Chapter 7:
1. The Proles:
“If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in the swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five per cent of the population of Oceania, could force to destroy the Party ever be generated” (69).
a. Aren’t aware of their own strength against the government.
b. “The Party taught that the proles were natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals, by the application of a few simple rules” (71).
c. “To keep them in control was not difficult. A few agents of the Thought Police moved always among them” (71).
d. “All that was required of them was primitive patriotism” (71).
e. “The sexual Puritanism of the Party was not imposed upon them. Promiscuity went unpunished; divorce was permitted. For that matter, even religious worship would have been permitted if the proles had shown any sign of needing or wanting it” (72).
f. “As the Party slogan put it: ‘Proles and animals are free’” (72).
2. The Revolution:
“The story really began in the middle sixties, the period of the great purges in which the original leaders of the Revolution were wiped out once and for all” (75).
a. By 1970, none of the original leaders were left, except Big Brother.
b. Goldstein and others were considered to be traitors or counterrevolutionaries.
c. Among the last survivors were Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford.
i. Were arrested, then put back into the Party, arrested, and executed.
ii. Confessed to sharing intelligence with the enemy, embezzlement of public funds, murder of various Party members, intrigues against the leadership of Big Brother, and acts of sabotage (causing many deaths).
iii. Considered to be the last figures left over from the heroic early days of the Party. (Winston knew of them before Big Brother).
iv. Rutherford: famous caricaturist whose brutal cartoons helped inflame popular opinion before and after the Revolution, and had a broken nose (just like Aaronson).
3. Other:
a. Jus primae noctis: The law by which every capitalist had the right to sleep with any woman working in one of his factories. (73)
b. “He knew, with more certainty than before, that O’Brien was on his side” (80). What if O’Brien really isn’t?
c. According to Winston, the Party was wrong and he was right.
i. “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows” (81).
Chapter 8:
1. The Proles Side of Oceania:
“On impulse he [Winston] had turned away from the bus stop and wandered off into the labyrinth of London [...] losing himself along the streets and hardly bothering in which direction he was going” (82).
Ø Instead of going to the evening at the Community Center, Winston ends up in the slums of Oceania.
I. The Pub:
i. Winston sees an old man much older than himself and decides to ask him how life was when the old man was a child.
ii. The old man does not tell Winston what he wants to hear, but mentions how there are no pints or top hats nowadays.
iii. The old man also mentions the term “Lackeys” and The House of Lords.
II. The Lottery:
i. “The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention.
ii. The running of the Lottery was managed by the Ministry of Plenty.
iii. Only small sums of money actually paid out, the winners of the big prizes were nonexistent people. (It was mostly all imaginary.)
III. The Junk Shop:
“He had sworn never to come near the place again. And yet the instant that he allowed his thoughts to wander, his feet had brought him back here of their own accord” (93).
i. The proprietor, Mr. Charrington, remembered Winston from the last time Winston came into the shop.
a. Mr. Charrington is sixty-three year old widower, who lives above his shop (with no telescreen!).
ii. Winston buys coral and thinks of it as a paperweight.
iii. Winston leaves deciding he will come back to purchase some more items and visit Mr. Charrington in a month.
iv. As Winston walks out of the store, he notices the dark-haired girl.
a. “There was no doubting any longer that the girl must have followed him here, because it was not credible that by pure chance she should have happened to be walking on the same evening up the same obscure back street, kilometers distant from any quarter where Party members lived” (101).
2. Other:
a. “In principle Party member had no spare time, and was never alone except in bed. It was assumed that when he was not working, eating, or sleeping, he would be taking part in some kind of communal recreations” (82).
i. Newspeak: ownlife: individualism and eccentricity. (Not good!).
b. A “Steamer” the nickname for rocket bombs given by the proles. (83)
c. Beer was the only drink in prole pubs. There was no gin. (88)
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