Part Two, Chapter 1

1984

Mountaineers · 10th–12th

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.

1. 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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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.

nimbly The girl nipped nimbly round the lions at the base of the monument and joined in the rush.

incurious Their sad Mongolian faces gazed out over the sides of the trucks, utterly incurious.

extricate But for the moment they could not extricate themselves from the crowd.

insatiably The trucks were still filing past, the people still insatiably gaping.

Critical thinking

1. 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?

Thesis

Objection

Revision

2. 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?

Thesis

Objection

Revision