1984, AmLit Recap quiz

From 1984 by George Orwell

A whole-book recap of 1984 by George Orwell: Oceania's machinery, Winston and Julia, O'Brien and Room 101, and what the last chapter settles.

15 questions · about 16 minutes

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Questions and answers

  1. Question 1. What is Winston Smith's actual job in the Records Department?

    • Correct answer: Altering back issues of The Times so they agree with the Party now
    • Writing formulaic novels for the proles on the fiction machines
    • Filing telescreen transcripts collected by the Thought Police
    • Compiling the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary

    He rectifies the record: old articles are rewritten to match current Party claims and the originals go down the memory hole.

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  2. Question 2. Why does Syme believe thoughtcrime will one day be impossible?

    • Because every citizen will have a telescreen in every single room
    • Because the Thought Police will place an informer in every building
    • Because children will be trained to report any adult who hesitates
    • Correct answer: Because the words needed to express it will have been destroyed

    Newspeak works by deleting vocabulary. Syme's point is that a thought with no word left to carry it cannot be formed at all.

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  3. Question 3. What is Winston's considered view of the proles?

    • They have already begun to organise under Goldstein's Brotherhood
    • Correct answer: They could sweep the Party away, but will not while they stay unaware of it
    • They are the Party's most loyal supporters and its best-rewarded class
    • They are watched far more closely than any Outer Party member is watched

    He writes that hope lies in the proles, then states the trap: they cannot rebel until they are conscious and cannot become conscious until they rebel.

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  4. Question 4. What turns out to be true of the room above Mr. Charrington's shop?

    • It was a Brotherhood safe house before O'Brien handed it over to Winston
    • It is the one building in the prole quarter that has never held a telescreen
    • Correct answer: A telescreen had been hidden behind the picture on the wall the whole time
    • It had belonged to Winston's mother in the years before she disappeared

    The picture of St. Clement's concealed a telescreen, and Charrington, the mild old shopkeeper, was Thought Police.

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  5. Question 5. What does the Party do in the middle of Hate Week?

    • It announces that Goldstein has at last been captured and put on trial
    • Correct answer: It switches Oceania's enemy from Eurasia to Eastasia without a pause
    • It suspends the Two Minutes Hate to concentrate on the processions
    • It declares that the long war with Eurasia has ended in total victory

    The speaker changes enemies mid-sentence, the crowd decides saboteurs hung the wrong posters, and the Ministry of Truth rewrites the record in days.

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  6. Question 6. According to O'Brien, why does the Party hold power?

    • To defend Oceania against the armies of Eurasia and Eastasia
    • To bring about a future in which every citizen is equal and content
    • To keep the proles fed and the Outer Party usefully occupied
    • Correct answer: For power itself, which is an end and never a means to anything

    Earlier oligarchies claimed to rule for God, the people or a coming paradise. O'Brien says the Party is different because it admits the object of power is power.

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  7. Question 7. What does Winston learn about Goldstein's book once he is in the Ministry of Love?

    • Julia had read the whole of it years earlier and never mentioned it
    • Every copy had been burned in the furnaces before it reached Winston
    • Correct answer: O'Brien helped write it, and it works as bait for heretics
    • It was smuggled into Oceania by couriers working out of Eastasia

    O'Brien says he collaborated in writing it. The Brotherhood may be nothing but a mechanism for identifying people like Winston.

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  8. Question 8. What is in Room 101?

    • Correct answer: Whatever that particular prisoner fears most, chosen case by case
    • A mirror in which the prisoner is made to look at his ruined body
    • A cage of starving rats, which is the worst thing in the world for everyone
    • The chamber where prisoners are shot once they have signed a confession

    The room holds the worst thing in the world, and the worst thing differs for every person. Winston's happens to be rats; the mirror belongs to an earlier session.

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  9. Question 9. What happens when Winston and Julia meet again after their release?

    • Correct answer: Each admits betraying the other, and neither one of them feels anything
    • Julia refuses to speak to him at all and walks away across the park
    • They arrange to go back to Charrington's room together one last time
    • They find that neither of them gave the other away under interrogation

    Both screamed for it to be done to the other. Julia says that once that has happened you never feel the same toward the person again, and they do not meet a second time.

