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Copywork
About This Passage
This passage sits at the dark center of Winston's reflection. The Party's deepest threat, he realizes, is not that it will punish him for dissent but that it might actually be right, that reality itself could bend to whoever controls every mind. Notice how Orwell builds the fear: a sharp antithesis, 'not that... but that,' flips our expectation, and then three parallel rhetorical questions, each opening 'Or that,' pile doubt onto the plainest certainties, arithmetic, gravity, the fixed past. Copying these sentences trains a reader to feel how a writer can make even a question feel like the ground giving way beneath an idea we never thought to doubt.
And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity w...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Summarize this chapter, then explain what you think Orwell most wanted the reader to notice or feel about the Party's power over truth and the past. What techniques, such as the children's textbook or the destroyed photograph, did he use to achieve that effect?
Discussion Questions
- Winston has wondered before whether the Party can ever be resisted. Here he writes that hope 'lies in the proles,' yet the chapter shows them roaring over saucepans while 'the larger evils invariably escaped their notice.' How do you reconcile Winston's hope in the proles with the very evidence he gives that they may never use their strength? Defend your reading with the text.
- The Party teaches that the proles are 'natural inferiors' who must be kept down 'like animals,' while also claiming it 'liberated' them from their old oppressors. Make the strongest case that a ruling Party could sincerely hold both ideas at once, then give the strongest objection to that case. Which case is more convincing, and why? Defend your reading with the text.
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Vocabulary
Item 1
impossible to imagine or believe could ever happen; Winston finds it inconceivable that the Brotherhood could gather in more than twos and threes.
Item 2
to fill someone's mind with a set of beliefs until they accept them without question; the Party does not even bother to indoctrinate the proles, whom it treats as harmless.
Item 3
specific complaints about being treated unfairly; the proles can focus their anger only on petty grievances, never on the larger evils that escape them.
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Critical Thinking
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