1984 Take Home Test
1) Newspeak is just that – new speak. Big Brother – the ultimate authority in Orwell’s sick, twisted, happy, little world – is the bringer of this nifty new language to one and all. Basically, there are three different vocabularies dubbed Vocabulary A, Vocabulary B, and Vocabulary C. There was even a Newspeak Dictionary – twelve whole additions. Each one had numerically less words than the last. Less adjectives. Less adverbs. Less clauses. Less prepositional phrases. Less nouns. Less verbs. Less of everything that makes up the world’s current language.
In Vocabulary A, there consists of words needed for everyday life. People use them in work, cooking, eating, school, and whatnot. This vocabulary has words in it that are used today, like cat, dog, sugar, grass, and house. The amount of these words, however, as aforementioned, is numerically less. This vocabulary can’t be used any longer in literature or for any type of discussion because all meaning of the words has been taken away.
The words also change. Instead of very cold, it would be doublepluscold. Also, the opposite of words – such as good – are taken away. So, there would be no more bad. To say something would be bad, one would have to say ungood.
The B Vocabulary are words used for political purposes. Big Brother uses these types of words to control what people think – they wanted a certain attitude and these words, Big Brother hoped, would do that. One must fully grasp English Socialism, or Ingsoc in Newspeak. These words are often compound and used as a type of shorthand. This vocabulary had no grammatical sense whatsoever. They can be any two parts of speech that are smashed together to create a word. One must really understand this vocabulary to speak it because there is no detectable pattern. There are not words that are neutral, and in most instances they mean to opposite of the mane. For example, joycamp is a forced labor camp. Nothing joyful there.
The C Vocabulary has mostly scientific and technical terms. These are the same types of words people use today. People who worked in these fields have their own lists of words devoted to their own specific field. These people rarely – if ever – use words from the other two vocabularies. The irony of this vocabulary: there is no word for science.
Big Brother uses these vocabularies to put limits on a person’s thoughts. Big Brother could control what the people did and how they acted. But that wasn’t enough. They didn’t want anyone to have thoughts against what Big Brother was preaching. By giving people a new vocabulary, Big Brother was able to further modify a person. It’s complete and utter control. That’s all it was. Big Brother wanted the power. To gain said power, they began molding people to love Big Brother. To do that, they had to change what people saw as freedom. How to start? Change the language. Newspeak became the official language of Oceania. It’s like the frog in the slowly boiling water. It doesn’t know it’s dying. They don’t know they’re becoming mindless slaves.
Eventually this could happen. It would take a very long time – generations – for what people think of as speech to be totally gone and something like Newspeak to rule. But it could happen. To have it happen is totally unrealistic. The language would die before it even began. Big Brother had the right idea to wait until 2050 to make it the real language. Like I said: generations – sure. Overnight? No. That’s a different story altogether.
2) “You asked me once what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world … The worst thing in the world varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal … in your case, the worst thing the world would happen to be rats (O’Brien, 233).”
A room consists of four walls, a ceiling, and a floor. There’s nothing scary about it. It’s supposed to be a place where one feels safe and secure. It helps to protect one from the cold, harsh, uncaring world outside. Anyway, what’s so scary about a bunch a plaster and wood? Well, nothing. It’s what is inside the room that makes a room scary. It could be a person or an animal or a thing. It could be alive or dead. It doesn’t matter because a person’s fears differ. Somehow Big Brother hit on this. They discovered that a person’s greatest fear can be the best breaking tool. When all other means of torture fails – when the shocking and the beatings don’t break them as they should be broken – Big Brother ships them off to Room 101.
The room – the four walls, floor, and ceiling – has the ability to make hell itself pale in comparison. Some people would rather face the fire than face their fears. That is why Room 101 is so wonderful for Big Brother. It breaks people – crushes them, destroys them – so utterly perfectly that they cave and beg for mercy – beg for it to stop. No one is strong enough to hold out against this room, not even darling Winston, who screamed for his captors to put Julia through that hell instead of him after only a few minutes.
