George Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Four 1984 :: Free Essays on 1984

As Winston Smith entered his apartment building, he passed a old(prenominal) poster. "It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you around when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran." Then Winston receptive the door to his flat to be greeted by a voice on his "telescreen" - a device he could dim, entirely never shut forward completely. Telescreens broadcasted government propaganda and served as the eyes and ears of the Thought Police, who scrutinized everyone for any possible departure from acceptable thought or action. In the flat was a diminutive alcove precisely out of sight from the telescreens vision. Winston sat down to frame in his diary, an act that was not officially illegal "but if find it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death . . . " duration he sat writing, a recent memory stirred in his mind the "Two Minutes Hate," a government-sponsored work break i n which every worker at the Ministry of Truth was required to participate, had consisted that day of an entracte when everyone raged and screamed as the telescreen alternately flashed images of enemy Eurasian soldiers and Goldstein, an abhorred traitor. That morning, Winston had noticed a "bold-looking girl of about twenty-six" who worked in the Fiction Department. This particular girl - eating away the bright scarlet sash of the official anti-sex league - gave him "the impression of universe more dangerous than most," and Winston had that unnerving feeling that she was watching him. A some days later, Winston walked through the working-class "prole" neighborhood to the antique hook where he had bought his diary. Though class barriers stood tensely in place throughout Oceania, Mr. Charrington, the shop owner, welcomed him and invited him upstairs to see other items. There wasnt much there, but Winston liked the old-fashioned room it didnt even have a tel escreen. When Winston again slipped out onto the street, he passed the dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department. Now he was sure she was an informant. Back at work, as Winston walked toward the lavatory, the girl reappeared in the hall. Then, just a few feet in front of him, she stumbled and fell. When he offered his hand to service her up, she slipped him a scrap of paper. Shaken, Winston decided to open the paper later at the cubicle where he rewrote old newspaper articles, deleting any reference to persons who had deviated from orthodoxy.