1984: Summary

1984 · Summary

A beat by beat account of what actually happens in George Orwell’s 1984, built for a Leaving Cert comparative essay rather than a first read of the novel.

Setting the Scene

Orwell finished the novel in 1948, close to the Soviet show trials and the propaganda of the Second World War, and both leave their mark on the book. The story is set in Airstrip One, once Britain, now a province of the superstate Oceania. Oceania is ruled absolutely by the Party, and the novel follows one of its more ordinary officials as he starts to come apart from the inside.

A Diary in a Blind Corner

Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth, where his job is to edit old newspapers so that the printed past always matches whatever the Party is currently claiming. Away from work he buys an illegal notebook and starts to write in it, choosing the one corner of his flat that the telescreen on the wall cannot see. Nothing else has happened yet, but the diary alone is enough to make him guilty of a crime that carries the death penalty.

Julia’s Note

A young woman from the Fiction Department, Julia, passes Winston a note telling him she loves him. What follows is an affair carried on almost entirely against the rules of the society they live in. They meet first out in the countryside, away from any telescreen, then more regularly in a rented room above a junk shop kept by an old man called Mr Charrington, in the poorer part of the city where the proles live. The room has no screen in it, or so they believe, and it becomes the one place where Winston feels he can be an ordinary person.

O’Brien and the Forbidden Book

Winston becomes convinced that O’Brien, a senior member of the Inner Party, is secretly part of an underground resistance movement. O’Brien invites Winston and Julia in, appears to enrol them in that movement, and hands Winston a banned book. The book sets out how the world’s three superstates keep a permanent, low level war going between them, not to win it, but to use it up as a way of keeping their own populations poor, busy and obedient.

The Room Was Never Safe

The room above the shop turns out to hide a telescreen behind a picture on the wall, and Mr Charrington turns out to be an officer of the Thought Police rather than a harmless shopkeeper. Winston and Julia are arrested there and taken to the Ministry of Love. Their interrogator is O’Brien. He was never part of any resistance movement. The whole approach, from the enrolment to the book, was a way of drawing Winston out.

Room 101

Over weeks of imprisonment, O’Brien sets out to break Winston down, and he is clear that the point is not punishment but conversion. Winston has to be made to believe what the Party tells him to believe, not just to obey it. The process ends in Room 101, where Winston is confronted with the one thing that frightens him more than anything else, and where he begs for that punishment to be turned onto Julia instead of himself. Once he has asked for that, there is nothing left of his resistance to protect.

What Is Left of Winston

Winston is eventually released. When he and Julia meet again by chance afterwards, neither has anything left to say to the other, whatever held them together has gone. The novel ends with Winston sitting in a cafe, no longer fighting the Party in any way, even inside his own head. His private rebellion, the diary, the relationship, his stubborn belief that some things are simply true whether the Party allows them or not, has been found and removed piece by piece.

1984 Summary: Using This in the Exam

How to use it: For the comparative, do not retell this plot from beginning to end. Pick out three moments and build your points around them: Winston altering a record at his desk, the picture coming off the wall in the room above the shop, and his request in Room 101 to have the punishment moved onto Julia. Each one lets you make a clean comparison with your other texts, on how a society decides what is true, on whether any private space is really private, and on what a person will give up to survive.

Conclusion

The plot of 1984 is really the story of how completely a state can take apart one ordinary person’s resistance, piece by piece, until nothing private is left. Knowing the shape of that story, in order, gives you the moments you need for a strong comparative answer, without falling into the trap of simply describing the world Orwell built.