1984 by George Orwell is a phenomenal classic that was published in 1949. Warning of the danger of technology when misused by totalitarian governments, 1984 is more relevant today than ever, seeing all the power and responsibility involved with modern science, making it a book to be read by everyone.
1984’s protagonist is Winston Smith, an Outer Party member of the Party of Oceania. The world of 1984 takes place in a reality that is much darker than the real world, for totalitarian dictatorships are likely to have conquered most societies on the planet, for it is reputed that the world has been divided into three areas, Eastasia, Eurasia, and Oceania, each ruled by a vicious dictatorship. The society Smith lives in, Airstrip One, is a section of Oceania, which was originally London, and is dominated by a hierarchical social structure of proles (the proletariat), Outer Party members, and Inner Party members. The proletariat makes up the vast majority of the population (around 85%), Outer Party members make up most of the Party, and Inner Party members technically rule Oceania. The society of Oceania relies on a massive amount of propaganda and indoctrination to properly function and seeks to render its citizens incapable of even thinking about thoughts deemed heretical and therefore dangerous by the authorities. Oceania employs the Thought Police, secret police who are trained to punish “thought-crime” as well as actual crimes, for thinking the wrong things in Oceania are considered to be just as illegal as actually committing them. Oceania itself is an impoverished society, for, to keep the population stupid and obedient, Party members ensure that Oceania is in a constant state of war, for war requires a large number of resources and uses up whatever surplus is produced. Oceania’s buildings are dilapidated, the food is usually of very poor quality and quantity, the education is nothing less than fanatical indoctrination, there are few to trust (even one’s family, for the Party encourages young children to betray their parents if they show any sign of free-thinking or disobedience), the people are ignorant and cruel due to the harshness of their lives, and the only individuals who live somewhat reasonable lives are Inner Party members, for they enjoy a substantial amount of housing and servants while having access to better food. It should be noted that Oceania, as the embodiment of a totalitarian society, relies on no single individual to exist: it simply needs the mass of people to blindly accept what they are told. When it comes to Outer Party members, while they have certain privileges, their lives are much harder than Inner Party members, for they usually have to work in harsh conditions and are subjected to extreme scrutiny by the Party, for the Party is adamant about its members being inflexible, adherent extremists. Whenever any citizen of Oceania is suspected of committing either thought-crime or actual crime and is caught doing so by telescreens (TVs that are cameras) and informants, they are taken to the institution known as the Ministry of Love, the branch of Oceania’s government that deals with imprisoning, torturing, and executing people. It should be noted that when it comes to the punishments, one’s position in Oceania is a major factor concerning the one received. The Party teaches its members that “proles and animals are free,” for it considers proletarians below their attention, for they are too stupid and lazy to rebel. Thus, when they are sent to the Ministry of Love for breaking the law, they are treated much more leniently than the political prisoners and are likely to be acquainted with the guards. However, Inner and Outer Party members who lose favor within the Party are brutally and extensively tortured by the Party, which leads to the next point: the ruling party of Oceania is different from every other oppressive group in history due to its ultimate goals concerning punishment. While there have been numerous incidents of totalitarian institutions severely punishing people, their methods of dealing with insubordination have been noted by an Inner Party member (to be discussed later) as utterly ineffective. That is, even if the victim is tormented to the point that they give a confession and publicly recant, they can always take it back and think subversive thoughts. In fact, there have been countless cases of the victims publicly defying their executioners and interrogators, even when being executed. For instance, when the Soviet Union had show trials and mass purges that involved the slaughter of tens of millions, most of Stalin’s victims retained their freedom of thought and remained fundamentally unswayed, for they knew in their minds that the Communist Party wasn’t infallible. When the Spanish Inquisition burned heretics at the stake, it was quite common for the heretics to scream obscenities and further blasphemies, which only incited further resistance. However, as stated before, this isn’t the case in Oceania, for the Party makes the primary goal of its interrogation the conversion of the victim: the political prisoner’s mind must be fractured and purged until it feels only love for Big Brother (who is the mascot of the Party, for there were countless pictures in Oceania with his face on it along with the caption that informed the passerby that he was watching them) and the Party. The Party’s interrogation procedures have been perfected to the point that most prisoners are soon rendered incapable of thoughtcrime, making them feel nothing but admiration and Stockholm Syndrome for Big Brother. The process of doing so involves a huge amount of torture and indoctrination, for every person has their breaking point, no matter how tough or strong they are. Once the prisoners have been brought over to the side of the Party, they are released in public to show potential dissidents the futility of resistance. Eventually, they are re-imprisoned and executed (usually by a bullet to the head), thereby crushing all potential resistance.
