PART 1- CHAPTER 5

Characters

Winston Smith, Syme, Parsons, and other workers in the factory canteen.

Settings

The factory canteen.

Summary

This chapter begins with Winston Smith that is going to have breakfast with all his collegues before starting work. When he has received his breakfast he chooses a table and starts eating. Near him there is Syme, a person that is working in the Research Department , an expert engaged in compiling the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary. While Winston and Syme start a conversation about the development of Syme’s work, Parsons [a friend of Winston’s] arrives with his meal and sits near them. While they are eating and speaking together the telescreens make an announcement from the Ministry of Plenty: a voice says that all the workers have won the battle of production....a great development for Oceania’s economy….so more benefits for all. Immediately all the comrades feel happy hearing this. Of course Winston does not believe in the words of the Big Brother but he does not say anything. The announcement from the Ministry of Plenty ends with a trumpet call which gives way to tinny music. While Winston is smoking his cigarette and looking around, suddenly he sees the girl with dark hair that is looking at him… and a horrible pang of terror goes through him because he thoinks that she is a member of the Psychopolice. The chapter ends with the telescreens that give the signal to return to work and all the three men come back into the factory.

PART 1 - CHAPTER 6

Characters

Winston Smith

Settings

Winston’s home

Summary

This chapter starts with the protagonist that is writing on his diary about his experience with a prostitute….a sort of “therapy” for himself in order to try to forget his ex wife called Katherine.

He stops for a moment, shuts his eyes and presses his fingers against them, trying to remove that horrible vision that dominates in his head. He continues describing on his diary that holy night with that woman….an old woman…maybe 50 years old. He stops again, thinking of Katherine. Katherine was a tall , fair-haired girl, very straight, with splendid movements, but she did not have a thought in her head that was not a slogan, she was not capable of swallowing if the Party handed it out to her. Winston is confused, angry, and tired and he would like to shout a string of filthy words at the top of his voice. This chapter ends with Winston that writes the last words of that filthy and holy night.

Focus on some relevant points of chapters 5 and 6

This book is a very “riveting” text, written in a simple and istantaneous language offering more “space” for the protagonist’s psyche than for the descriptions of  the landscape that surrounds him. This is a catastrophic universe,  a sort of projection of  the future that the author paints with a fantasy that is invaded by a disquieting drama, that proposes the painful event of degeneration of the individual destiny. It is a book that is also a sort of premonition of a future day that is not so far. The book’s title is the result of the reversal of the composition date’s last two numbers – 1948 / 1984.

“1984” is the most classic example of dystopia. George Orwell wrote this novel to favour all the democracy’s arguments and also to condemn the Russian Communism, but he did not want to criticize that from an opposite ideological point of view, because he was an anarchist.

As to the chapters that I have read, my personal considerations are that these two chapters are very important to understand the “core” of this book, because there are many dystopian concepts both in the 5^th and the 6^th chapters.

Some of these can be: the frenetic work of Syme to invent Newspeak, a new language  for all the people. His effort is to create a very poor language, only based on essential words. The aim of this operation is to limit the people’s imagination or simply  their capacity of thinking; the physical attraction between humans is forbidden, as well as weddings and sex. We all know that without these feelings all the men are incomplete and prisoners of their desires and instinct; every wrong thought is severely punished; human beings cannot express any judgments; the government’s interference in the people’s private life is total and every person that wants to be a PERSON, is considered a rebel.

Making a general evaluation of Winston Smith’s character I think that he is a person that would like to know and say the truth and he does not succeed in non-thinking. From this attitute a sense of bother slowly develops inside him up to become an explicit rebellion act. He knows that he can be punished, but his powerful will wins his fear.

These two chapters work for the whole book to show that the Party use any way they could to control the people. The Party don’t care about the people’s life is happy or not. The only important thing is despotism.

1. The canteen

“From the grille at the counter the steam of stew came pouring forth, with a sour metallic smell which did not quite overcome the fumes of Victory Gin.

