1984: Part 2

Part Two begins with a normal workday for Winston. He had not, after all, been vaporized by the Thought Police, and he thinks that everything has blown over.

Winston, while walking in the corridors, sees the same girl who he had seen in the street some days earlier (she works in the Fiction Department of the Ministry, Winston knows). She trips and falls, and so Winston pauses to help her up. As their hands met, she slipped a scrap of paper into his hands, and after thanking him and moving on, Winston makes his way about the day until he can read it. Once reading it, he finds it to read:

I LOVE YOU

This note confuses him, but as it is a dangerous possession, he disposes of the note.

The words absorb Winston for days, and he is longing to meet up with this girl (whose name he doesn’t even know). He attempts to sit next to her in the canteen for several days, but in all until the last, he is prevented by circumstances: some days, she is already sitting with a group, others she is sitting near a telescreen, and even others he is called to another table by one of his coworkers.

Once he can finally make contact with her, in the middle of a crowd, she gives him directions to a place in the countryside outside London, where they are to meet soon.

They meet in the place described by that dark-haired girl, and they talk freely (a first for Winston) about the Ministry, the Party, and life in general in Oceania. They stay hidden in the trees, but Winston notices a lot of similarities to the Golden Country of his dreams: the valley, the creek, and the row of trees. He learns her name, too: Julia.

After enjoying each other’s company for a few hours, they made for home. They took a different route home as that which they had come, so as to avoid suspicion.

They vow to meet each other again, and after a few more meetups, Winston suggests using the antique shop’s upper room for a hiding spot, where they could not be caught due to the lack of a telescreen. Mr. Charrington, the antique shop’s owner, kindly agrees to rent it to them.

 Meanwhile, Winston had been getting certain feelings about O’Brian, an important Inner Party member. He felt that O’Brian  would be sympathetic to the cause of the destruction of the Party, although he could not understand why.

O’Brian had evidently been feeling similarly about Winston, as he established contact by using the 10th edition of the Newspeak Dictionary as a cover-up (that Winston was to come by O’Brian’s flat to pick it up).

O’Brian had the luxury, as an Inner Party member, to turn off the telescreen so that it would not pick up all that he told Julia and Winston.

They learned of the underground organization, called the Brotherhood, lead by Emmanuel Goldstien, whose goal was to overthrow the Party. It is unclear whether or not this organization had a mastermind somewhere behind it, but all members have no more than four contacts within the Brotherhood.

It was promised that Winston would get a copy of the book, that which Emmanuel Goldstien had written, and surely enough, he did.

While reading it with Julia, in the safety of the room above Mr. Charrington’s shop, they heard a voice, coming from behind a two-hundred year old painting. It ordered them to stand in the centre of the room, with their hands behind their heads. Several armed officers of the Thought Police march into the room and surround them, followed by Mr. Charrington, relieved of his disguise as an elderly shopkeeper.

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