{"id":1389770,"date":"2016-06-01T11:00:09","date_gmt":"2016-06-01T15:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/community.sparknotes.com\/?p=1389770"},"modified":"2022-04-13T16:53:53","modified_gmt":"2022-04-13T20:53:53","slug":"blogging-1984-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"\/blog\/blogging-1984-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Blogging 1984: I (Part I, Chapter 1)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I first \u201cread\u201d 1984<\/em> in maybe grade eight, and the main memories are of my English teacher writing \u201cBIG BROTHER\u201d and \u201cNEWSPEAK\u201d up on the blackboard, lest we miss the \\subtlety\/ of George Orwell’s writing. As the saying goes, behind every book with one or more eyeballs on the front cover is an author with a Very Important, Zero-Chill Message, and George Orwell was about as chill as his artistic contemporary Shia LeBeouf. George wanted you to be ~ready~.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hot on the heels of the fantastic Blogging The Great Gatsby<\/a> <\/em>and Blogging Lord of the Flies<\/a>, <\/em>I hereby commit to chronicling my way through the venerable political text that brought us the self-same TV show Big Brother, <\/em>and, by extension, Survivor, The Hills<\/em>, and my fav reality show of all time, the panda cam at San Diego Zoo. I doubt I can hit the high notes Elodie has rung out, but perhaps we can toddle through this thing in time for your essay that is due\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As you know, you can tell everything about a book from its first and last lines,* and 1984 begins thusly:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Wuh\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 thirteen?<\/em> You’re thinking. Are we on Burning Man time? <\/em>Ho no. The fact of there being multiple clocks all striking thirteen suggests something is very off, that some bad information is being passed around. The \u201cbright, cold day in April\u201d suggests to me either that a) no one has a tan yet, no, why are you asking it’s only April, or b) life in the alternate world of 1984 <\/em>is somehow both bleak and overexposed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Winston Smith, the man we will be accompanying through the novel, enters his crappy apartment building, which smells like boiled cabbage (this is England pre-Jamie Oliver), and passes an enormous poster of a man’s face with a \u201cheavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features,\u201d and eyes that follow you around the room. So \u00a0basically Joaquin Phoenix plus \u00a0the intensity of Wes Bentley’s facial hair in \u00a0The Hunger Games<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The caption beneath the poster reads: BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, which coincidentally was an abandoned slogan for the Boys and Girls Club of America. Winston takes seven flights of stairs up to his \u201cflat\u201d because the elevator is powered down to save energy for the upcoming \u00f0\u0178\u017d\u2030Hate Week\u00f0\u0178\u017d\u2030 and I’m pretty excited to find out what that entails.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Inside his flat, a \u201cfruity\u201d voice (that’s an insult, here) is making constant MSNBC-esque announcements from a metal box about pig-iron production. Winston can’t turn it off so he turns it down, which makes my heart race, because one of my greatest fears is being stuck in the back of a yellow cab unable to turn off the taxi TV thing. Mario Lopez is ALWAYS on there and I just can’t. Even worse, Winston’s telescreen is simultaneously broadcasting and recording his every movement and sound.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Winston is, by the way, dressed in blue overalls, which are the official uniform of \u201cThe Party,\u201d and which subsequently launched the uniforms of a thousand apocalyptic dystopias.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Out the window, the city is bleak and pasted over with numerous Joaquin posters\u2014BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING\u2014while in the distance, a helicopter peers into people’s windows. The Ministry of Truth building rises from the rot; a tall, vast tower above decaying, bombed-out terraces. Did I mention it’s bleak out?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Ministry of Truth is referred to as Minitrue in Newspeak\u00e2\u201e\u00a2, which is, I suppose, the government’s form of lolcatspeak. Minitrue is where news, entertainment, and the arts originate. There is also the Ministry of Peace, which handles war-related stuff, the Ministry of Plenty, which is the economic pillar, and the Ministry of Love, center of law and order, which has no windows and is surrounded by barbed-wire fences, battalions of soldiers, and \u201cmachine-gun nests\u201d\u2014your typical love dungeon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here’s a helpful way to remember what each ministry does:<\/p>\n\n\n\n