Comprehensive Summary and Review of
Part II Chapters 1-5
Summary:
A few days later, Winston walked through the working-class
"prole" neighborhood to the antique shop 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 wasn't much there, but Winston liked the old-fashioned
room; it didn't even have a telescreen.
When Winston again slipped out onto the street, he passed the dark-haired
girl from the Fiction Department.
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 help 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.
Back at his desk, Winston opened the message and read: "I love you."
Now he was intrigued - and terrified. Like writing in a diary, an affair
between party members was "legal", but punishable by death.
Winston and the girl were finally able to arrange a rendezvous in the country.
But even there, there was always the possibility of concealed microphones.
So, after meeting at the selected spot, the pair walked on in silence until
they found a remote, heavily forested area. Winston didn't even yet know
the girl's name: "I'm thirty-nine years old," he began. "I've
got a wife that I can't get rid of. I've got varicose veins. . . "
The girl replied, "I couldn't care less." She shared some black-market
chocolate with him, and then they made love.
Afterwards, while the girl slept, Winston thought about what they had done.
"You could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure,
because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been
a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It
was a political act."
Winston now saw the girl - Julia - whenever he could. She explained her
survival philosophy: "I always carry one end of a banner in the processions.
I always look cheerful and I never shirk anything. Always yell with the
crowd, that's what I say. It's the only way to be safe." For their
clandestine meetings, Winston hit upon the idea of renting Mr. Charrington's
room above the antique shop. Although the room offered them privacy, "both
of them knew it was lunacy;" in the end, they would be caught.
Review:
Orwell uses objects-an antique table, an antique clock, a
print of the church of St. Clement's Dane-to create atmosphere and to give
the reader a strong sense of Mr. Charrington's place. Through Winston's
response to these objects, we get a clear picture of Winston's love for
the past. All novelists use details to bring us into rooms we've never seen;
many, like Orwell, use physical objects to stand for much more than their
face value. The paperweight, as we saw after Julia left, a symbol of the
past.
These objects are also symbolic in that the paperweight that
Winston buys in the old junk-shop stands for the fragile little world that
he and Julia have made for each other. They are the coral inside of it.
As Orwell wrote: "It is a little chunk of history, that they have forgotten
to alter". The "Golden Country" is another symbol. It stands
for the old European pastoral landscape. The place where Winston and Julia
meet for the first time to make love to each other, is exactly like the
"Golden Country" of Winstons dreams.
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