Summary: Chapter II
Winston opens the door fearfully, assuming that the Thought
Police have arrived to arrest him for writing in the diary. However,
it is only Mrs. Parsons, a neighbor in his apartment building, needing help
with the plumbing while her husband is away. In Mrs. Parsons’s apartment,
Winston is tormented by the fervent Parsons children, who, being
Junior Spies, accuse him of thoughtcrime. The Junior Spies is an
organization of children who monitor adults for disloyalty to the
Party, and frequently succeed in catching them—Mrs. Parsons herself
seems afraid of her zealous children. The children are very agitated
because their mother won’t let them go to a public hanging of some
of the Party’s political enemies in the park that evening. Back
in his apartment, Winston remembers a dream in which a man’s voice—O’Brien’s,
he thinks—said to him, “We shall meet in the place where there is
no darkness.” Winston writes in his diary that his thoughtcrime
makes him a dead man, then he hides the book.
Summary: Chapter III
Winston dreams of being with his mother on a sinking ship.
He feels strangely responsible for his mother’s disappearance in
a political purge almost twenty years ago. He then dreams of a place
called The Golden Country, where the dark-haired girl takes off
her clothes and runs toward him in an act of freedom that annihilates
the whole Party. He wakes with the word “Shakespeare” on his lips,
not knowing where it came from. A high-pitched whistle sounds from the
telescreen, a signal that office workers must wake up. It is time for
the Physical Jerks, a round of grotesque exercise.
As he exercises, Winston thinks about his childhood, which
he barely remembers. Having no physical records such as photographs and
documents, he thinks, makes one’s life lose its outline in one’s memory.
Winston considers Oceania’s relationship to the other countries
in the world, Eurasia and Eastasia. According to official history,
Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia and in alliance with
Eastasia, but Winston knows that the records have been changed.
Winston remembers that no one had heard of Big Brother, the leader
of the Party, before 1960, but stories about
him now appear in histories going back to the 1930s.
As Winston has these thoughts, a voice from the telescreen
suddenly calls out his name, reprimanding him for not working hard enough
at the Physical Jerks. Winston breaks out into a hot sweat and tries
harder to touch his toes.
Analysis: Chapters II–III
Winston’s fatalism is a central component of his character.
He has been fearing the power of the Party for decades, and the
guilt he feels after having committed a crime against the Party
overwhelms him, rendering him absolutely certain that he will be
caught and punished. Winston only occasionally allows himself to
feel any hope for the future. His general pessimism not only reflects
the social conditioning against which Orwell hopes to warn his readers,
but also casts a general gloom on the novel’s atmosphere; it makes
a dark world seem even darker.
An important aspect of the Party’s oppression of its subjects
is the forced repression of sexual appetite. Initially, Winston
must confine his sexual desires to the realm of fantasy, as when
he dreams in Chapter II of an imaginary Golden Country in which
he makes love to the dark-haired girl. Like sex in general, the
dark-haired girl is treated as an unfathomable mystery in this section;
she is someone whom Winston simultaneously desires and distrusts
with a profound paranoia.
