1984

Part Two, Chapter 4

George Orwell · Mountaineers 10th–12th

Teaching Companion Print Adapt for your student

Copywork

It was curious how that predestined horror moved in and out of one’s consciousness. There it lay, fixed in future time, preceding death as surely as 99 precedes 100. One could not avoid it, but one could perhaps postpone it: and yet instead, every now and again, by a conscious, wilful act, one chose to shorten the interval before it happened.

He wondered vaguely whether in the abolished past it had been a normal experience to lie in bed like this, in the cool of a summer evening, a man and a woman with no clothes on, making love when they chose, talking of what they chose, not feeling any compulsion to get up, simply lying there and listening to peaceful sounds outside. Surely there could never have been a time when that seemed ordinary?

Lying in bed at sunset, Winston wonders whether an evening like this was ever “a normal experience.” He doubts it. What keeps him from believing it?

For the educator Two passages, five sentences. The first is Winston waiting on the bed, thinking of the cellars of the Ministry of Love. It opens on “It was curious how”, a calm frame around a horror. The second sentence pins the horror in place with three phrases (“There it lay, fixed in future time, preceding death”) and a comparison as sure as counting, “as surely as 99 precedes 100”. The third sets “avoid” against “postpone” on either side of “but”, turns at a colon on “and yet instead”, holds back its verb behind two interruptions (“every now and again, by a conscious, wilful act”) and lands on the choice: “one chose to shorten the interval”. Winston thinks of himself as “one”, not “I”. The second passage is the same man later that evening, in bed at sunset. Its first sentence wonders, then piles up phrases (“making love when they chose, talking of what they chose, not feeling any compulsion to get up, simply lying there”) until the sentence itself seems to lie still. The second is a short question. Students copying them practise a framing sentence, a verb held back, a turn at a colon, a run of phrases with a repeated word, and a question that expects no answer. Set side by side, the passages share a verb: in the first, one “chose” to bring the end nearer; in the second, they make love “when they chose” and talk “of what they chose”. For the talk prompt, listen for more than one reading. One says the past has been taken even from memory: it is “the abolished past”, and Winston, who “had occasionally slept in” a double bed “in his boyhood”, still cannot trust that such evenings were normal. Another says the doubt is wonder: the evening is too good to feel ordinary, because every pleasure he has is hidden and timed, and the water in the pan is already “boiling fast”. A strong student may notice that “Surely” is a word for being certain, used here to doubt. Keep to the page: the chapter does not settle whether such evenings were ever ordinary.

Discussion

Narration Tell back the chapter, from Winston waiting in the room while the woman sings in the yard, through the day Julia could not come, to her bag, her painted face and the rat. End on the rhyme and what Winston sees in the glass.

The song in the yard was written by a machine, with no person involved at all. Yet Winston hears “a sort of happy melancholy” in the woman’s voice. Where does the feeling in that song come from? Tone
Of everything in her bag, Julia is proudest of the coffee. It is Inner Party coffee, and she calls the Inner Party “those swine.” Why would she be proudest of that? Character
Winston turns round expecting to see Julia naked. Instead she has painted her face, which is “much more surprising than that.” What can paint do that taking off her clothes cannot? Character
After the rat, Winston is back in a nightmare he has had all his life. In it, his deepest feeling is “self-deception,” because he knows what lies behind the “wall of darkness.” How can he fool himself about something he knows? Inference
Julia learned the rhyme from her grandfather. She says he “was vaporised when I was eight – at any rate, he disappeared.” Why might she correct herself? Character

Make a Connection Think of a place, in a story, in history or in your own life, that someone kept secret from everyone. How did keeping it secret change what the place meant to them?

Vocabulary

predestined: It was curious how that predestined horror moved in and out of one’s consciousness. Settled in advance and impossible to escape (pre-, before, and destine, to set a course for). Winston calls the cellars of the Ministry of Love a “predestined horror”: to him they are not a risk he runs but an appointment already made.
wilful: One could not avoid it, but one could perhaps postpone it: and yet instead, every now and again, by a conscious, wilful act, one chose to shorten the interval before it happened. Done on purpose, and stubbornly, whatever sense says (will and -ful). Winston’s “conscious, wilful act” is the choice to bring the end nearer. The word carries both freedom and a kind of obstinacy, and both fit.
emanation: The smell was already filling the room, a rich hot smell which seemed like an emanation from his early childhood, but which one did occasionally meet with even now, blowing down a passage-way before a door slammed, or diffusing itself mysteriously in a crowded street, sniffed for an instant and then lost again. Something that flows out from a source, as light from a lamp or a smell from a kitchen (Latin emanare, to flow out). The coffee seems “like an emanation from his early childhood”: Winston does not call up the memory; it drifts out of the past and finds him.
abstractedly: Winston gazed abstractedly through the muslin curtain. With the mind elsewhere, not really seeing what the eyes rest on (abstract, from Latin abstrahere, to draw away). Winston looks at the yard abstractedly while Julia changes behind him; even so, the singing woman is what his thoughts settle on.
inconsequently: I wonder what a lemon was,’ she added inconsequently. In a way that does not follow from what came just before (in-, not, and consequent, following on). Julia goes straight from her vanished grandfather to wondering what a lemon was. The narrator names the jump and leaves the reader to wonder why she makes it.
countersign: It was like the two halves of a countersign. A secret reply to a password: one person gives the sign, the other must answer it rightly (counter, in reply, and sign). When Julia caps his line of the rhyme, it feels to Winston like the answer that proves two people are on the same side.
inexhaustibly: The inexhaustibly interesting thing was not the fragment of coral but the interior of the glass itself. Without ever running out or being used up (in-, not, and exhaust, to use up). The glass is “inexhaustibly interesting”: Winston can look into it forever and never reach the end of it. Earlier he imagines the singing woman with a supply of clothes just as “inexhaustible”.

Critical thinking

Winston’s heart keeps calling the room “conscious, gratuitous, suicidal folly.” After the evening he spends there, which of those three words fits it worst?
At the end Winston sees his life and Julia's inside the paperweight, “fixed in a sort of eternity.” Is that a hopeful picture or a frightening one?