ASSIGNMENT:
• What is privacy? And how is it negotiated by the main characters, the governmental bodies, and corporations in Private Eye by Brian K.
Vaughn and in the excerpt of 1984 by George Orwell? How is privacy valued, defended and/or violated and by whom? Move beyond the simple
dictionary definitions and use concrete examples from characters’ behaviors to define these terms.
• Make sure to include specific lines, words, or sentences from the comic and sure to provide in-text citations.
Make sure to use Notice and Focus to dig into the meat of both texts and to search for evidence that supports your Definition claim.
A successful paper should contain:
• An attention-grabbing introduction that gives a real-life example (this can be a current event or a historical one) that we haven’t
talked about in class of how the issue of privacy is negotiated and debated among consumers, corporations, governmental bodies – please cite
your source. Write your thesis which should include your own definition and exploration of the term “privacy” (these shouldn’t be dictionary
definitions) and how it is negotiated by characters, governments, and/or corporations in Private Eye and 1984.
• Body paragraphs that explore privacy in relation to the characters in Private Eye. How is privacy valued, defended and/or violated and
by whom? Use examples from the text to illuminate your points, and provide context from the comic. Make sure to expand your analysis, and not
summarize too much. Be sure to include in-text citations!
• Body paragraphs that explore privacy in relation to the characters in 1984. How is privacy valued, defended and/or violated and by whom?
Use examples from the text to illuminate your points, and provide context from the graphic novel. Make sure to expand your analysis, and not
summarize too much. Be sure to include in-text citations!
• Conclusion. Include any newfound insight you’ve gained on the term “privacy” through your exploration of these texts.
• A Works Cited page citing the texts you’ve used.
Don’t forget! Your essay must also contain:
• Proper MLA formatting. This means double space your essay, include a proper heading on the top left corner of the first page (name,
date, CRN #, course title and professor’s name), and paginate your essay with your last name at the top right corner of every page after the
first one.
• A creative title (that is not “Essay #2” or the like).
• Diction appropriate to the writer’s voice.
• Grammatically correct, full sentences (no fragments or run-ons).
• Few to none grammatical errors, such as misspellings or punctuation mistakes.
Excerpt from 1984
George Orwell
Chapter One
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape
the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from
entering along with him.
The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a colored poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the
wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a meter wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black mustache and
ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at
present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was
seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine, and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the
way. On each landing, opposite the lift shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so
contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.
Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do with the production of pig iron. The Voice came from
an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank
somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of
shutting it off completely. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure, the meagerness of his body merely emphasized by the blue
overalls which were the uniform of the Party. His hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt
razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.
Outside, even through the shut window pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper
into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no color in anything except the posters that were
plastered everywhere. The black-mustachio’d face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house front immediately opposite.
BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston’s own. Down at street level another poster, torn at
one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed
down between the roofs, overhead for an instant like a blue-bottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the Police Patrol,
snooping into people’s windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.
Behind Winston’s back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig iron and the overfulfillment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan.
The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up
by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plate commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was
of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on
any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. but at any rate they could plug in your
wire whenever they wanted to. You have to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was
overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer; though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometer away the
Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste – this
was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some childhood
memory that should tell him whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses,
their sides shored up with balks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls
sagging in all directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow herb straggled over the heaps of
rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger path and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken
houses? But it was no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux, occurring against no
background and mostly unintelligible.
The Ministry of Truth – Minitrue, in Newspeak – was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure
of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, three hundred meters into the air. From where Winston stood it was just
possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below. Scattered about
London there were just three other buildings of similar appearance and size. So completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that from
the roof of Victory Mansions you could see all four of them simultaneously. There were the homes of the four Ministries between which the entire
apparatus of government was divided: the Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts; the
Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order; and the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs. Their names, in
Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty.
The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There were no windows in it at all. Winston had never been inside the Ministry of Love, nor
within a half a kilometer of it. It was a place impossible to enter except on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of
barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests. Even the streets leading up to its outer barriers were roamed by gorilla-
faced guards in black uniforms, armed with jointed truncheons.
Winston turned round abruptly. He had set his features into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing the
telescreen. He crossed the room into the tiny kitchen. By leaving the Ministry at this time of day he had sacrificed his lunch in the canteen,
and he was aware that there was no food in the kitchen except a hunk of dark-colored bread which had got to be saved for tomorrow’s breakfast.
He took down from the shelf a bottle of colorless liquid with a plain white label marked VICTORY GIN. It gave off a sickly, oily smell, as of
Chinese rice-spirits. Winston poured out nearly a teacupful, nerved himself for a shock, and gulped it down like a dose of medicine.
Instantly his face turned scarlet and the water ran out of his eyes. The stuff was like nitric acid, and moreover, in swallowing it one had the
sensation of being hit on the back of the head with a rubber club. The next moment, however, the burning in his belly died down and the world
began to look more cheerful. He took a cigarette from a crumpled packet marked VICTORY CIGARETTES and incautiously held it upright, whereupon
the tobacco fell out onto the floor. With the next he was more successful. He went back to the living room and sat down at a small table that
stood to the left of the telescreen. From the table drawer he took out a pen holder, a bottle of ink, and a thick, quarto-sized blank book with
a red back and a marbled cover.
For some reason the telescreen in the living room was in an unusual position. Instead of being placed, as was normal, in the end wall, where it
could command the whole room, it was in the longer wall, opposite the window. To one side of it there was a shallow alcove in which Winston was
now sitting and which, when the flats were built, had probably been intended to hold bookshelves. By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well
back, Winston was able to remain outside the range of the telescreen, so far as sight went. He could be heard, of course, but so long as he
stayed in his present position he could not be seen. It was partly the unusual geography of the room that had suggested to him the thing that he
was now about to do.
But it had also been suggested by the book that he had just taken out of the drawer. It was a peculiarly beautiful book; its smooth creamy
paper, a little yellowed by age, was of a kind that had not been manufactured for at least forty years past. He could guess, however, that the
book was much older than that. He had seen it lying in the window of a frowzy little junk shop in a slummy quarter of the town (just what
quarter he did not now remember) and had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire to possess it. Party members were supposed not to
go into ordinary shops (“dealing on the free market it was called), but the rule was not strictly kept, there were various things such as
shoelaces and razor blades which it was impossible to get hold of in any other way. He had given a quick glance up and down the street and then
had slipped inside and bought the book for two dollars fifty. At the time he was not conscious of wanting it for any particular purpose. He had
carried it guiltily home in his brief case. Even with nothing written in it, it was a compromising possession.
The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if
detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least a forced-labor camp. Winston fitted a nib into the pen holder
and sucked it to get the grease off. The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one, furtively and
with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being
scratched with an ink pencil. Actually he was not used to writing by hand. Apart from very short notes, it was usual to dictate everything into
the speakwrite, which was of course impossible for his present purpose. He dipped the pen into the ink and then faltered for just a second. A
tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote:
April 4th, 1984.
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