Along with the Ministry of Love, Oceania has other branches concerning the governance of society. Like the Ministry of Love, their names are the epitomes of Orwellian language, for their functions are actually the opposite of their names. That is, the Ministry of Love focuses on severely abusing and maiming people, the Ministry of Plenty finds ways to waste Oceania’s resources so as to keep people poor and foolish, the Ministry of Peace incites controlled wars with the other two superpowers of the world (the three superpowers involve America, Europe, and Asia who fight over Africa—they purposefully fight unfruitful wars due to it being very difficult for them to actually achieve a decisive victory over each other. Furthermore, their military operations give them justification for the poverty most of their citizens are subjected to.), and the Ministry of Truth falsifies documents to show the utter infallibility of the Party as well as destroying all records that go against its words. When it comes to the Ministry of Truth, its goal is to encourage an unbending, rigid believe on part of the populace to believe whatever the Party says, as it employs a large number of people to extensively re-write history so that the Party can get rid of facts they don’t like to acknowledge and take credit for things it wasn’t responsible for doing (ex. it alleges that it comes up with technological innovations like the airplane). Orwell writes in 1984 that the person who controls the present controls the past, for the past has to be documented and interpreted in order for it to be somewhat known, and that whoever controls the past controls the future, for they will be able to influence public opinion at will. Needless to say, the Party is in total control of Oceania, and another method they use to keep the population pacified, patriotic, and xenophobic is by employing a rumor that states that Emmanuel Goldstein, who was supposedly one of the founding fathers of Oceania, has turned against the country and is collaborating with Oceania’s enemies to bring it down. He is in control of an organization, the Brotherhood that may or may not exist. When one examines the text, it is quickly apparent that it is very possible (perhaps most likely) that Goldstein isn’t even a part of a genuine rebellion and is yet another prop of the Party, for the fabled resistance that he leads sees no action in the plot of the book, and it should be noted that all information regarding him is hushed up, so that the only thing most people know about him is that he is against the Party, thus increasing their resolve to be obedient citizens. To reiterate, the book’s protagonist is a forty-five-year-old man named Winston Smith. Winston suffers from ill health, best encapsulated in a varicose ulcer he has on his leg. He is a member of the Outer Party and works in the Ministry of Truth, and when he was walking to his apartment one afternoon, he saw posters of Big Brother and the three slogans of the Party: “WAR IS PEACE / FREEDOM IS SLAVERY / IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.” It is then noted that the official language of Oceania is known as Newspeak and that some Party members focus on decreasing the number of words within it, for when people are stripped of words they can use to express themselves, the range of their thoughts will be likewise limited. Winston, upon entering his room, sees the telescreen and makes sure to act perfectly normal, for the Thought Police can analyze his behavior through the telescreen whenever they choose, though he receives no indication that they are doing so. He later drinks some “victory gin,” a “colorless liquid” that “gave off a sickly, oil smell, as of Chinese rice-spirit.” Winston, despite his membership in the Party, secretly despises it, for he wishes to express himself and knows he will be arrested if he does so. Regardless, he engages in an act of covert resistance by beginning a diary. The first date he puts down is April 4th, 1984, and he recounts the propaganda (that featured the slaughtering of civilians belonging to the enemies of Oceania) that was shown to the populace. Winston thinks about his job, introducing the audience to the existence of a dark-haired, athletic, pretty, and fierce-looking young woman whom Winston is attracted to but is afraid of, for she is in the Party’s Anti-Sex League and appears to be a devout follower. Winston notes that young people are frequently the most fanatical and intolerant of all individuals of Oceania, for they knew nothing but the Party. One of Winston’s superiors is O’Brien, who is a member of the Inner Party. O’Brien “was a large, burly man with a thick neck and a coarse, humorous, brutal face. In spite of his formidable appearance he had a certain charm of manner. He had a trick of resettling his spectacles on his nose which was curiously disarming—in some indefinable way, curiously civilized.” Party members are subjected daily to a ritual known as the Two Minutes Hate, in which they are not only allowed but encouraged to vent their hatred, rage, and frustration towards a representation of Emmanuel Goldstein. Winston notes that although he knew Two Minutes Hate was nothing but a Party diversion, he couldn’t help himself from joining in, for humans are social animals that are prone to imitating the behavior of their neighbors. What’s more, it offered him a legitimate outlet for his emotion. Orwell recounts, “A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp. Thus, at one moment Winston’s hatred was not turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police … And yet the very instant he was at one with the people about him … At those moments his secret loathing of Big Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed to tower up, an invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against the hordes of Asia, and Goldstein, in spite of his isolation … seemed like some sinister enchanter, capable by the mere power of his voice of wrecking the structure of civilization.”
