Start: “He began telling her the story of his married life, but curiously enough she appeared to know the essential parts of it already”

Finish: “‘If you’re happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?

The veil: Julia’s/Katharine’s reaction to sex and the Youth Movement

Type of Satire: Juvenalian - The passage has a tone of resentment and anger towards the way that the Party has changed the definition of sex. It has become such a mediocre and disgusting event that it is even uncomfortable to talk about between Julia and Winston. Julia even mentions that the Youth Movement has this ingrained into minds from a young age. In Oceania, sex is a “duty to the Party,” with that duty being having more children. 

Tools of Satire: incongruity - In this situation, Winston and Julia are speaking about how horrible sex is in Oceania because of the way that the party has portrayed it. When discussing the sexual relationship that Winston had with Katharine, Julia imagines the scene, showing Winston that she knows how he is feeling. This makes it appear that Winston and Julia can understand the feelings that the Party has regarding sex. However, this is completely different from how Winston and Julia feel about sex. They had already slept with each other at least once at this point in time. So while they are discussing the horrors created by the Party at that time, they actually feel the complete opposite about sex. 

The Target: The target of this passage is the way that Stalin felt towards sex during the time of his reign. During his time in power, Stalin outlawed abortion so women would have more children leading to larger families. This was done in order to assure that there were new minds to corrupt into the communist way of thinking. This parallels the reasoning for having children in 1984. In both instances, sex should not be something that is pleasurable or reversible, it should only be done to produce more offspring.   

Start: “She believed, for instance, having learnt it at school, that the Party had invented airplanes.”

Finish: “At first, indeed, she failed to grasp the point of the story.”

The Veil: Julia forgetting that the Party didn’t invent airplanes

Type of Satire: Juvenalian - The tone of this passage has a tone of frustrated and indifferent. Through the explanation that Winston is giving, he is frustrated with Julia because she doesn’t really seem to care if her memory is wrong. Julia tells Winston that the small details aren’t the things that matter. The things that need to be remembered are important to one person, like their beliefs of the people that are important to them. This is frustrating to Winston because he wants the history books to be accurate and state history exactly how it happened. 

Tools of Satire: paradox - This is an example of paradox because the way that Julia and Winston feel about the situation is completely different from each other. Winston wants the Party to tell the truth and leave history alone and the way it happened. While Julia on the other hand, only wants the present to matter, and in the sense that she only cares about the events in the present that directly affect her. 

The Target: The target of this piece of satire is the ways that Stalin would erase history. Stalin and his government were known for erasing people out of photographs and were experts at doing so. Looking at the before and afters of these images are so well done that it is almost unfathomable that someone didn’t use photoshop or modern technology. Additionally, Stalin was known to change accords of events that occurred, similarly to how the Party changed who invented airplanes.

Start: “It could not have been ten seconds, and yet it seemed a long time that their hands were clasped together.”

Finish: “With hands locked together, invisible among the press of bodies, they stared steadily in front of them, and instead of the eyes of the girl, the eyes of the aged prisoner gazed mournfully at Winston out of the nest of hair.”

The Veil: The subject of the passage is addressing the meeting between Winston and Julia in the square and how a traitor is being transported. Both of them are in the crowd, next to each other watching the man being moved, but they hold hands during the entire encounter. Winston describes her hand and you can see the importance this touch has on him and his mindset.

Type of Satire: The tone in the piece is desperate and shows Winston struggle and need for human connection. Winston spends the passage searching every crevice of her hand, memorizing. Hand holding in today’s society reflects the couple’s relationship and is one action that represent human interconnection. When you hold a hand, you show trust and love, something not apart of Oceania’s society. Love and affection cannot be apart of 1984 society because it destroys loyalty. When you love someone, you are loyal to them and the relationship but in 1984 you can only be loyal to one thing, Big Brother. Winston is desperate to break the cycle of blind loyalty and yearns for affection that isn't fake. We see this in his recollections of a prostitute and his wife. Both gave him nothing of importance; he craves love and humanity, two things frowned upon in 1984.

The actions taken place in the passage is not following the patterns of 1984 society. It is unusual and something not teached in that society so them holding hands seems to be unconscious of humans, that love is something that is within us all and not taught.

The target: The target of the writing is of admiration of the ordinary couple. It is not attacking society but actually encouraging normal relationships of love. Hand holding is the most innocent and simplistic way of expressing love and Orwell uses it to show what simple love is.

Start: “She fell on her knees, threw open the bag, and tumbled out some spanners and a screwdriver that filled the top part of it.”

Finish “‘It’s real tea. Not blackberry leaves’”

The Veil: Julia stealing some of the Inner Party’s goods such as real sugar and real coffee, despite there being ‘shortages’ and it not existing for the lower classes. The Inner Party keeps the better foodstuffs for themselves.

Type of Satire: Juvenalian -  Once again, the tone of this passage is not inherently negative, but rather the fact that Julia and Winston are relatively happy about such a minor thing like real sugar, coffee, bread, milk, jam and tea show how deprived the population is of what we consider to be basic foodstuffs. This in turn, shows in what a sad state they live in, and therefore the tone is more glum to a third person who is observing their happiness. 

