Book 3 Chapter 2-3

A Comprehension Questions

1 What is a disease Winston suffers from, according to O’Brien?

2 What does O’Brien want Winston to say when he holds up four fingers in front of him,
and why?
3 Why is the Party determined not to make martyrs and how do they avoid doing so?
4 What are the three stages of Winston’s reintegration?
5 According to O’Brien, who wrote the book supposedly authored by Goldstein, and what
does he say about the information it contains?
6 Why does the Party cling to power?
7 Why does O’Brien consider Winston the last man, the guardian of the human spirit?
8 What does O’Brien have Winston do that brings him to tears?

B Guided Exam Practice — Writing a PEEAL Paragraph

1 The Passage (Book 3, Chapter 2)

His voice had grown almost dreamy. The exaltation, the lunatic enthusiasm, was still in his face.
He is not pretending, thought Winston, he is not a hypocrite, he believes every word he says.
What most oppressed him was the consciousness of his own intellectual inferiority. He watched
the heavy yet graceful form strolling to and fro, in and out of the range of his vision. O'Brien was
5 a being in all ways larger than himself. There was no idea that he had ever had, or could have, that
O'Brien had not long ago known, examined, and rejected. His mind contained Winston's mind.

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 Book 3 Chapter 2-3

But in that case how could it be true that O'Brien was mad? It must be he, Winston, who was mad.
O'Brien halted and looked down at him. His voice had grown stern again.

'Do not imagine that you will save yourself, Winston, however completely you surrender to us. No
10 one who has once gone astray is ever spared. And even if we chose to let you live out the natural
term of your life, still you would never escape from us. What happens to you here is for ever.
Understand that in advance. We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming
back. Things will happen to you from which you could not recover, if you lived a thousand years.
Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you.
15 Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or
courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you
with ourselves.'

He paused and signed to the man in the white coat. Winston was aware of some heavy piece of
apparatus being pushed into place behind his head. O'Brien had sat down beside the bed, so that
20 his face was almost on a level with Winston's.

Q How does Orwell convey Winston's despair and O'Brien's fanaticism in this passage?

2 Planning Stage 1: Close Reading & Annotation

Before you write your passage-based response, you need to read the passage carefully and
consider aspects that you may want to comment on. In passage based questions, your response
has to explore the author's techniques and choices of language, structure and form. In other
words, ask yourself the following questions:

Language devices – How the writer has used vocabulary choices and imagery to influence
the reader’s thinking towards characters, events, settings and the sense of atmosphere being
developed.

Structure and form – How the passage has been narrated and laid out. For example, it could
be narrated in the first or third person, it could contain a flashback or it could contain a dual
narrative to achieve a particular effect.

Effect – How the reader is made to feel towards the characters, events, settings and atmosphere
by the writer’s use of language, structure and form.

During this stage of your planning, read the passage closely, take notes and annotate the
passage with relevant quotations to use accordingly.
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 3 Planning Stage 2: Complete the PEEAL Table (Point — Evidence — Explanation — Analysis — Link)

Complete the following table using the quotations from the passage that you have decided upon. Examples are provided:

Point Evidence Explanation Analysis Link

The passage begins with "His voice had grown The phrases "dreamy" At the same time, the Focusing on Winston's
Winston's poignant almost dreamy. The and "lunatic enthu- contradictory, even point of view foreshad-
observations about exaltation, the lunatic siasm" emphasise hyperbolic phrases ef- ows how both Winston
O'Brien's voice and ap- enthusiasm, was still in Winston's conflicted, fectively convey Win- (and by extension the
pearance. his face." (1) confused perception of ston's sense of horror reader) are fooling
O'Brien. and disbelief at what themselves in seeing
he is witnessing in any hope of escape from
O'Brien. this situation.

Alexander Myers 3
English, Grades 7-12
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 Book 3 Chapter 2-3

4 Writing the PEEAL Paragraph

Now use your completed PEEAL table to write your response about how Orwell conveys
Winston's despair and O'Brien's fanaticism in this passage. Remember to use your points to
help you.

Alexander Myers 4
English, Grades 7-12
agzmyers@gmail.com
Book 3 Chapter 2-3

Alexander Myers 5
English, Grades 7-12
agzmyers@gmail.com
ANSWER KEY

Book 3 Chapter 2-3

A Comprehension Questions

1 What is a disease Winston suffers from, according to O’Brien?

He has a poor memory, which actually means he has a good memory and remembers the past. O’Brien
feels Winston is also unwilling to fix it.

2 What does O’Brien want Winston to say when he holds up four fingers in front of him,
and why?

That he is actually holding five fingers. He is trying to get Winston to stop differentiating between that
which is knowable—that he can see four fingers—and perceived reality, that O’Brien tells him he is
holding up five. This is the final step for Winston’s reintegration, accepting whatever he is told as the
only truth.

