1984

Part Two, Chapter 1

George Orwell · Mountaineers 10th–12th

Teaching Companion Print Adapt for your student

Copywork

In front of him was an enemy who was trying to kill him: in front of him, also, was a human creature, in pain and perhaps with a broken bone. Already he had instinctively started forward to help her. In the moment when he had seen her fall on the bandaged arm, it had been as though he felt the pain in his own body.

She need not have told him that. But for the moment they could not extricate themselves from the crowd. The trucks were still filing past, the people still insatiably gaping.

In the passage you copied, the girl is both “an enemy who was trying to kill him” and “a human creature, in pain”. Why does Winston start forward to help her before he has made up his mind about her?

For the educator Two passages, six sentences. The first is the corridor, in the seconds after the girl falls. Its first sentence is built on a colon: “In front of him” opens each half, and the second half adds “also” between commas, so the human creature comes as an addition to the enemy and does not replace it. The enemy is blunt, “trying to kill him”; the other is the widest word the sentence could choose, “a human creature”, not a girl or a woman, and its pain keeps Winston’s guess in “perhaps with a broken bone”. The next sentence opens on “Already”: his body has moved before the thought is finished. The last holds its main clause back behind “In the moment when”, and ends on “as though”, a feeling he does not claim as fact. The second passage comes in Victory Square, after she has given him the route and said, “Then get away from me as quick as you can.” It opens on a short, dry sentence that says more than it states: he knows the rule as well as she does. The next turns on “But for the moment”: the crowd that hid them now holds them, and “extricate” makes it a tangle they are caught in. In the last sentence, the closing phrase, “the people still insatiably gaping”, has no main verb of its own and hangs on the first half, and “still” comes twice, so the trucks and the gaping go on together. Students copying them practise a colon between two halves that open the same way, a word set off by commas to add rather than replace, a short sentence opening on “Already”, a main clause held back, a short dry sentence, a turn on “But”, and a closing phrase without its own verb. For the talk prompt, listen for more than one reading. One says the helping is older than anything the Party has taught him: when she fell, “it had been as though he felt the pain in his own body”, and a body that shares another’s pain moves before politics can. Another says the move proves less than it seems: an instinct is not a choice, and within the same half minute a second instinct, the habit of keeping his face blank, takes over just as fast. A third says the enemy was only ever his own picture of her, made from fear, while the pain is in front of his eyes, so what he sees wins over what he has imagined. A strong student may notice that the sentence never takes the enemy back: “also” adds the human creature without removing the other, and the passage leaves him holding both. Keep to the page: “an enemy” is Winston’s belief, not a fact about her, and the chapter never says she works for the Thought Police.

Discussion

Narration Give a short account of the chapter, from the fall in the corridor, through the days of trying to reach her in the canteen, to the hands clasped in Victory Square while the prisoners pass. Then pick the one sentence you think matters most, and say what the chapter would lose without it.

Back on her feet, the girl says, “Thanks, comrade!” Then she walks on “as briskly as though it had really been nothing.” Who is that line for? Inference
Winston is sure that whatever is on the paper “must have some kind of political meaning.” Then he reads it: “I love you.” Is that a political message, or the one thing in his life that is not? Theme
For three days she does not come to the canteen. Winston thinks she might have been vaporised, or killed herself, or been sent away. But the “worst and likeliest of all” is that she has changed her mind. Why is that worse to him than her death? Character
When they finally speak, over the stew, their talk is eleven short lines of times and places. Neither of them says a word about the note. Where in that talk is his answer to it? Inference
Winston cannot turn his head to look at her. Instead, the eyes that meet his are an old prisoner’s, gazing at him “mournfully” out of “nests of hair”. What might the old man be mourning? Author's choice

Make a Connection In Winston’s world, people send printed postcards and strike out the phrases that do not apply. Think of a message you have sent or received that came ready-made, like a card, a form or a stock reply. What can a ready-made message never say?

Vocabulary

rectification: Fortunately the piece of work he was engaged on was mere routine, the rectification of a long list of figures, not needing close attention. The act of putting something right (Latin rectus, straight or right). In the Ministry it means changing figures to agree with what the Party now says. Winston can do this rectification with his heart banging and his mind on the note: the lie is such routine work that it needs no close attention.
nimbly: The girl nipped nimbly round the lions at the base of the monument and joined in the rush. Quickly and lightly, with easy control of the body (from nimble, quick to take hold, Old English niman, to take). She slips nimbly round the lions, while Winston has to shove, butt and squirm through the same crowd. The word adds to what he is learning about her: she is quick and sure.
incurious: Their sad Mongolian faces gazed out over the sides of the trucks, utterly incurious. Showing no wish to know or look (Latin in-, not, and curiosus, careful, eager to know). The prisoners look out “utterly incurious” at a crowd whose “prevailing emotion was simply curiosity”. The word turns the looking round: the people being stared at do not care to look back. Later some eyes do look into Winston’s, “sometimes with strange intensity”.
extricate: But for the moment they could not extricate themselves from the crowd. To free yourself, with effort, from something that holds you fast (Latin extricare, to free from tangles). The crowd that hid them now traps them. She tells him to get away “as quick as you can”, and they cannot, so their hands meet in the last moments, “while the crowd still hemmed them in”.
insatiably: The trucks were still filing past, the people still insatiably gaping. In a way that can never be filled or satisfied (Latin in-, not, and satiare, to fill). The crowd gapes at the prisoners insatiably, yet the chapter says its “prevailing emotion was simply curiosity”. A hunger to look, with little behind the looking.

Critical thinking

Before the note, Winston imagined her as “a fool like all the rest of them”. Now he thinks of her body “as he had seen it in his dream”, and he still does not know her name. How much of his new picture of her comes from her, and how much from him?
After the note, Winston stops taking small risks so that he can take a much bigger one. Has the note made him braver or more afraid?