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Copywork
About This Passage
In a crowd, hidden among bodies, Winston gets to hold the girl's hand for the first time, and he memorizes it through touch alone. Notice how Orwell builds the moment from precise physical details, 'the long fingers, the shapely nails, the work-hardened palm with its row of callouses,' each one quietly telling us this is a real, hard-working person, not the fantasy figure Winston once imagined. The final sentence, 'Merely from feeling it he would have known it by sight,' shows how completely he takes her in, since touch is the only sense he is allowed in this stolen moment. Copying the passage trains a reader to see how a writer can make a single, secret touch carry the whole weight of a forbidden human connection.
He had time to learn every detail of her hand. He explored the long fingers, the shapely nails, the work-hardened palm with its row of callouses, the smooth flesh under the wrist. Merely from feeling ...
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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 Winston's sudden return of hope and the dangers surrounding it. What techniques, such as the long week of near-misses or the crowd scene, did he use to achieve that effect?
Discussion Questions
- When the girl falls, Winston feels her pain 'in his own body' and moves to help her before he can think, though he had imagined her as an enemy. What does this instinctive act of help reveal about what survives in Winston beneath years of Party training, and why? Defend your reading with the text.
- The moment Winston reads the note, his fear that the girl is a trap vanishes and is replaced by a fierce will to live. Make the strongest case that Winston is right to trust the note, then give the strongest objection, that his desperate hope is blinding him to real danger. Which reading is more convincing, and why? Defend your answer with the text.
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Vocabulary
Item 1
without success, despite real effort; Winston tries vainly to push down the wild hope that the note might come from a secret Brotherhood.
Item 2
thought seriously about doing; only five nights earlier Winston had contemplated smashing the girl's skull with a cobblestone.
Item 3
to damage someone's good name or reputation; Winston's job is to falsify reports so as to cast discredit on an Inner Party member now out of favour.
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Critical Thinking
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