3 Why is the Party determined not to make martyrs and how do they avoid doing so?

Martyrs hold glory, and others rise up in their place. They are a tangible image of resistance. Instead,
the Party simply eradicates those who work against Party goals and kills people quietly, without fanfare.
This works to destabilize the very idea of resistance and of its possibility. The result is that all resistors feel
alone, isolated, as if they are the only ones not in line with Party goals.

4 What are the three stages of Winston’s reintegration?

Learning, understanding, and acceptance.

5 According to O’Brien, who wrote the book supposedly authored by Goldstein, and what
does he say about the information it contains?
He says that O’Brien himself, along with others, authored the book. He says that it is both completely true
and propaganda manufactured by the Party.

6 Why does the Party cling to power?

The Party desires power for the sake of power itself. Compared to other totalitarian regimes, like the
German Nazis or the Russian Communists, the Party does not pretend they have seized power unwillingly
or only for a short time. The desired result is simply domination: “Power is not a means; it is an end.”

7 Why does O’Brien consider Winston the last man, the guardian of the human spirit?
Winston insists that the spirit of man makes the ultimate survival of the Party impossible and believes
that in the end that spirit is irrepressible.

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English, Grades 7-12
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ANSWER KEY

Book 3 Chapter 2-3

8 What does O’Brien have Winston do that brings him to tears?

He has him look in the mirror at his body, which is emaciated, broken, feeble, and ugly. He has come to
look like the skeletal prisoner he saw in his first days at the Ministry of Love.

B Teacher's Guide

Book 3, Chapter 2:

Summary & Analysis:

Winston regains consciousness to find himself strapped to some kind of cot, with O’Brien and a man
holding a syringe staring down at him. Though his memories of his time so far at the Ministry of Love
are broken by bouts of unconsciousness, he remembers having gone through a nightmarish period of
routine brutal beatings, which he eventually realized all prisoners are subjected to as a matter of course,
just as all prisoners are forced to confess to a long list of crimes. Sometimes he fought against confessing;
sometimes he begged for mercy before the beating even began. After a while the beatings stopped,
and Winston was interrogated not by armed guards but by Party intellectuals who questioned him for
hours at a time. Though these interrogators made sure he was constantly uncomfortable and in pain,
their main method of breaking him down was the relentless questioning itself: they accused him of lying
and contradicting himself, screamed at him, threatened to have him beaten again, then called him
“comrade” and asked him to repent in the name of Ingsoc and Big Brother.

These interrogations broke Winston down even more than the beatings had, reducing him to tears until
he confessed to every crime he was falsely accused of and implicated almost everyone he had ever known.
Since the Party recognizes no distinction between thought and action, Winston reasoned that in a way
these confessions were all true. Winston also has several disconnected, dreamlike memories: He was
diving into a pair of glowing eyes. He was sitting in a chair surrounded by dials beside a man in a white
coat when guards arrived to take him to Room 101. In another memory he travelled down a huge,
light-filled corridor along with Julia, Mr. Charrington, O’Brien, and all the employees of the Ministry of
Love while joyfully confessing his crimes, feeling forgiven and as though he had miraculously avoided
something terrible. All through this time, Winston had the feeling that O’Brien was the one directing
every aspect of his interrogation. At one point, the same voice that had said “we shall meet in the place
where there is no darkness” told Winston that he had watched over him for seven years and would now
save him and make him “perfect.”

Now, strapped down flat on his back, Winston looks up at O’Brien’s face. When O’Brien moves his
hand, Winston is met with a wave of wrenching pain from a machine beside the cot. O’Brien states that
Winston’s greatest fear at that moment is that his back will break. He turns a dial that stops the pain.

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ANSWER KEY

Book 3 Chapter 2-3

He warns Winston that he can inflict as much pain on him as he likes at any time and that he won’t
hesitate to do so if Winston lies to him or fails to respond intelligently. Winston, O’Brien says, is suffering
from mental derangement and a defective memory, but his condition can be cured. According to O’Brien,
Winston’s memory of Oceania’s having once been at war with Eurasia rather than Eastasia is just one
example of his illness; his “hallucination” of the photograph proving Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford’s
innocence is another. O’Brien then produces the photograph, causing Winston to desperately reach for
it, but O’Brien drops it down a memory hole, asserting that the photograph does not exist and never did.
Winston argues that it exists in memory, but O’Brien replies that he does not remember it. Winston thinks
with despair that O’Brien might be telling the truth.