Had it always been like this? Had food always tasted like this? He looked round the canteen. A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of innumerable bodies ; battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close together that you sat with elbows touching; bent spoons, dented trays, coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy, grime in every crack; and a sourish, composite smell of bad gin and bad coffee and metallic stew and dirty clothes.”

Our feelings of the canteen

 All the details of the canteen make us feel so nasty and terrible. The trays are greasy, and the food smells terrible though in the book doesn’t mention the taste but I am sure that it must be even worse. We’ve thought about why the workers of the canteen make it clean? I don’t think it just tell that the workers are lazy, there must be something that the writer want to tell us.

How the description of the canteen helps us understand the society? 

Try to imagine, if the scene of the canteen in 1984 appears in our school canteen, what would you do? At least I will rush out the canteen that makes me feel so nasty. Maybe I am so angry that I will complain about the canteen with my teacher or make my advice to the school leaders. What about in Oceania? Can they rush out the canteen with an angry face? Can they complain about the condition with other people? Can they make their own advice to the leaders of the country? No! That will make them the target of the thought police, and also means they will die soon…Because of all the above, the people of Oceania can only get used to all the terrible things in order to survive the horrible society. As a normal person will certainly be angry with such a terrible environment, but what we see is nobody really cares about how dirty the trays and bowls are; how nasty the food is, they eat there, talk their, do the things they usually do with a general expression.

This is the unusual part. People have lost their sense about a small detail of their daily life. We usually call this kind of people ‘stupid’. Yes, they are turning into a kind of stupid that the party want them to be.

Canteen is just a small detail of people’s daily life, but writer catch the detail to show us how horrible the society is. The society is not only rotten on the surface but has permeated into the soul of every human beings in this country.

2. Syme

Syme’s appearance

“He was a tiny creature, smaller than Winston, with dark hair and large, protuberant eyes, at once mournful and derisive, which seemed to search your face closely while he was speaking to you.”

What information can we get from his appearance?

We think the language of a good novel must be terse but powerful, there is no nonsense. Why George Orwell created a character like this, there must be some other meanings hidden in his words.

Syme’s eyes are mournful and derisive. We think the eye contact of one person can’t cheat others. Syme’s mournful eye contact can almost tell us that he’s miserable destiny. The derisive eye contact make us feel that he thinks all the people can’t understand him, he despise all the people around him. 

“Search your face closely while he was speaking to you.” We think from this detail, we can say that Syme has a special ability, that is he can see through everyone and he is searching you all the time. His eye contact is sharp, but we don’t think he will call the thought police and arrest anyone, maybe he is just searching for a person who has the same idea with him, because we can feel his lonely through the paragraph.

Why is Syme crazy about Newspeak?

As we know he is a crazy admirer of Newspeak and also is a loyal party member. He can’t help to talk about the Newspeak all the time. Newspeak is a kind of tool that some of the party members create. It is used to control the mind of the people. I think Syme is so smart that he is sure to know the essence of the Newspeak, but why he is still crazy about it? Does he really love it or it is just a lie?

From the book: “He had brightened up immediately at the mention of Newspeak. It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms”.  What’s Syme’s opinion of the Newspeak? It seems that he is excited about it, he enjoys doing his work very much, but we don’t think that is his real emotion.

From the beginning we said that his eye contact has almost show his miserable destiny. I think he is not really crazy about it. He pretends to be a crazy admirer of it just like an actor who is playing a role that he doesn’t love to be. Syme is just trying his best to be against of his miserable destiny, he wants to survive his destiny. That’s the most usual emotion of human beings to cherish his own life.

The scene society makes me feel depressed.

Death is waiting for Syme

He has touched too much about the inner party besides his smartness; there is no doubt that he is to die sooner or later. The Party wants all the people to turn into a kind of stupid that they want them to be, of course the smartness of Syme is not allowed for sure.

3. Newspeak

What is Newspeak?

Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. In the year 1984 there was not as yet anyone who used Newspeak as his sole means of communication, either in speech or writing. The leading articles in The Times were written in it, but could only be carried out by a specialist. It was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or Standard English) by about the year 2050. Meanwhile it gained ground steadily, all Party members tending to use Newspeak words and grammatical constructions more and more in their everyday speech.

