Winston opens the door fearfully, assuming that the Thought Police have arrived to arrest him for writing in the diary. However, it is only Mrs. Parsons, a neighbor in his apartment building, needing help with the plumbing while her husband is away.
In Mrs. Parsons’s apartment, Winston is tormented by the fervent Parsons children, who, being Junior Spies, accuse him of thoughtcrime.
The Junior Spies is an organization of children who monitor adults for disloyalty to the Party, and frequently succeed in catching them—Mrs. Parsons herself seems afraid of her zealous children.
The children are very agitated because their mother won’t let them go to a public hanging of some of the Party’s political enemies in the park that evening.
Back in his apartment, Winston remembers a dream in which a man’s voice—O’Brien’s, he thinks—said to him, “We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.” Winston writes in his diary that his thoughtcrime makes him a dead man, then he hides the book.
SECTION 3
Winston dreams of being with his mother on a sinking ship. He feels strangely responsible for his mother’s disappearance in a political purge almost twenty years ago.
He then dreams of a place called The Golden Country, where the dark-haired girl takes off her clothes and runs toward him in an act of freedom that annihilates the whole Party.
He wakes with the word “Shakespeare” on his lips, not knowing where it came from. A high-pitched whistle sounds from the telescreen, a signal that office workers must wake up. It is time for the Physical Jerks, a round of grotesque exercise.
As he exercises, Winston thinks about his childhood, which he barely remembers. Having no physical records such as photographs and documents, he thinks, makes one’s life lose its outline in one’s memory.
Winston considers Oceania’s relationship to the other countries in the world, Eurasia and Eastasia. According to official history, Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia, but Winston knows that the records have been changed. Winston remembers that no one had heard of Big Brother, the leader of the Party, before 1960, but stories about him now appear in histories going back to the 1930s.
As Winston has these thoughts, a voice from the telescreen suddenly calls out his name, reprimanding him for not working hard enough at the Physical Jerks. Winston breaks out into a hot sweat and tries harder to touch his toes.
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SparkNotes Editors. “George Orwell 1984.” SparkNotes.com, SparkNotes LLC, 2005.