Chapter 2: As Winston walked to the door to see who was there, he realized he had left his journal open with the words DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER all over it. Turns out he had mistaken his neighbor Mrs. Parsons for the Thought Police. Mrs. Parsons asked Winston for help with her clogged kitchen sink, repeating that it was because her husband Tom was not home. Winston headed over to the Parsons’ flat and began to look at the sink. Once he was finished unclogging the kitchen sink, Mrs. Parson’s two sons who are dressed in the uniform of the Spies as they play-pretended to be a part of the Thought Police, accusing Winston of being a traitor and thought criminal in their game world. Mrs. Parsons explains that her children are riled up because they couldn't go see the hanging, a spectacle that occurred about once a month where Eurasian spies were publicly executed for being guilty of war crimes. Children especially loved to see it, but children at the time became savages as they worked for organizations such as the Spies where they adored the Party and worshiped all that they stood for. It became normal for people over thirty to be afraid of their children because “child heroes” as they were called, would report and turn in their parents if they were suspected of traitorous behavior. One child hit Winston in the neck with a catapult toy as he was leaving, yelling “Goldstein!” pretending that was who Winston represented in his game. Winston returned to his loft and remembered a dream in which he heard a voice, one he believed was O’Brien’s, saying “We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.” This makes him realize that all these thought crimes he has committed and written down in his diary mean he’s already a dead man, so why should he stop? He then put his diary back in its drawer, hidden from the telescreen, and washed his ink-stained fingers before returning to work.

Chapter 3: That night Winston has a dream about being with his mother and his baby sister on a sinking boat. He somehow knows that she was lost in a purge twenty years ago, and feels that he is responsible. His dream then shifts to a spring field scenery that he calls the Golden Country. A dark-haired girl appears and removes all of her clothes before running toward him. He was more mesmerized by the act of what she did than the woman herself. When he wakes up, the word “Shakespeare” is on his lips although he doesn’t know where it came from. The telescreen then lets out a whistle indicating that it was time to wake up and do the morning exercises called Physical Jerks. While doing these exercises, Winston begins to think of his past and his childhood, realizing he doesn't remember much and doesn’t have any physical evidence of it such as photos or documents. He then begins to ponder how in his childhood, there were little to no times of peace.  

Winston wonders about Oceania itself and how now it is at war with Eurasia and in an alliance with Eastasia. The Party stated repeatedly that it had always been this way, but Winston recalls that just four years earlier it was flipped and Oceania was at war with Eastasia and Eurasia. Winston realized how frightening it was that the Party could just basically erase events of the past and say it never happened, and no one would question it. He wondered when he first heard of Big Brother and believed it was sometime in the 1960s, but he isn’t sure especially since he can’t remember when the Party had been created. As he becomes lost in his thoughts, a voice from the telescreen yells at him to work harder on his Physical Jerks.  

Chapter 4: Now at Winston’s work, the Records department of the Ministry of Truth, he uses a speakwrite to update records and documents. A speakwrite is a machine that types what Winston speaks into it. Basically, Winston was updating information to make sure that Big Brother looked right and all-knowing because Big Brother is never wrong. On this day, Winston is given a document from December 1983 that he must update. This document includes the name of a former official for Big Brother who has been vaporized, Comrade Withers. Comrade Withers was executed after being accused as an enemy of the Party, so Winston needed to update this document so it was not speaking positively about him and making him sound loyal to the Party. Winston decides to create a fake name, Comrade Ogilvy, to replace Comrade Withers in the document. He created a backstory for Comrade Ogilvy, one where he was a hero who died in battle and a man who Bog Brother was proud to call a part of the Party. He glanced at Comrade Tillotson in the cubicle across from him and reflects on how the Ministry of Truth makes its workers correct all records and history to what the Party wants them to say.