Before winter break we started our dystopia and utopia studies. We started by reading “1984” by George Orwell, a very influential book for the dystopian genre. After starting the book we were assigned to pick a character and and make a metaphor man. This meant choosing a character from the novel and cutting them out from paper and adding symbols to represent their role and personality in the book. After choosing last we ended up with the only character left; Mr. Charrington.
Our Character:
Mr. Charrington is first introduced as the man who sells Winston the diary. He later provides a room to Winston and Julia were they can discuss illegal subjects without being surveilled by Big Brother, (not the American reality competition, which is loaded with epic challenges, juicy romances and surprising eliminations. A reality series and a game show, where contestants battle it out each week to maintain their place in the house, all in the hope of claiming the $500,000 prize awarded at the end of the summer. ) A SHOW WORTH WATCHING BTW!!! (I linked the most iconic Big Brother fight)
Back to Mr. Charrington, he also provided Winston with illegal antiques which are illegal to own. By doing these things he pretended to be Winston’s friend and ally. By the end of the book we find out he is been lying about his identity and turned out to be a member of the thought police and was ready to turn in Winston to Big Brother the whole time.
Creating The Metaphor Man:
We first picked the colour of the paper. “Take the green” -Mrs. Willemse Dec 2017, turns out we were doing a green screen project… Anyways we traced Spencer’s body and cut it out as we thought it fit with Mr. Charrington’s body the most and then we started adding symbols to the body. We started by just creating an old man since none of us had finished the book and didn’t know about his secret identity. Next class we fixed this issue by slitting the body into two and creating the “two faced” character.
Here are some elements of the left side (The old Man) and what they mean:
The Tears: They represent his sadness after loosing his wife which made him sad and lonely.
The Cane: Represents his old age
The Empty Pocket: Shows his financial situation as he can’t make too much money just by selling his old furniture.
See-through/Empty heart: It is on his right side to show how his heart is in “the wrong place”. Also it is see through to show how Big Brother sees through it.
The Ball and Chain: Shows how he is stuck doing the same boring things everyday.
The Antique: It is see-through in the picture because we coloured it blue and we used a blue screen. He sold this antique to Winston.
Some of the symbols on the right side(A Thought Police Person) and what they mean:
The Face: Shows a very serious and almost evil face. It is a combination of Stalin and Hitler (done by Spencer unintentionally) This shows the dictatorship like feel in this dystopia
The Red Fist: Represents the fist of oppression
We used DoInk to make the video. The quality is horrible since we had to make our own blue screen since our character was green.
Overall making a metaphor man can help analyze character in a much more in depth way. Unfortunately this was not as helpful as it could have been for our overall book understanding since Mr. Charrington had a minimal role in the book.