To think; he stood firmly against Big Brother through all the other torture only to cry out in Room 101. Granted, there were rats who threatened to gnarl slowly, pitilessly through his cheeks and face. But he was so perfectly broken. I can’t say Room 101 broke him completely or beautifully, because he still loved his dearest Julia. After that short stay in that room, thought, he also loved Big Brother. Two plus two no longer equaled four. It equaled five, and if Big Brother said so, it would equal television or taco or pudding or walnuts. And it would all be thanks to that nifty little Room 101 – those four walls, ceiling, and floor.
4) Darling Winston Smith was fortune’s fool. He was a queer sort of optimist. Everyone knows that if optimists don’t fall through – if somehow something goes horribly wrong – the only thing left for them is disappointment. It’s bittersweet, in a way. I guess love really can be hate.
Winston is a 39-year-old male. He’s not too bad looking, but he’s not attractive either. He doesn’t constantly sweat. Nor does he scuttle around like the other men do. His eyes are not beady. He looks kind – like he wouldn’t welch on someone at the drop of a hat .he had health problems – there’s that annoying varicose ulcer on his ankle that itches him incessantly at times. And there never seems to be enough for him to eat, so his stomach’s always growling.
Winston isn’t exactly the most stable guy around. Granted, the conditions he lived under never helped any. He had these strange dreams of memories – echoes long forgotten – of his past. His mother and sister slowly sinking further and further down. Very grisly memories. And his dreams were of panic inducing things – great, encompassing walls of darkness and stomach-clenching squeals. He was paranoid, but I suppose he had reason to be. After all, Big Brother was watching.
He works as a research official at the Ministry of Trust (even though they lie – I love the oxy-moronic irony!!) but he isn’t sure if he trusts Big Brother. He hates the Party, and unbeknownst to him, Big Brother was really watching him for quite some time. So, they knew all about his unorthodox thoughts and wanton dislike for the Party. Big Brother did what every good power-hungry organization does: it broke him perfectly.
Winston goes through three basic stages. He is somewhat depressed in the beginning because his life is really going nowhere fast. He’s stuck in a rut and not moving. There’s no food and rations keep getting cut. Life is just… so many shades of melancholy grey. But somewhere in the middle, he finds love, and he starts to get happy. There’s something worth living for. Suddenly all those things that made life unbearable and depressed him before don’t matter quite so much. Love lifted him up; Julia saved him. Things were finally going his way. And in the end – forgive me, I must say this bluntly, because saying it bluntly sums it all up in such a splendiferous manner. In the end, he winds up as just a part of the collective – another Big Brother loving idiot. Another Party clone. Another faceless, nameless, personality-less drone.
Julia was his main motivation for things. She picks him up only to throw him back down. And then, of course, there was hope – a guiding light to a better tomorrow. What a poor, almost pathetic fool. Pain and pleasure are also two motivators everyone responds to. It’s a simple system of Reward and Punishment. Funny how Big Brother realizes that people still respond to childlike treatment, ne? Basically, Mr. Winston Smith is just like everyone else in the world – he just swallows what is shoved down his throat.
5) Julia is the raven-haired beauty who captures Winston’s heart. Julia hates the party almost as much as Winston does. She wants to rebel against it, but where Winston is restless and fatalistic and concerned about Big Brother and the Brotherhood and revolution, Julia is more sensual and pragmatic. She is generally contented to live for the moment and tries to make the best of her life. She enjoys the freedoms she bestows to herself, like copulation. She would rather make plans to avoid getting caught by the Thought Police than plans to change the world.
Winston looks at her as a temporary thing. He loves her deeply – she’s the only thing that keeps him from being utterly broken – but he knows that the affair can’t go on. It’s mostly because of his tragic, queerly optimistic mind-set.
Julia is sort of a bad girl. She leads many small rebellions almost daily. She brags about sleeping with several of the members of Big Brother – the highest of the high in the Party. And she doesn’t care. She’s very wanton. She likes the thrills and the pleasure too much to stop or to care. Julia isn’t scared of being caught, either. Ironically, it’s because of Winston that she gets caught in the room above the antique store. It was kind of a wrong place at the wrong time thing.
