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Copywork
About This Passage
Syme is describing the finished world that Newspeak is meant to build, and these four short sentences are its darkest thesis. He moves from a vague phrase, 'the whole climate of thought,' to a flat absolute, 'there will be no thought,' and finally to a chilling definition: orthodoxy is not careful agreement but the absence of mind altogether. Notice the rhetorical compression. Orwell strips the syntax down to bare equations ('Orthodoxy means not thinking,' 'Orthodoxy is unconsciousness'), so the prose itself enacts the narrowing it describes. As you copy, weigh the paradox that the Party's ideal citizen is not a fervent believer but a person who has stopped thinking entirely.
The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking – not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Retell this chapter in order: Winston eats lunch in the grimy, deafening canteen, where his colleague Syme, a Newspeak philologist, gloats over a recent hanging and then explains with a pedant's delight that his real work is to destroy words, narrowing the language until thoughtcrime becomes literally impossible and orthodoxy means simple unconsciousness; Winston privately concludes that the too-clever Syme will be vaporized; Parsons arrives, a sweaty, boyish fool proud of his spy-children, boasting that his daughter trailed a stranger and turned him in; nearby an eyeless man quacks pure orthodoxy like a duck, words without a mind behind them; the telescreen announces the chocolate ration has been raised the day after it was cut, and the canteen believes it through doublethink; Winston broods on the grim physical texture of life and a buried sense that things were once better; and the dark-haired girl watches him, raising the terror of facecrime. When you reach Syme's claim that orthodoxy is unconsciousness, slow down and weigh what it means for a regime to want its citizens not merely to obey but to stop thinking.
Discussion Questions
- Syme insists that the aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought until thoughtcrime is 'literally impossible,' and that 'Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.' What relationship between language and thought does the chapter suggest Syme imagines, and why would that relationship matter so much to the Party's project? Support your reading with the text.
- Winston is certain that Syme will be vaporized because he 'sees too clearly and speaks too plainly,' even though Syme is more fervently orthodox than almost anyone around him. Is Winston right that intelligence dooms Syme, or should such zeal protect him? Weigh the strongest case on both sides, then defend your reading with evidence from the chapter.
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Vocabulary
Item 1
A scholar who studies the history, structure, and development of language; Syme is a philologist, one of the experts compiling the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary.
Item 2
To increase or spread rapidly in number; Winston notices how the small, beetle-like type of official seemed to proliferate in the Ministries, flourishing under the Party.
Item 3
A person who flaunts narrow learning or fusses over small points of rule and detail; Syme warms to his subject with a sort of pedant's passion, savoring every technicality of Newspeak.
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Critical Thinking
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