1984

Part One, Chapter 3

George Orwell · Mountaineers 10th–12th

Teaching Companion Print Adapt for your student

Copywork

His mother’s memory tore at his heart because she had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love her in return, and because somehow, he did not remember how, she had sacrificed herself to a conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable. Such things, he saw, could not happen today. Today there were fear, hatred and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows.

But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

Winston thinks that today there are “no deep or complex sorrows.” Yet his mother’s memory still tears at his heart, nearly thirty years after her death. Does his own grief prove him wrong?

For the educator Two passages, six sentences, one from the first dream and one from the morning exercises. The first gives two reasons for his grief, each opened by “because”, and fences an aside between commas, “he did not remember how”, so that his forgetting sits inside the sentence about his love. It saves its weightiest words for the end, “private and unalterable”. Then a short sentence closes on “today”, and the next picks the word straight up, “Today there were”, with three nouns for the present, “fear, hatred and pain”, and two denials, “no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows”. The second passage is the narrator at his driest. Its first sentence makes a man’s memory sound like a fault in a machine: “merely”, “happened to possess”, “not satisfactorily under control”, the Party’s words for a thing it manages. The next sentence opens on one flat word of authority, “Officially”, and cancels an event. The last sets a statement and a conclusion on either side of a colon, joined by “therefore”, and the conclusion is only the statement again, stretched back by “always”, so the logic looks sound and proves nothing. Students copying them practise a sentence with two reasons, an aside fenced by commas, a sentence that picks up the last word of the one before, a list of three, irony carried by word choice, and a colon that introduces a conclusion. For the talk prompt, listen for a student who sees that Winston’s claim and his feeling pull against each other. One reading says his grief proves him wrong: the sorrow he says is impossible is the one tearing at him, so the ancient time still lives in at least one man. Another says it proves him right: the sorrow comes to him in a dream, for a death “nearly thirty years ago”, and awake his day has only the whistle, the cough and the drill. A strong student may say he grieves for two things at once, his mother and the kind of sorrow she made possible.

Discussion

Narration Give a short account of the chapter, from the dream of the sinking ship to Winston touching his toes. Then pick the one sentence you think matters most, and say what it shows about the chapter as a whole.

In the dream, his mother and sister sink so that he can live, and their faces show “no reproach”. But it is Winston who is dreaming. When he sees no blame in them, is he seeing them truly, or excusing himself? Moral reasoning
In the Golden Country, Winston barely looks at the girl’s body. What he admires is the way she throws her clothes aside, with “grace and carelessness”. How could one movement of an arm seem to sweep away the whole Party? Theme
Winston still remembers the old man’s gin, his tears and his very words. But he cannot remember who the old man was blaming. Why might that be the part he lost? Inference
Winston thinks it is “more terrifying than mere torture and death” for the Party to say of an event, “it never happened”. Death would end him. What could the Party take from him that death would not? Theme
Winston’s mind slides away into doublethink. When the toe-touching starts, the “half-pleasant quality” goes out of his thoughts. What was pleasant about them? Character
The screen shouts “6079 Smith W!” just as Winston starts to recall the one real proof he ever held. All it wants is for him to bend lower. What does the screen know about him at that moment? Inference

Make a Connection Think of a time, in a story or in your own life, when someone knew something and made themselves forget it. Why might a person do that?

Vocabulary

furtive: But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Done or kept in secret, out of fear of being caught, like something stolen (Latin furtum, theft). Glances and footsteps are often furtive; knowledge is not, until Orwell makes it so. In Oceania simply remembering the old alliance is a kind of theft from the Party’s record, and Winston must keep it hidden even from his own face.
satisfactorily: But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Well enough to meet a required standard (from satisfy; the word of reports, inspections and school marks). The question is always whose standard. Here a memory that works is called one not “satisfactorily under control”, as if remembering were a fault to be fixed. The narrator borrows the Party’s language for a moment, and the irony is in the borrowing.
alterable: And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Able to be changed (from alter, to change; its opposite, unalterable, is the word Winston uses for his mother’s loyalty). The sentence holds two claims that cancel out: the past can be changed, and the past has never been changed. The chapter sets a loyalty that is “private and unalterable” against a history that is alterable by its nature.
repudiate: To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully-constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them; to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy; to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. To reject something completely and refuse to own it (Latin repudiare, to cast off, once used of putting away a wife). Doublethink asks a person to repudiate morality and lay claim to it in the same breath. That is why it is not simple lying: the thinker does both, and believes both.
fancied: It seemed to breathe out of his skin in place of sweat, and one could have fancied that the tears welling from his eyes were pure gin. Imagined, or let yourself believe for a moment (from fancy, a shortened form of fantasy). Today the word usually means liked or wanted; here it is the older sense. The narrator lets the reader picture tears of gin, a joke, and then insists in the next sentence that the old man’s grief was “genuine and unbearable”.

Critical thinking

Winston thinks families once “stood by one another without needing to know the reason.” Doublethink, too, sets reason aside: it means “to use logic against logic”. What, if anything, makes his mother’s loyalty different from what the Party asks?
Winston’s only proof that Oceania was once allied with Eurasia is in his own head. If no record agrees with him, is that knowledge still worth trusting?