Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [497]

For the rest they could meet only in the streets, in a different place every evening and never for more than half an hour at a time. In the street it was usually possible to talk, after a fashion. As they drifted down the crowded pavements, not quite abreast and never looking at one another, they carried on a curious, intermittent conversation which flicked on and off like the beams of a lighthouse, suddenly nipped into silence by the approach of a Party uniform or the proximity of a telescreen, then taken up again minutes later in the middle of a sentence, then abruptly cut short as they parted at the agreed spot, then continued almost without introduction on the following day. Julia appeared to be quite used to this kind of conversation, which she called ‘talking by instalments’. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 497

Note

The serialized, truncated speech pattern realizes the panoptic constraint at the level of syntax and conversation itself — each telescreen or uniform acts as surveillance that severs the sentence. The lighthouse metaphor renders the internalized watching as an external rhythm that governs speech.