Overall, Winston and Julia are two completely different souls. They share desire and Party hatred, but there isn’t much else. But I believe it is because of this difference that the two fit so well together. She is the yin to his yang – the black to his white. She makes Winston a little bit braver – maybe rubs off on him a bit. She’s something new to him. And that’s why it hurts so much more when she fed him to the stray dogs. She was sort of like the unknowing bait that leads him “home”.
Here’s where things get confusing. Because the reader can only catch the glimpses of Party life that Winston does, not much is known about it. So O’Brien is fascinating only because he is so mysterious.
O’Brien doesn’t really work for the Brotherhood. He is, in fact, a member of the Inner Party. He only tricks Winston into thinking that he was a rebel to that he could gain his trust. O’Brien had been watching Winston for a period of several years – observing the man he knew would become a traitor. But he played off being the friend so well. He was the one who brought Winston into the Brotherhood; that’s why it was kind of a shock when he showed up at Winston’s cell to beat and torture and brainwash him for Big Brother.
I think that Orwell leaves O’Brien too underdeveloped. There were too many questions left unanswered by the end of the book. And there were even more questions that I wanted to know about. Was he a rebel too? Did he get put through the same brainwashing? Is the Brotherhood real, or is just Big Brother’s trap for people like Winston?
O’Brien is the closest thing the reader sees to what is known as Big Brother, so he is a symbol of the system. He’s the man who lulls Winston into a false sense of security. He’s very doubleplusungood, to coin a phrase from Newspeak – so he’s very, very, very bad. He breaks Winston – breaks him perfectly in so many ways – but he never destroys love.
6) If people aren’t careful, the world will become like 1984. And there will be nothing that can be done about it, because the people will do it to themselves. Already I see the beginnings of that sick world happening. And it scares me. I don’t want to live in any play even remotely like that world. And because I read it, I can see the correlations forming, and it scares me. NO!! I do not want to live in a place where my freedoms are limited like that. I cannot live somewhere where I only get twenty grams of chocolate a week. I cannot live in a place where books and songs and music are computer generated. I don’t want to live in 1984, but I can see it slowly – ever so slowly – beginning to happen.
Because of what happened in 2001, the first amendment is starting to be limited. People who speak in a certain way about the government are charged with treason and sent to prison. They’re labeled as terrorists. Censorship has cracked down, limiting what people are exposed to. People can’t see this, or that, or this because of some random people in a random room in a random place say it’s offensive. Security is everywhere, and so are the cameras. They’re at stoplights, in schools and stores and cars. They’re in homes and on phones. It seems that almost everyone has a camera somewhere. Someone is always watching – someone is always listening.
I’m cringing. Not even repeating my mantra of being an anarchist is helping me. My stomach is churning, because if it’s like this now, what will it be like in a generation? The US hasn’t really started anything yet. Will it get better? Will it get worse? The government is already starting to lie to the people. Don’t hand me anything about Bush, because he’s just a flesh puppet. Someone else is pulling the stings. Everyone knows he just reads whatever is put in front of him, because, let’s face it, the man isn’t the brightest bulb.
In the book, Big Brother is the ultimate authority. It’s everywhere. Then, people have to deal with the Thought Police. They have very little freedoms. And society is backwards. Love is hate. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Big Brother feeds the people constant lies. It’s disgusting! Government like that is completely, utterly, perfectly, beautifully useless.
Soon, America will become another Nazi Germany with propaganda everywhere. And this will be like a disease. It will spread everywhere. No part of the world will be safe from it. I wonder if Phil Collins read this book when he wrote the song, “Land of Confusion”, because it fits so wonderfully. It’s like a distant, early warning – like he somehow knew what was coming. It’s kind of freaky. Soon all that will be left for people anywhere are forsaken dreams and hopes of fallen angels and dead gods.
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