Ch4

• 1.4

  This chapter describes Winston’s work. He is forging several old documents in order to make the Party always sound correct. By altering the past it allows them to always predict the future. Winston even makes up the existence of a man for Big Brother’s speech.
• This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs - to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance.
• All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.
• Even the written instructions which Winston received, and which he invariably got rid of as soon as he had dealt with them, never stated or implied that an act of forgery was to be committed: always the reference was to slips, errors, misprints, or misquotations which it was necessary to put right in the interests of accuracy.
• Winston’s greatest pleasure in life was in his work.