Quiz Questions

1. How did Winston spend long afternoons as a child?
2. What sudden change came over Winston’s mother after his father’s disappearance?
3. What is the “never-mentioned thing that was about to happen”?
4. What did Winston take from his younger sister?
5. What are Reclamation Centers?
6. Why does Winston believe his mother possessed “a kind of nobility, a kind of purity”?
7. What is important to Winston about the arm gestures made by his mother in his dreams and by the Jewish woman on the news film?
8. Why does Winston believe the proles have “stayed human” while Party members like himself and Julia have not?
9. What does Winston say would be the “real betrayal”?
10. What is the one thing Winston and Julia decide the Party cannot do?

Quiz Answers

1. Winston spent long afternoons scrounging for scraps of food from garbage bins, rubbish heaps, and a road where trucks sometimes dropped bits of cattle feed.
2. Winston’s mother suddenly became “completely spiritless,” going about her work very slowly and apparently waiting for something to happen.
3. The “never-mentioned thing that was about to happen” was Winston’s mother’s arrest.
4. Winston took his younger sister’s portion of chocolate.
5. Reclamation Centers are colonies for homeless children. They were established after the civil war.
6. Winston believes his mother possessed nobility and purity because she lived by her own private standards and feelings and did not believe that her actions were meaningless just because they were ultimately ineffective.
7. Both Winston’s mother and the Jewish woman on the news film were holding and protecting their children with their arms even though they were powerless to actually keep their children safe.
8. Winston believes the proles have stayed human because they still value individual relationships, private loyalties, and the kind of personal feelings that Winston is having to relearn how to feel. The proles are not trying to alter the course of history and therefore are able to find value and meaning in gestures that might seem futile.
9. Winston says the “real betrayal” would not be if he confessed but rather if the Party could make him stop loving Julia.
10. Winston and Julia decide the one thing the Party cannot do is alter an individual’s private feelings; they cannot “get inside you.”