Winston notes that it is possible for hatred to be intentionally directed towards a specific entity, and he does so himself, making himself fiercely loathe the dark-haired young woman behind him. He viciously imagined brutalizing her, and then he realized why he despised her: “He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so, because round her sweet supple waist, which seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there was only the odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chastity.” When the Two Minutes Hate was over, the viewers were filled with relief, for the last thing that was shown in the short film was the face of Big Brother. Winston, going back to the present moment, wrote “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER” repeatedly in his diary, knowing that if (or more accurately, when) the Thought Police caught him, he would be “vaporized,” vanished out of existence, turning into an “unperson,” which the Party was fully capable of doing due to their controlling not only historical records but people’s minds, for most people are used to forgetting those who had been vaporized for the sake of their safety. As for him, he knew of people who have been vaporized, filling with terror at the thought of disappearing without a trace himself. Winston then hears knocking. Terrified, he was relieved to see that it was only his neighbor, a woman named Mrs. Parsons who had two children who had been turned into virulent lunatics by the Party. Mrs. Parsons asked him to examine the kitchen sink. Winston notes that Tom Parsons, Mrs. Parsons’s husband, “was a fattish but active man of paralyzing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms—one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party depended … He would inform you with quiet pride, between whiffs of his pipe, that he had put in an appearance at the Community Center every evening for the past four years.” Winston tried to fix the sink but was hit by a projectile launched by the two children, who were angry due to being denied the opportunity to witness a hanging. Winston discerned that he couldn’t actually fix the faucet, and when he left, he saw that Mrs. Parsons’s face was full of terror regarding her offspring. He notes that “Another year, two years, and they would be watching her night and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy. Nearly all children nowadays were horrible … they adored the Party … All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children. And with good reason, for hardly a week passed in which the Times did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak— ‘child hero’ was the phrase generally used—had overheard some compromising remark and denounced his parents to the Thought Police.” Winston, after writing some more in his diary, put a small grain of dust onto the cover of the book so that he would know if someone tampered with it. That night he dreamt of his mother. Winston remarks that both his parents were executed in the purges of the 1950s. When Winston was a child (ten or eleven), he was a bully, demanding much from his mother despite knowing that his requests were impossible to fulfill, considering the deprivations of Oceania. He notes that while his mother probably died protecting him and perished thirty years ago with a certain degree of dignity if she did, such things were impossible in the present, for friendships and familial relationships have been degraded by the Party: “Tragedy … belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there were still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the embers of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason. His mother’s memory tore at his heart because she had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love her in return, and because somehow, he did not remember how, she had sacrificed herself to a conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable … Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows.” Winston remembers more information regarding his childhood: atomic bombs had been used in the war and he recognizes that he couldn’t remember a relatively long peace, for the world seemed to be constantly at war. A word of Newspeak is then revealed: “Ingsoc,” which is a shortened form of “English Socialism.” Winston’s work in the Ministry of Truth involves writing false documents and incinerating ones that contradicted the Party. Newspeak as a language appears to be gibberish for those acquainted only with modern-day English, for the following order, “times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling” translates, when put into Oldspeak (standard English), “The reporting of Big Brother’s Order for the Day in the Times of December 3rd 1983 is extremely unsatisfactory and makes references to nonexistent persons. Rewrite it in full and submit your draft to higher authority before filing.” Winston later spoke to a colleague named Symes who was intelligent yet still a fanatic whose job consists in trimming down the number of words in Newspeak. He informs Winston that by 2050, not a single person will be able to understand the conversation they are currently having due to how it will become oversimplified: “‘The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron—they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be … The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.’” Winston mentally remarks that for all his loyalty, Symes will be vaporized, for he is too aware of what he is doing: “Syme will be vaporized. He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly. The Party does not like such people. One day he will disappear. It is written in his face.”