O’Brien then asks him if he believes the past exists. Winston replies that it exists in records and memories,
but O’Brien says the Party controls all records and all memories and therefore controls the past as well.
There is, he says, no such thing as external reality: reality exists only in the collective mind of the Party,
and Winston must submit to the Party in order to see things as they really are. O’Brien then holds up
four fingers and asks Winston how many fingers there are if the Party says there are five. Winston replies
that there are still only four. O’Brien turns the dial and increases Winston’s pain every time he replies that
he sees four fingers. Eventually Winston says he sees five, but O’Brien can tell he is lying and asks him if
he really wants to see five instead of four. Winston says that he does. This time the pain is so great that
he sees more fingers than he can count and forgets why he is supposed to count them. When O’Brien
asks him how many fingers he sees, Winston doesn’t know. O’Brien says that this is an improvement,
and Winston is given an injection that fills him with a feeling of bliss. Even though he knows O’Brien is
torturing him and will eventually have him executed, Winston feels an intense love for his torturer in this
moment.

With a look of insane enthusiasm, O’Brien tells Winston that the Party has brought him to the Ministry
of Love not to make him confess or to punish him but to cure him of his insanity. He explains that the
Party has done something the Medieval Inquisition and the Russian Communists failed to do: it has
eliminated martyrdom by ensuring that every prisoner brought to the Ministry of Love is truly converted
before being executed. This is what happened to Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford, who came to love
Big Brother before they were shot. Winston despairs as he realizes that O’Brien, who is his intellectual
superior, believes everything he is saying, meaning that in spite of how maniacal O’Brien looks, it must
be true that Winston is the one who is insane. What the Party does to Winston in the Ministry of Love,
O’Brien stresses, will be forever—he will not save himself, and he will never recover. Then two pads
are fixed to Winston’s temples, and O’Brien tells the man in the white coat standing by to turn the
dial to three thousand. Winston is met with a blinding flash of light and the sensation of having been
knocked down. Afterward, feeling that there is an empty space in his brain for O’Brien to fill, he accepts
without argument what O’Brien tells him: that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, that the
photograph of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford wasn’t real, and that O’Brien is holding up five fingers,
not four. For an instant he really does see five fingers. O’Brien tells Winston that he is right to think
O’Brien is someone he can talk to, as he enjoys their conversations and even thinks he and Winston are
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English, Grades 7-12
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B Guided Exam Practice — Writing a PEEAL Paragraph

Complete the following table using the quotations from the passage that you have decided upon. Examples are provided:

Point Evidence Explanation Analysis Link

The passage begins with "His voice had grown The phrases "dreamy" At the same time, the Focusing on Winston's
Winston's poignant almost dreamy. The and "lunatic enthu- contradictory, even point of view foreshad-
observations about exaltation, the lunatic siasm" emphasise hyperbolic phrases ef- ows how both Winston
O'Brien's voice and ap- enthusiasm, was still in Winston's conflicted, fectively convey Win- (and by extension the
pearance. his face." (1) confused perception of ston's sense of horror reader) are fooling
O'Brien. and disbelief at what themselves in seeing
he is witnessing in any hope of escape from
O'Brien. this situation.
Orwell then goes on to "But in that case how The use of questions is The fact that this is an Self-interrogation like
use questions to further could it be true that rhetorical and serves to interrogation is highly this reinforces the ul-
emphasise Winston's O'Brien was mad? It must showcase how Winston ironic, at this point, as timate truth that it is
confusion and despair. be he, Winston, who was may or may not be go- it appears that Winston O'Brien, not Winston,
mad." (7) ing mad. is interrogating him- who is in fact in com-
self. plete control, through-
out.
O'Brien's powerful "Never again will you The finality of Win- Structurally, this O'Brien becomes a typ-
monologue relentless- be capable of ordinary ston's fate is further sentnece concludes a ical antagonist here,
ly reminds Winston human feeling." (14) reinforced when O'Brien lengthy and revealing whose use of monologue
of what awaits him in says: "What happens to monlogue by O'Brien emphasises his fanati-
Room 101. you here is for ever" (11) that reinforces the force cism and his role as an
of his own conviction. antagonist, overall.

Finally, O'Brien rev- "'We shall squeeze you The phrases "squeeze The use of the pronouns The Party will force
elation of the Party's empty, and then we shall you empty" and "fill "we" and "ourselves" Winston to give up his
ultimate goal is partic- fill you with ourselves.'" you with ourselves" fore- powerfully shows how entire self-identity in
ularly harrowing and shadow a harrowingly insignificant Winston favour of the Party's
violent. violent form of torture. ("you") ultimately is, goals. This is poignant-
faced with the power of ly reinforced in the
the Party. pronouns used.

Alexander Myers 9
English, Grades 7-12
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