L.O: I can analyse the plot, characters, themes, motifs and the language used.

Key Facts:
Full Title - 1984
Author - George Orwell
Genre - Dystopian Fiction, Science Fiction
Narrator - Third-person, limited

Climax - Winston’s torture with the cage of rats in Room 101

Protagonist - Winston Smith
Antagonist - The Party; Big Brother
Setting (Time) - 1984
Setting (Place) - London, England (known as “Airstrip One” in the novel’s alternate
reality)
Point of View - Winston Smith’s
Falling Action - Winston’s time in the café following his release from prison, including
the memory of his meeting with Julia at the end of Book Three

Tone - Dark, frustrated, pessimistic

Themes

• The psychological, technological, physical, and social dangers of totalitarianism

and political authority

• The importance of language in shaping human thought

Motifs

• Urban decay (London is falling apart under the Party’s leadership)

• The idea of doublethink (the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in one’s mind
at the same time and believe them both to be true)
L.O: I can analyse the plot, characters, themes, motifs and the language used.

Symbols

• The glass paperweight (Winston’s desire to connect with the past)

• The red-armed prole woman (the hope that the proles will ultimately rise up
against the Party)

• The picture of St. Clement’s Church (the past)

• The telescreens and the posters of Big Brother (the Party’s constant surveillance
of its subjects)

• The phrase “the place where there is no darkness” (Winston’s tendency to mask
his fatalism with false hope, as the place where there is no darkness turns out to
be not a paradise but a prison cell)

Characters:
Winston Smith
A minor member of the ruling Party in near-future London, Winston Smith is a thin, frail,
contemplative, intellectual, and fatalistic thirty-nine-year-old. Winston hates the
totalitarian control and enforced repression that are characteristic of his government. He
harbors revolutionary dreams.
O’Brien
A mysterious, powerful, and sophisticated member of the Inner Party whom Winston
believes is also a member of the Brotherhood, the legendary group of anti-Party rebels.
Big Brother
Though he never appears in the novel, and though he may not actually exist, Big Brother,
the perceived ruler of Oceania, is an extremely important figure. Everywhere Winston
looks he sees posters of Big Brother’s face bearing the message “BIG BROTHER IS
WATCHING YOU.” Big Brother’s image is stamped on coins and broadcast on the
unavoidable telescreens; it haunts Winston’s life and fills him with hatred and fascination.