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  10. Question 10. Why do readers argue about the tense of the Appendix on Newspeak?

    • It is written in the present tense, which the rest of the novel never uses
    • Correct answer: It is written in the past tense, as though the Party were already history
    • It is written in the future tense, forecasting the completion of Newspeak
    • It moves between tenses in order to imitate doublethink on the page itself

    The essay discusses Newspeak, Ingsoc and the Party as finished subjects, in standard English. Many readers take that as the one hint that Oceania did not last.

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  11. Question 11. What does 'doublethink' mean, defined as 'the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them'?

    • Privately thinking one thing while publicly saying the opposite thing
    • Repeating a Party slogan until you no longer hear its actual meaning
    • Reasoning your way toward a conclusion the Party has already approved
    • Correct answer: Accepting two beliefs that cancel each other out as both being true

    Doublethink is not lying or hypocrisy. It requires genuine belief in both halves of a contradiction, plus forgetting that you performed the trick.

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  12. Question 12. What does 'crimestop' mean, defined as 'the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought'?

    • Forgetting a crime the moment the last record of it has been burned
    • Reporting a forbidden thought to the Thought Police before acting on it
    • Correct answer: Halting a dangerous thought by reflex before it can finish forming
    • Confessing to a crime that you have only ever imagined committing

    Crimestop is a protective stupidity the Party trains into its members. Winston deliberately drills himself in it while awaiting the third stage of re-education.

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  13. Question 13. What is an 'unperson', as in: 'Syme's name is removed from every list; he has become an unperson'?

    • A prisoner held in the Ministry of Love while awaiting a sentence
    • A prole who was never registered with the Party in the first place
    • Correct answer: Someone erased from the record as having never existed at all
    • A Party member demoted from the Inner Party to the Outer Party

    Vaporization is arrest and deletion in one act. The unperson is not simply dead; the official position is that there was never such a person.

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  14. Question 14. Which of these events actually happen in 1984?

    • Winston buys a blank book from a junk shop and begins keeping a diary.

      Happened

      The cream-laid book comes from Charrington's shop in the prole quarter, and the first thing Winston finds on the page is DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER.

    • Winston and Julia arrange their first meeting through notes carried by Mr. Charrington.

      Didn't happen

      Julia gives him the route herself, spoken quickly while they sit side by side in the crowded canteen. Charrington is nowhere near it.

    • Syme disappears, and his name is quietly removed from every list he was on.

      Happened

      Winston had predicted it. Syme was too intelligent and too candid about what Newspeak was designed to do.

    • Tom Parsons is denounced to the Thought Police by his own daughter.

      Happened

      She heard him talking in his sleep. In the cells he tells Winston he is proud of her for it.

    • Winston and Julia are married in a secret ceremony arranged by the Brotherhood.

      Didn't happen

      There is no ceremony. O'Brien's catechism is the only ritual they take part in, and Winston is still legally married to Katharine.

    • The Party changes Oceania's enemy from Eurasia to Eastasia during Hate Week.

      Happened

      The switch happens mid-rally, and Winston then spends days rewriting records so that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

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  15. Question 15. Which of these events actually happen in Part Three and at the end of the novel?

    • O'Brien tells Winston that he has been watching him for seven years.

      Happened

      The glance Winston built seven years of hope on was surveillance, not sympathy.

    • Winston is shot in Room 101 at the close of the novel.

      Didn't happen

      He is released and given a sinecure. O'Brien has said the Party heals a man and makes him love Big Brother before it destroys him.

    • Winston screams for the rats to be turned on Julia instead of himself.

      Happened

      He means it. That genuine wish, not the words, is what the Party was excavating toward.

    • Julia organises an escape from the Ministry of Love and is recaptured.

      Didn't happen

      Nobody escapes. Julia is broken in her own way and Winston next sees her in a park, thickened and indifferent.

    • Charrington turns out to have been a member of the Brotherhood all along.

      Didn't happen

      He is Thought Police. The kindly old shopkeeper straightens into a much younger man during the arrest.

    • Winston traces 2+2=5 in the dust on a table in the Chestnut Tree Cafe.

      Happened

      The equation that once appalled him now costs him nothing, which is the measure of how complete his conversion is.

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