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Copywork
About This Passage
Study how Orwell compresses the whole logic of the regime into three sentences. The first names the two instruments of control, the watching eyes and the enveloping voice, as a single seamless surround. The second sentence is a relentless tricolon, ‘Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors,’ that closes every gap of time and place before landing on the flat verdict ‘no escape.’ Then the last sentence concedes the regime’s one limit, ‘the few cubic centimetres inside your skull,’ the sole space still private, which is exactly the ground Winston’s diary tries to defend.
Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed – no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic cen...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Retell this chapter in order: a knock fills Winston with terror, but it is only his worn neighbor Mrs Parsons, who needs help with her blocked sink; in the Parsons flat, hung with Spies banners, the children point a toy gun at him, brand him a traitor and thought-criminal, and the boy shoots him with a catapult; Winston glimpses a look of helpless fright on Mrs Parsons's face, afraid of her own son; back in his flat he reflects that the Spies systematically turn children into savages who would denounce their own parents, recalls a dream voice promising 'the place where there is no darkness,' and writes again in his diary while the telescreen reduces all freedom to the few cubic centimetres inside his skull. When you reach Winston's reflection on the children, slow down and weigh what the Party has done to the family.
Discussion Questions
- Winston is seized with terror at a knock that proves to be only Mrs Parsons needing her sink fixed. What does the gap between his terror and the harmless visitor reveal about the texture of daily life under the Party, and why? Support your reading with the text.
- The Parsons children treat threatening Winston like a thrilling game. Are they mainly performing a script they barely understand, or does the chapter suggest the Party is already shaping what they love and admire? Defend your reading with evidence, and explain what the other reading still gets right.
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Vocabulary
Item 1
Complete destruction, leaving nothing behind; Winston foresees that before him lies not merely death but annihilation, his diary burned and himself erased from memory.
Item 2
The quality of being changeable or unstable; the torn poster's flicker of INGSOC calls up the mutability of the past, the Party's power to rewrite what has happened.
Item 3
An unbroken connection across time; Winston decides that by merely staying sane and uttering a truth no one hears, the continuity of the human heritage is somehow kept unbroken.
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Critical Thinking
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