The difference between Standard English and Newspeak

As we know, English is becoming more and more beautiful and rich. The words in English are brought from many languages such as typhoon from Chinese and sushi from Japanese. English is the richest language in the world because it has over one million words. As the world is developing, people need new words to express their new feelings, new inventions and new actions.

But the new language in Oceania is just the opposite.

In Newspeak words are reduced. Newspeak was designed to remove all ambiguity and shades of meaning from language, in order to make it a terse mechanism purely for the conveyance of information, without any capacity to form truly complex thought.

There is an example:

In English, we have fast, quick, rush, rapid … and many other words mean the same kind of meaning. Also, we have slow, largo, lumberly… and many other words for the opposite meaning. But in newspeak, fast is the same. But plus fast, double plus fast even triple plus fast, unfast, plus unfast, double plus unfast, will take other words’ place which I mentioned.

 In the book, the author uses Syme’s words to tell this reduction: “Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take “good”, for instance. If you have a word like “good”, what need is there for a word like “bad”? “Ungood” will do just as well—better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of “good”, what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like “excellent” and “splendid” and all the rest of them? “Plusgood” covers the meaning, or “doubleplusgood” if you want something stronger still.”

Winston's opinion and attitude of Newspeak

The author doesn’t show Winston’s opinion directly, and it seems that Winston doesn’t hate Newspeak since he nearly tells everything that he thinks is terrible and bad to Julia, such as the bogus news. But he doesn’t mention Newspeak. Also, when Syme can’t stop his big mouth on Newspeak, the author doesn’t say that Winston feels disagreeable. Instead, he feels like kind of interesting.

But in fact, Winston is against Newspeak.

Newspeak is for the autarch to control people and prevent people from knowing what is true and what is false. They don’t want the people, especially the party members, to know the past and the history, so they use Newspeak to brush this knowledge out of their mind.

Winston’s diary is just written to let somebody know the truth. He wants somebody to read it and realize that the Party is disingenuous. He wants to let the history be. That is against the Newspeak language

Our opinion and attitude of Newspeak’s essence

Newspeak is no more than a tool of controlling people since the most merit of Newspeak is that thoughtcrime would be impossible in Newspeak. The Party tries to control people in a way that destroy the civilization.

“In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.”

Though Syme is crazy in Newspeak, he nearly tells the essence of Newspeak. The central principle of Newspeak is that it makes it impossible to contemplate rebellion against the state. In Newspeak peace is war, love is hate, freedom is slavery.

“The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought—that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc—should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods.”

4. Winston’s wife, Catherine

 “Katharine was a tall, fair-haired girl, very straight, with splendid movements. She had a bold, aquiline face, a face that one might have called noble until one discovered that there was as nearly as possible nothing behind it.”

Katharine is a woman that seems good in surface. Winston won’t separate with her unless there is something that he hates a lot. That’s Katherine’s loyalty to the party.

“Perhaps it was only that he knew her more intimately than he knew most people—that she had without exception the most stupid, vulgar, empty mind that he had ever encountered. She had not a thought in her head that was not a slogan, and there was no imbecility, absolutely none that she was not capable of swallowing if the Party handed it out to her. ‘The human sound-track’ he nicknamed her in his own mind.”

In some way, Katherine’s crazyness and loyalty cause Winston’s hate to the Party.

Why the old prostitute appear in this chapter

This detail works for the description of the society. Prole’s lives are quite hard so the use anyway they can to make money. The Party doesn’t want to punish they, but also is happy to see the prole is degenerate. The party just let them go.

Comments

References:

http://donh.best.vwh.net/Esperanto/EBook/chap03.html

http://www.enotes.com/1984/

http://www.k-1.com/Orwell/

http://www.newspeak.com/Newspeak.htm

http://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/

http://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/patee.html

http://students.ou.edu/C/Kara.C.Chiodo-1/orwell.html