1984 by George Orwell, Passage 3 (page 96-97)

     "A long line of trucks, with wooden-faced guards armed with sub-machine guns standing upright in each corner, was passing slowly down the street. In the trucks little yellow men in shabby greenish uniforms were squatting, jammed close together. Their sad, Mongolian faces gazed out over the sides of the trucks utterly incurious. Occasionally when a truck jolted there was a clank-clank of metal: all the prisoners were wearing leg-irons. Truck-load after truck-load of the sad faces passed. Winston knew they were there but he saw them only intermittently...
The trucks were still filing past, the people still insatiably gaping. At the start there had been a few boos and hisses, but it came only from the Party members among the crowd, and had soon stopped. The prevailing emotion was simply curiosity. Foreigners, whether from Eurasia or from Eastasia, were a kind of strange animal. One literally never saw them except in the guise of prisoners, and even as prisoners one never got more than a momentary glimpse of them. Nor did one know what became of them, apart from the few who were hanged as war-criminals: the others simply vanished, presumably into forced-labour camps. The round Mongol faces had given way to faces of a more European type, dirty, bearded and exhausted. From over scrubby cheekbones eyes looked into Winston’s, sometimes with strange intensity, and flashed away again. The convoy was drawing to an end. In the last truck he could see an aged man, his face a mass of grizzled hair, standing upright with wrists crossed in front of him, as though he were used to having them bound together. It was almost time for Winston and the girl to part. But at the last moment, while the crowd still hemmed them in, her hand felt for his and gave it a fleeting squeeze."

     This passage talks about war prisoners coming through London, where Winston lives. At first, when I was reading this, I wondered why Orwell would spend so much time explaining the prisoners in such detail. Then I realized that the prisoners could be symbols of Winston, and all the residents of Oceania, for that matter. First, Orwell mentions the wooden-faced guards. This is much like the Thought Police, who are constantly watching Oceanians. Orwell also mentions the fact that they are close together, and that they are utterly incurious. A parallel can be drawn there, too, because most of the citizens live in small apartments, and don't have an inquisitive nature: they usually just accept everything about life. Also, the leg-irons may represent the strict rules of the government. Later, Orwell states that the prisoners' faces are dirty and exhausted, which is a pretty good description of Winston. Orwell then tells that some prisoners looked into Winston's eyes "with strange intensity," (as if to say "we aren't as different as you think we are"). The last description of a prisoner is of one who was "used to having [his hands] bound together." This sort of sums up the state of society in 1984, because people have gotten so used to the opressive government that they don't even seem to care any more. I may be looking way into this, but I think that Orwell was saying that Winston was just as much a prisoner as the men in the trucks.

1984 by George Orwell, Passage 2 (page 208-209)

     "‘Do you know where you are, Winston?’ he said.
‘I don’t know. I can guess. In the Ministry of Love.’
‘Do you know how long you have been here?’
‘I don’t know. Days, weeks, months — I think it is months.’
‘And why do you imagine that we bring people to this place?’
‘To make them confess.’
‘No, that is not the reason. Try again.’
‘To punish them.’
‘No!’ exclaimed O’Brien. His voice had changed extraordinarily, and his face had suddenly become both stern and animated. ‘No! Not merely to extract your confession, not to punish you. Shall I tell you why we have brought you here? To cure you! To make you sane! Will you understand, Winston, that no one whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands uncured? We are not interested in those stupid crimes that you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them. Do you understand what I mean by that?’"

     This passage is a dialogue between Winston and O'Brien, who has been torturing Winston. O'Brien is explaining to Winston that the torture is not simply punishment, or to make Winston say anything, but to change Winston completely. The object is to make him into a new person with a new mindset. To change everything he believes in a way that he will truly want to be loyal to the government. Orwell shows that the torture has been long and that it has been messing with Winston's mind by saying that Winston doesn't know the difference between days and months while he is at the Ministry of Love. Additionally, O'Brien believes that this is good and right. He shows this by using words like "cure,: "change," and "we care." O'Brien is trying to slowly convince Winston that he is wrong, and O'Brien is right.

1984 by George Orwell, Passage 1 (page 46)

     He turned around. It was his friend Syme, who worked in the Research Department... he was one of the enormous team of experts now engaged in compiling the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak dictionary...
     "You haven't a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston," he said almost sadly. "Even when you write it you're still thinking in Oldspeak.I've read some of those pieces that you write in the Times occasionally. They're good enough, but they're translations. In your heart you'd prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning.You don't grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?"...
"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten... Every year fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller."

     Here, Orwell uses a character named Syme to explain that in the world of 1984, one of the ways the government is controlling the minds of its citizens is creating a new type of language with fewer and fewer words every year. People's vocabularies are getting smaller and smaller until they can't help but think the way the government wants them to, because they don't know how not to. Throughout his monologue, Syme has a quite excited tone, which shows how he is oblivious to the damage that he is causing to not only the current citizens of Oceania, but the future generations. He has been blinded by the government and convinced that he's doing everyone a favor by saving them from unnecessary intelligence.