1984 Chapter 1 Summary
1984 By George Orwell
Setting
Chapter one of 1984 is set in London, Oceania,
Main Characters
Winston Smith – is the protagonist of the novel. Winston is a 39-year-old Outer Party functionary who privately rebels against the Party's totalitarian rule.
Big Brother – he is an invention of the Party whose face appears on coins and posters throughout Oceania.
O'Brien – is the antagonist of the novel. O'Brien is a corrupt bureaucrat, a member of the Inner Party, and a symbol of dehumanizing and dehumanized despotism.
Julia/the Dark-Haired Girl – she is Winston's dark-haired, sexually rebellious 26-year-old lover, who works in the Fiction Department at the Ministry of Truth.
Emmanuel Goldstein – is an exiled former Party leader, who is vilified by the party as the Enemy of the People.
Plot Summary
As the clocks strike thirteen on a day in April, Winston Smith, a low-ranking member of the Outer Party, climbs the stairs to his flat in Victory Mansions. He has left his work at the Records Department early in order to write in a diary he has bought in a junk shop in a proletarian slum in London, the capital of Airstrip One in the superstate of Oceania. Because the electricity that powers the elevator has been turned off in preparation for Hate Week, Winston, who is 39 years old, frail, fair-haired, and wearing a blue Party uniform slowly climbs seven dingy flights of stairs to his flat. He limps because of a varicose ulcer on his right ankle. On each landing of the stairs hangs a poster depicting the enormous face of a man with a black mustache, with a caption that reads, BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.
As he enters the flat, Winston hears a voice reading a list of figures about the production of pig iron. It is coming from a telescreen, which is embedded in the wall and can't be shut off, though the sound can be turned down. As Winston looks out the window at the cold, colorless city, he sees posters of Big Brother plastered on every corner and the word "INGSOC" written on a wall. A police helicopter hovers near the windows of a distant building, spying on people, which reminds Winston that the Thought Police can see and hear him through the telescreen, so he keeps his back turned to it.
Gazing through his window at the rows of rotting and bombed-out buildings, Winston can't remember whether London has always looked this way. He is distracted by the sight of four gigantic glittering white pyramids: his workplace, the Ministry of Truth, which controls the media and education; the Ministry of Peace (Minipax), which conducts war; the terrifying Ministry of Love (Miniluv), which maintains law and order; and the Ministry of Plenty (Miniplenty) which manages economic affairs.
Controlling his facial expression, Winston faces the telescreen. By leaving work early he has missed his opportunity to eat in the canteen, and though he is hungry he must save the only food in the house, a piece of dark-colored bread, for breakfast the next day. He drinks a teacup of oily-smelling Victory Gin and takes out a Victory cigarette. Sitting in an alcove out of sight of the telescreen, Winston takes out a penholder and nib, a bottle of ink, and a blank book. Since there are no laws in Oceania, it's not illegal to keep a diary, but Winston knows that if he's discovered the punishment will be death or 25 years in a forced-labor camp. He writes what he believes to be the date; April 4th, 1984 in the diary, but this is only a guess, as dates can no longer be known with certainty.
Feeling nervous, Winston begins writing in the diary about a film he had seen the previous evening in which a ship full of refugees was bombed by a helicopter. He describes a scene in which a middle-aged Jewish woman ineffectually covers a child with her body in order to protect him from bullets and notes the audience's delighted reaction to their deaths and alone prole woman's outraged protest. He then remembers the incident that caused him to leave work and begin the diary.
That morning, at a routine political rally, called the Two Minutes Hate, O'Brien, a charismatic Inner Party member whose body language suggests to Winston that he secretly hates the Party, had entered the Records Department with an attractive dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department whom Winston suspects is an agent of the Thought Police. During the Two Minutes Hate, the telescreen broadcasted a story about Emmanuel Goldstein, a former Party leader and now its scapegoat. Winston experienced conflicting feelings of hate toward Goldstein on one hand and the Party on the other. He also felt hatred toward the dark-haired girl and imagined beating, raping, and slitting her throat. He realized that he hated her because she was young and desirable, and was wearing a scarlet sash that identified her as a member of the Junior Anti-Sex League, an organization that promotes chastity.
As the crowd reached a frenzied hatred of Goldstein, Big Brother appeared on the telescreen along with the Party slogans: WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. Winston's eyes met O'Brien's, and it seemed to Winston that O'Brien was sending him a silent message of understanding. Wondering if O'Brien was a member of the fabled Brotherhood, a counterrevolutionary group, Winston decided to go home to write in his diary. In the apartment, Winston finds he has been writing "DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER" repeatedly in the diary. He realizes that whether he writes them down or not, his disloyal thoughts constitute thoughtcrime and that he will eventually be discovered, arrested by the Thought Police, and vaporized. Just then, he hears a knock on the door.
Themes
- Totalitarianism and Communism. Orwell published Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949, not as a prediction of actual future events, but to warn the world against what he feared would be the fate of humanity if totalitarian regimes were allowed to seize power as they had done recently in Germany under Hitler and in the Soviet Union under Stalin.
- The Individual vs. Collective Identity. One way a totalitarian regime seeks to stay in power is by denying human beings their individuality, eradicating independent thought through the use of propaganda and terror. Throughout Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston tries to assert his individual nature against the collective identity the Party wishes him to adopt.