1984 Active Reading Questions And Answers

In order for the “Big Brother” to maintain this ideology, the ruler needs to have highly organized system and individuals to follow each and every task. In the novel, Oceania’s society has reached the level of brainwashing. In order for anyone to conquer such a vast and complicated system, the individual will need a highly-organized plan and a sophisticated mind to carry through. Winston possesses neither of these traits; therefore he was doomed to fail.

Julia and Winston return to the district and enter Winston’s room. They begin carving on the back wall directly in the Telescreens’ line of sight. Ten or so minutes later, the wall reads “DOWN WITH O’BRIEN”.

Throughout the novel, Winston wanted to rebel against the government, but the fear of the thought police made him conform. The party used telescreens and other things to monitor the citizens to make sure they were not thinking for themselves. This is why Winston had to be careful in what he does because if he got caught he would have been killed. When Winston finally found people that he trusted and thought were on his side, he started to begin to do things outside of conformity. This is when the party stepped in and began to punish him with his worst fear of rats to make him conform again. Winston knew that Big Brother was not real, but he was forced to conform by being brainwashed by his

This is shown in part 3 of the novel where Winston feels the full extent of the brutal power of the Party when he is taken to the Ministry of Love where he is tortured and brainwashed so he can’t remember things that have happened, he is made to be like everyone else in Oceania. This is shown when O’Brien tries to persuade him:

No one knew if what they remembered was true or not because of all the false stories put into their heads. In Orwell’s novel, the rebels were beaten and the soul they once had floated away to never come back. “We have beaten you, Winston. We have broken you up. You have seen what your body is like. Your mind is in the same state. I do not think… You have whimpered for mercy, you have betrayed everybody and everything. Can you think of a single degradation that has not happened to you?” (Orwell, 273). This is clear proof that Winston was tortured and beaten into believing what the government wanted him to. He hated Big Brother his whole life and now the person that he was once was had been taken away from him. A new and government improved version appeared. No flaws, no doubts, no anger, just confidence that everything Big Brother said was true.

government he lives in daily and the weights of just how wrong it is. Winston works in the

Lastly, when O’Brien came in contact with Winston, he asked about Big Brother and asked to join their party. “We believe that there is some kind of conspiracy, some/ kind of secret organization working against the Party, and/ that you are involved in it. We want to join it and work for/ it. “(177) In this quotation, Winston clearly exposes the fact that he is against Big Brother and he wants to join O’Brien’s group, and that he doesn’t care about the fact that O’Brien may be just pretending to be an ally, or the fact that even thinking of going against Big Brother can kill him. This clearly shows how brave Winston is compared to all the other people in Oceania who have yet to dare such a thing.

Throughout the novel, Winston is always hiding his thoughts about the Party and about Big Brother, although he is completely against it. However, in order to ensure that he does not get caught, he must act as though he loves them and agrees with their power over society. Surveillance is shaping these characters to be a perfect representation of what they are expected to be, instead of being who they are.

Additionally, the portrayal of this dystopian society controlled by a totalitarian government might have been understood well by contemporary audiences, mirroring the rules of totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy- the citizens have no influence on the government and have no freedom of choosing the rules that govern and control every part of their lives. Therefore, Winston blames the misery in his life totally and completely on the government and on Big Brother. In Winston’s case, we can see that the propaganda, deprivation, and strict rules fail to make him concur with the party and accept Big Brother- in this situation, the party has to use extreme force and torture to make Winston love the party as well as Big Brother, in order for the party to maintain complete power.

In the first part of the book, Winston describes how the government tries to control the lives of the people through telescreens, the thought police, and countless amounts of propaganda. Winston describes

The words under the picture read “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU” in all capitals. This phrase immediately establishes the power-distance relationship between the party and its members. All citizens are constantly being watched over and are powerless compared to the party. The word “watching” implies that all citizens are under scrutiny from big brother himself with the “mustachiod figure” playing the role of a “big brother”, watching over his citizens and controlling their actions and movements. Such a lack of freedom creates a stark contrast between normal people’s lives and the lives of Orwell’s characters, and therefore acts like a warning as to what might happen in the future if the rise of totalitarianism continued in Europe. Through this, Orwell is also criticizing this movement by highlighting its key disadvantages and drawbacks.

Despite Winston's passionate hatred for the Party and his desire to test the limits of the Party's power, his capacity to carry out action against the Party is burdened (i.e. lacking positive freedom) by his intense paranoia and overriding belief that he will ultimately suffer scrutiny and brutal torture for the crimes he

The two of them get caught by the Thought Police and brutally arrested. Winston sits in a bright, bare cell in which the lights are always on—he has at last arrived at the place where there is no darkness. Four telescreens monitor him. He has been transferred here from a holding cell in which a huge prole woman who shares the last name Smith wonders if she is Winston’s mother. In his solitary cell, Winston envisions his captors beating him, and worries that sheer physical pain will force him to betray Julia. Seeing starvation, beating, and mangling, Winston hopes dearly that the Brotherhood will send him a razorblade with which he might commit suicide. His dreams of the Brotherhood are wrecked when O’Brien, his hoped-for link to the rebellion, enters his cell. Winston cries out, to which O’Brien replies, “They got me long ago,” and identifies himself as an operative of the Ministry

”Big brother is watching you” is a famous quote from George Orwell’s 1984 (1949). Taking place in a dystopian world, Orwell created the classical warning of a world without freedom of speech, where you as an individual must obey the rules of the authorities, otherwise your life was at risk. Although the book takes place in 1984, it was written in 1949. At the time, the soviet union had it’s rise, with Joseph Stalin as a main character. A man who was and is known for his dictatorship and inhumane leadership.

     Winston is a miserable member of a society he hates, and is controlled and watched in every area of his life. He has no desire to go on