27 February 2015

Lit Circles
Warm Up
What are the events of Hate Week? What is the purpose of these events? Respond briefly; dont
worry about addressing everything but make sure you analyze the overall atmosphere and purpose of
the events.
Discussion Questions
1.) Share your warm up responses with your group. Discuss hate week generally, what its like
and why the Party demands participation. Does it remind you of anything today? What? How
are these things similar to hate week and how are they different?
2.) What is Mr. Carrington like? Why do you think he is allowed to operate this nostalgia shop?
3.) What does Julia take for granted about Party members? What does this say about her
character? (hint: look at p. 152 in the paperback)
4.) Often she was ready to accept the official mythology, simply because the difference between
truth and falsehood did not seem important to her. She believed, for instance, having learnt it
at school, that the Party had invented airplanes And when he told her that airplanes had
been in existence before he was born, and long before the Revolution, the fact struck her as
totally uninteresting. After all, what did it matter who invented airplanes?
What do you think about Julias line of reasoning here? Why does it matter who invented
airplanes?
5.) In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of
understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality,
because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was being demanded of them, and
were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of
understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they
swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will
pass undigested through the body of a bird.
At the beginning of the chapter, Syme was vaporized. Even though he was highly loyal to the
Party, his intelligence itself presented a threat to the Party, which demands from its members
a certain degree of unconsciousness. Do you see any issue with this? Could the Partys
ideology be successfully perpetuated in a world where no one understands it?