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Copywork
About This Passage
Study how Orwell compresses the engine of the regime into three flat sentences. The first borrows the cadence of scripture, 'from everlasting to everlasting,' to give a manufactured present the false weight of eternal truth. The clipped second sentence, 'It was quite simple,' delivers this monstrous idea with a shrug, as if it were obvious. The third then names the price: not a single victory but 'an unending series of victories over your own memory,' so that holding the Party's line means defeating yourself again and again, forever. The calm, almost arithmetic tone is exactly what makes the claim chilling.
Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory.
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Retell this chapter in order: Winston dreams first of his mother and baby sister sinking away beneath him while still looking up at him with love, and he senses that deep love and sorrow belonged to a vanished age; then of a beautiful place he calls the Golden Country; a piercing whistle wakes him for the Physical Jerks, led by a sharp woman on the telescreen; as he exercises, Winston struggles to recover his real childhood and reflects that the Party can rewrite the past, since whoever controls the past controls the future, and that the only proof against its lies lives in his own soon-to-be-annihilated mind; the voice screams '6079 Smith W' and orders him to bend lower, and Winston, his face inscrutable, finally touches his toes. When you reach Winston's reflection on doublethink, slow down and weigh what it costs a mind to think that way.
Discussion Questions
- In his dream, Winston watches his mother and baby sister sink away beneath him while they keep looking up at him with love. Why do you think that dream matters so much to him, and what does it help him understand about his life now? Support your reading with the text.
- Winston describes doublethink as holding two contradictory beliefs at once and sincerely accepting both. Do you read doublethink mainly as a discipline the Party imposes on people from outside, or as something each person finally performs on themselves? Defend one reading with evidence from the chapter, and explain why it fits the text better than the other.
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Vocabulary
Item 1
Existing or happening underground; in the dream Winston's mother and sister sit in some subterranean place, far below him, sinking deeper still.
Item 2
A carrying-on or extension of something already begun; the dream is described as a continuation of Winston's intellectual life, where ideas seem newly true even after he wakes.
Item 3
In a manner showing scorn or contempt; in the dream the dark-haired girl flings her clothes disdainfully aside, a gesture whose careless freedom seems to defy the whole Party.
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Critical Thinking
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