, an organized revolution, his intellectual crush on O’Brien, and passing on his efforts to the next generation. Julia isn’t down for that.
Book 2 Chapter 6 * O’Brien makes supposedly subversive contact with Winston in the corridor at the Ministry of Truth. Winston feels as though he has been waiting for this moment for his entire life. O’Brien discusses with Winston the tenth edition of the Newspeak dictionary, and tells him that he can take a peek at it if he makes a visit one evening.
Book 2 Chapter 7 * Winston awakes one morning in the room atop Mr. Charrington’s shop, crying. He tells Julia about his dreams of the past – repressed memories of his childhood revealed. Up until this moment, Winston has believed that he had murdered his mother. But the dream says differently.
Book 2 Chapter 8 Winston and Julia arrive at O’Brien’s luxurious flat. Upon Julia’s exit, O’Brien questions Winston about his hiding place and tells him about the importance of Goldstein’s book, a manifesto of sorts, which he shall arrange for Winston to receive. Someone will drop off Goldstein’s book in a public place, and Winston is to have it read and returned within 14 days.
Book 2 Chapter 9 * Goldstein’s manifesto is now in Winston’s hands. Winston goes to his private room atop Mr. Charrington’s shop to read it. Having worked more than 90 hours in five days leading up to the commencement of Hate Week, he is pooped.
Book 2 Chapter 10 * Winston and Julia awake at eight-thirty p.m. The two discuss how the future depends on the proles and their progeny. They realize that the two of them are kind of screwed. Or rather, that "they are the dead." The troops storm in through the window and proceed to kick and beat Winston and Julia. The troops drag Julia away. Mr. Charrington finally enters the room; Winston realizes that he is a member of the Thought Police.
Book 3 Chapter 1 * Winston wakes up in a bright, high-ceilinged, windowless cell in the Ministry of Love. At last, he is at the place where there is no darkness – the lights never go off. Four telescreens monitor him, one on each wall. He is referred to as "6079 Smith W." The cell is crowded with ten or fifteen people, and very noisy.
Book 3 Chapter 2 * Ten torture methods later…Winston (like all the other prisoners) confesses to a long range of crimes. O’Brien is still running the torture show. Turns out, he’s been surveying Winston for the last seven years. Or so he says. Winston is strapped onto a torture machine that is designed to stretch backbones until they break. O’Brien controls the dial that directs the machine. Suspense builds. So does the tension. O’Brien informs Winston that his crime was refusing to accept the Party’s control. Winston even went so far as to rely on his own memory. Winston becomes brainwashed, as tends to happen when you’re on a backbone-stretching machine. O’Brien informs Winston that Julia has long betrayed him, quickly and easily. Winston, by now focused on the backbone-stretching machine.
Book 3 Chapter 3 * After weeks of torture, O’Brien tells Winston that he is about to enter the second stage of the three-stage process of "reintegration": learning, understanding, and acceptance. O’Brien reveals a cornucopia of information to start the process of reintegration.
Book 3 Chapter 4 * After weeks or maybe months, the torture eases. Winston grows fatter and stronger. Voluntarily, Winston tries to make himself believe in Party slogans, and writes them down. He tries to learn to be stupid. One night, he screams out Julia’s name in the middle of a nightmare. Guards come for him, and he realizes that he has a new goal: to die hating the Party. Now that would be a personal victory. To die hating the Party would be freedom attained. Winston faces O’Brien, and tells him he hates Big Brother. O’Brien replies that the time has come for Winston to go to Room 101.
Book 3 Chapter 5 * O’Brien tells Winston that the worst thing in the world is in Room 101. O’Brien threatens Winston by showing him a cage of large, vociferous rats, waiting to gnaw away at Winston’s face. Winston, with the rats just inches away from his face, is terrified. Winston shouts out, "do it to Julia!" That does the trick for O’Brien. He’s satisfied. No more private loyalty = only party loyalty to Big Brother.
Book 3 Chapter 6 * At 3 p.m. one day, months later, Winston sits at the Chestnut Tree Café, where dismissed Party members go to have gin. He is content, and now accepts all that the Party says and does. He reminisces about that time back in March, 1985 when he had seen and spoken to Julia again. She had stiffened, her physique had coarsened and her face had been scarred by the torture endured. He daydreams about his time at the Ministry of Love. Most of all, though, he kind of wants to die via bullet to the brain. He looks up at the picture of Big Brother on the telescreen, and feels joy over his love for him. He has achieved a victory over the traitor he used to be. *

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