Tools of Satire: As in the previous satire I wrote about, this section of the text also utilizes allusion historical and current, and once again to past totalitarian, and more specifically communist regimes. If the reader is aware of these historical and current events, they will be able to notice how this situation is similar to those.

The Target: The target of this satire are once more nations such as the Soviet Union, and (unintentionally) the DPRK, in which the leaders hoard all luxuries for themselves while their population receives only the scraps, if even that.

Start: “He learned with astonishment that all the workers in Pornosex, except the head of the department, were girls.”

Finish “He wondered vaguely how many others like her there might be in the younger generation-people who had grown up in the world of the Revolution,knowing nothing else, accepting the Party as something unalterable, like the sky, not rebelling against its authority but simply evading it, as a rabbit dodges a dog.”

The Veil: Julia’s job and rule breaking life 

Type of Satire: As Winston learns more about Julia he becomes more amused and curious about her and about others like her. Winston’s new knowledge on how many girls work in Pornosec amazes him because of the general stereotype that men are usually the ones with the most sexual thoughts and actions and that women are “supposed to be pure.” He also starts wondering if there are others like her who are a part of the younger generation.

Tools of Satire: Irony- This passage shows irony within the first couple of lines when Winston finds out about the woman in Pornosec. It’s an ironic thought for him since he had always believed the theory that the men had more uncontrollable sex instincts than women, yet it was, almost all, women who made up the Pornosec. The irony continues later on in the passage when Winston tells of her first love affair when she was sixteen and how she’s been breaking the rules since. The irony in this is that she is shown wearing an Anti-sex sash but has had sex many, or scores, of times.

The Target: The target in this passage is directed toward how society has always been when it comes to sexual desire. It is the men who are seen as most sexual since the beginning of time. The passage speaks of Julia’s first love affair when she was sixteen, which is the age where most people have been beginning to experiment in sexual intercourse. Although, the major difference is in the society that Julia is living in and the one we live in. Our society has been more lenient on the subject as where Julia’s had someone commit suicide so they wouldn’t be arrested, which ended up working out for her since she would have gotten in trouble for it too. In today’s society only the man she had an affair with would have been in trouble since Julia was only sixteen and would have been seen as the victim.

Start: “Folly, folly, his heart kept saying:conscious, gratuitous, suicidal folly!”

Finish “He even, seeming almost to fade out of existence as he did so, added that there were two entries to the house, one of them through the backyard, which gave on an alley.”

The Veil: Winston’s anxiousness on using the room above Mr. Charrington’s shop for his love affair.

Type of Satire: The passage focuses on Winston’s concern and cautious actions on getting the private room to Mr. Charrington’s shop. At the beginning of the passage he becomes concerned about what it is he is doing, and the purpose of the room he is in. He thinks of the things that could happen, even saying its “suicidal.” Then, at the end of the passage he starts to get cautious and thinks of the entrances to the house. Either thinking about it as an escape plan or as a way someone might enter and catch his affair.

Tools of Satire: Absurdity- Winston believes that the entire idea of what he is doing is complete folly, as he keeps repeating it. This is due to the fact that he’s never done this before and the paranoia that he could be caught in the act and killed. He sees his actions as being absurd and questions what he’s doing. At the end of the passage he speaks of privacy, something that everyone wants. The fact that he is getting privacy, which he states is a “vulnerable thing,” to do something that is basically breaking the law, is also an absurd thought and one he wouldn’t have imagined himself doing.

The Target: The passage targets areas where the government has control over its people. This could include areas such as North Korea where their society isn’t all too much like the one in 1984, but has similarities when it comes to the leader. They both have to “worship” whoever is in charge (Kim/BB) and can’t be seen disobeying or rebelling against them. Having privacy where you aren’t subjected to put up an act is both frightening and liberating.

Start: “The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable.”

Finish “From the point of view of the Low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters.”

The Veil: The passage is taken from a part of “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism” and illustrates the issue of social class struggles in the eyes of the Brotherhood.

Type of Satire: Juvenalian - The pensive and dreary tones expressed in the passage are as a result of the pitiful description of the ongoing struggle for social liberation. The Low being described as always oppressed regardless of their efforts, and their only change being in who rules over them is an ominous thought, to imagine never being able to move up in the world, to be cursed to reside in the dirt of society, it’s frightening.

The text drawn here is exactly the reasoning behind the existence of Marxism. The idea of Karl Marx’s political agenda, which inspired the Communist Manifesto and the principles of Socialism, is that class struggles are the most pertinent issue in modern society. Marxism’s aim is to fix that by ridding society of class divisions altogether, so that there is no struggle between them. The passage about the issue of the High, Middle, and Low is a picture perfect representation of this issue.

The passage, as we know, heavily alludes to Marxist beliefs. This not-so-subtle description of the struggle of the lower class to survive under the more elite who crush them in their squabbles for power is clearly a nod to the political agenda which didn’t go so well for the Soviet Union in the years following the Second World War.