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Book beginning: page 3

Mechanics of the system

• Should the system have so many people working to falsify facts and then just go on home in the evening? Everyone in the Party takes an entry test (p217), however, each one must know what they are doing and at some point become susceptible to it. With doublethink the system for the most part works, especially when reinforced with the Ministry of Love, but it does seem that it might be open to error efficiency wise.

Time

• The only reason the reader knows how many hours Winston worked was because he could not see Julia. Without the love affair, no one really minds routines and overtime (p187).
• The dead not only cease to matter in the sense that someone’s life could be vaporized, leaving them an unperson, but there is also no presence of funerals. Once you are gone, you are gone. Not even Big Brother is a concrete person so he can never disappear (p272), because for the Party, the only definite aspect in life is that sooner or later you will die (p277) but the system must live on (p218).
• Is it plausible that anyone ever survived to see old age and die of natural causes? There are a lot of deaths caused by characters becoming an unperson, and of course you cannot have a funeral for someone who does not exist, but is it possible that some did survive the system through loyalty?

Once you are caught

• The magnificent aspect of the story is how openly O’Brien talked to Winston about the mechanics and history of the system. O’Brien only drew the line at whether Big Brother or the Brotherhood existed (p272) but other than wanting to leave these doubts in Winston’s mind, they conversed quite freely together.

What if…?

• What could Winston have been capable of if he were born at an earlier time? He was said to be very good at his job (p164), which was the manipulation and reconstruction of reports (p46, 48); and although he was not perfect at it (p55), he had a way with writing in Newspeak (p46); and he even took to writing a diary when it was a rule punishable by death (p8).
  
  Having said this, history would have inevitably given over to this new era, so if he were a writer his works would have been destroyed (Appendix p325), and if he were an inventor his discoveries abandoned (p201), ultimately affairs would have ended much the same as they now existed.

Orwell, George. 1984. Penguin Books, 2008.