1984

Comparative · 2027 & 2028 Leaving Cert

George Orwell’s 1984 is the book everyone thinks they know before they open it. Get past the slogans and you have one of the most useful comparative texts on the course, because almost every question about power, control or the world a text creates can be answered from it.

Orwell finished 1984 in 1948 and died two years later, writing with the Soviet show trials and wartime propaganda fresh in his mind. It is set in Airstrip One, formerly Britain, now a province of the superstate Oceania, and it follows one minor Party official who starts keeping a diary and cannot stop.

It is on the comparative list for both 2027 and 2028, and it tends to be chosen for Cultural Context because the society is so tightly built that every question about class, power, gender or religion has an obvious answer in the text. That is also the trap. A weak answer just describes Oceania. A strong one shows how the society shapes what one person is able to think.

The Story in Five Beats

One. Winston Smith works in the Ministry of Truth, editing old newspapers so that the past always agrees with whatever the Party is saying today. He buys an illegal diary and begins writing in the one corner of his flat the telescreen cannot see. That single act makes him guilty of a capital offence.

Two. A young woman from the Fiction Department, Julia, slips him a note saying she loves him. They begin an affair, meeting in the countryside and then in a rented room above Mr Charrington’s junk shop in the prole quarter, a room with no telescreen in it.

Three. Winston believes that O’Brien, a senior Inner Party member, belongs to a resistance movement called the Brotherhood. O’Brien enrols the pair and gives Winston a forbidden book explaining how the three superstates keep permanent war going to keep their own populations poor and obedient.

Four. The room above the shop has a telescreen behind a picture. Charrington is Thought Police. Winston and Julia are arrested and taken to the Ministry of Love, where the interrogator is O’Brien, who was never a rebel at all.

Five. O’Brien breaks Winston over weeks of torture, not to punish him but to convert him. In Room 101 Winston is faced with the thing he fears most and begs the Party to do it to Julia instead. Released, empty, sitting in a cafe, he finds that he has finally been cured.

Truth as Something the Party Owns

The most examinable idea in the novel is that the Party does not simply lie. It insists that there is no fixed truth for it to lie about. Winston’s job is proof: every day he drops inconvenient facts down the memory hole and writes replacements, so a man who has been executed is un-personed and a rationing cut is reported as a rise.

“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”Party slogan, Part 1 Chapter 3

Winston’s private rebellion is small and stubborn: he wants two and two to make four whether or not the Party says so. That is why arithmetic keeps reappearing in the novel and why it is the thing O’Brien has to break last.

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.”Winston’s diary, Part 1 Chapter 7

If you are writing about the values of a society, this is your strongest section. In Oceania, loyalty is worth more than accuracy, and being right is a form of disobedience.

Watching, and Being Watched

Surveillance in 1984 is not mainly about cameras. It is about being watched so constantly that you start doing the work yourself. The telescreen receives as well as transmits, so Winston keeps his face arranged into an expression of quiet optimism because a wrong expression is itself an offence, what the Party calls facecrime.

“BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU”Poster caption, Part 1 Chapter 1

Notice how much of the enforcement is done by ordinary people. Parsons is denounced by his own seven year old daughter and is proud of her for it. That detail is worth more in an essay than any description of the Thought Police, because it shows a society that has made informing on your family feel like good parenting.

Language Built to Make Rebellion Impossible

Newspeak is the Party’s long game. Syme, a linguist Winston works alongside, explains cheerfully that the point of the new dictionary is to destroy words, so that in the end a heretical thought will be literally unthinkable because the vocabulary for it will not exist. The Party slogans work the same way, holding two contradictions together until the contradiction stops registering.

“WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.”Party slogans, Part 1 Chapter 1

Syme is too clever and is vaporised. Winston predicts it before it happens. The novel is quietly consistent about this: understanding the system is more dangerous than resenting it.

Love, Then the End of It

The affair with Julia is the closest the novel comes to hope, and Orwell will not let it stand. Julia is not a political thinker. She breaks the rules because she wants to, sleeps with Party members because she enjoys it, and falls asleep when Winston reads her the theory. That is what makes her convincing rather than heroic.

The betrayal in Room 101 is the moment to build a paragraph around. Winston does not confess to save himself; he has already confessed to everything. He asks for the punishment to be moved onto the person he loves, and once he has said it there is nothing left in him to protect. When he and Julia meet again afterwards they have nothing to say. The final sentence of the novel is four words long, and it is a victory notice for the Party.

“He loved Big Brother.”Closing line, Part 3 Chapter 6

Who’s Who

Winston Smith is thirty nine, physically frail, with a varicose ulcer that flares whenever he is anxious. He is not brave and Orwell never pretends otherwise. His rebellion is a diary, a woman and a private belief about arithmetic, and all three are taken from him.

Julia works on the novel writing machines and wears the sash of the Junior Anti-Sex League as camouflage. She is practical where Winston is theoretical, and her instinct for what is survivable is sharper than his.

O’Brien is the most useful character for a question about power. He is cultured, patient and genuinely interested in Winston. He does not want obedience, which he says is not enough. He wants Winston to agree, and he gets it.

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, for ever.”O’Brien, Part 3 Chapter 3

Mr Charrington looks like a harmless old shopkeeper and turns out to be a Thought Police officer thirty years younger than he appeared. He is the novel’s proof that nothing kind in Oceania is safe to trust.

How 1984 Is Examined

On the comparative course 1984 is most often taught for Cultural Context, and it rewards that mode because the world is so fully specified: who holds power, how wealth is distributed between Inner Party, Outer Party and proles, what religion has been replaced by, what happens to people who step out of line. For Theme or Issue it works well on freedom, on truth, and on control. In Literary Genre, look at how the appendix on Newspeak is written in the past tense, which quietly implies that Oceania eventually fell.

Be careful with one thing. Examiners see a lot of answers that treat 1984 as a prediction about smartphones. Keep your points inside the text.

Using This in the Exam

How to use it: Build your comparative points around moments, not summaries. The three that travel furthest are Winston altering a newspaper record at his desk, the picture coming off the wall in the room above the shop, and the request in Room 101 to do it to Julia instead. Each one gives you a clean cross-text link: a society deciding what is true, a private space turning out to be public, and a person choosing survival over loyalty. Name the moment, quote no more than a line, then spend your words on the comparison.

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