How does W decide to fulfill his assignment in regard to BB’s speech? He creates Comrade Ogilvy to take the place of a vaporized person. Read p. 42 Exists just like Caesar!

Q. Why does Winston have to change Big Brother’s speech about the FFCC and Withers? They have to go back and say they didn’t exist.

As it happened, the Eurasian Higher Command had launched its offensive in South India and left North Africa alone. It was therefore necessary to rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother’s speech, in such a way as to make him predict the thing that had actually happened.

Winston works for the Records Department, which is a department of the Ministry of Truth. His job is to rectify records so that they match what the government wants them to say.

Julia

The rat is the fellow-traveller of death, destitution and figuratively, betrayal. Winston’s fear of rats is in essence a psychopathological fear of what he takes to be the greatest evil – self-betrayal, betrayal of others (“Do it to Julia!”), ratting or being a rat in general (especially a greedy one).

Winston fears rats. He then revealed that he feared rats more than anything else in the world. This same fear is what O’Brien eventually used to get Winston to betray his love for Julia.

Julia was a sexual animal. She loved sleeping with men. They could have threatened her with altering her beauty, but it is ambiguously described and from the fact that she sleeps with older, less-than handsome men like Winston, I don’t think that was it. Castration would have been terrifying to her.

In 1984, the rats represent Winston’s deepest fears because he is more afraid of them than of anything else. On a deeper level, however, the rats also symbolize the extent of the Party’s control over the people of Oceania.

Winston suffered death trauma when he was young. He had committed an offense against his mother and then ran-off. O’Brien also amplified the phobia by having a couple of starving rats held in a basket-like helmet with a way to have the rats move from their end, to where Winston’s face was housed.

In the final moment of the novel, Winston encounters an image of Big Brother and experiences a sense of victory because he now loves Big Brother. Although Winston’s fate is unhappy and the ending of the book may seem pessimistic, the ending also can be read as offering a glimpse of hope.

In Room 101, O’Brien straps Winston to a chair, then clamps Winston’s head so that he cannot move. With the writhing, starving rats just inches away, Winston cracks. He screams that he wants O’Brien to subject Julia to this torture instead of him.

The worst thing in the world to Winston is rats and yet for others it could be “burial alive, or death by fire. . .”, this means that the worst thing in the world is someone’s worst fear.

What does Winston see when he looks into the mirror? He sees a skinny, grey colored skeleton with no teeth and bald head. At the end of section III, what has Winston NOT done that O’Brien wants him to do? He has not betrayed Julia and admit that he loves the party.

The rat poking his head through the wall foreshadows two separate events, both having to do with the couple’s eventual capture. Winston is terrified of rats, a fact that is his breaking point later in the novel.

What is the one thing Winston and Julia will not do for the cause? They will not agree to stop seeing each other.

Winston’s betrayal reveals that he is only human, and that he has a breaking point. Realistically, he didn’t stand a chance against the Party due to the total power they had over him. Even after months of torture, Winston remained strong, and as defiant as he could be.

Emmanuel Goldstein is introduced as the Enemy of the People during the Two Minutes Hate at the beginning of the novel. He was once an important member of the Party but became a traitor.

19. Goldstein is “the principle traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party’s purity”.

First of all, Goldstein is presented as physically repulsive. Winston tells us, for instance, that he has a “face like a sheep,” a “silly” nose and an overall air of self-satisfaction. This irritates the people of Oceania and encourages them to hate him.