Winston later witnessed a thirty-year-old male who worked with him engage in “duckspeak,” a word that has two meanings: applied negatively, it means someone who doesn’t know what they’re actually saying, but when used to describe a Party comrade, it is a compliment to their orthodoxy. Winston later recollects about Syme: “There was something subtly wrong with Syme. There was something that he lacked: discretion, aloofness, a sort of saving stupidity. You could not say that he was unorthodox. He believed in the principles of Ingsoc, he venerated Big Brother, he rejoiced over victories, he hated heretics, not merely with sincerity but with a sort of restless zeal, an up-to-dateness of information, which the ordinary Party member did not approach. Yet a faint air of disreputability always clung to him.” Parsons entered the scene and brags about how his fiendish daughter had a stranger arrested, causing his execution or at least his incarceration. An announcement then played in the lunchroom, listing false statistics about how much life has improved for the citizens of Oceania. While everyone else in the room appeared to be overjoyed, Winston secretly wasn’t, for he knew on some level that things weren’t always as bad as they currently were: “Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to … Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?” Winston clarifies that those around him were unpleasant individuals, for not only were they heavily indoctrinated, but also physically repulsive. Winston thinks to himself as to who would be vaporized and who would be spared, eventually awakening from his thinking when the dark-haired girl, who sat at the table next to him, turned around to look at him curiously. Afraid that she was spying on him, Winston knew that it was likely she was a Spy, seeing how during the previous Two Minutes Hate she sat right in front of him, perhaps to observe whether he would be enthusiastic enough in his yelling against Goldstein. That night, Winston writes in his diary of having employed an old prostitute with no teeth three years before, for he needed an outlet for his sexual desires. He reminds himself that the Party loathes romantic relationships, for that takes away from the devotion and loyalty people have towards Big Brother. While prostitution isn’t usually severely punished (the maximum sentence for people with previously unblemished records would be five years in a labor camp), Party members would usually enjoy no relationships with each other, for the Party tried its best to make sex unenjoyable and only for the sake of reproduction: “All children were to be begotten by artificial insemination (artsem, it was called in Newspeak) and brought up in public institutions.” Winston was married to a woman named Katharine, but they were living apart, for they didn't get along very well, for she was stupid and a blind adherent to the Party. They were together for only fifteen months, and while the Party forbade divorce, it allowed people to live separately from each other if they were incapable of producing offspring. Winston was glad that he was now apart from Katharine, for he admitted that he would’ve lived with her if the copulation between them was enjoyable, yet whenever they engaged in coitus, she would do nothing but be submissive, which made Winston feel very embarrassed, so much so that he dreaded it whenever it happened, for Katharine informed Winston that they should produce a child for the Party if they could. Fortunately, there was no child, and Winston lived in relative peace for a time. Winston details in his diary that if the hell that is Oceania is to collapse, the proles are the key to doing so, for if they can be educated and organized, their sheer numbers will overthrow the Party in a mere moment: “If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning.” Unfortunately, Winston admits to himself that it is highly unlikely they’ll rebel anytime soon, for they are so foolish and unthinking that they care for nothing except physical pleasures and basic survival. Winston details that proles are only supposed to work and mate to keep Oceania stable. “Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern. They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling, filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult. A few agents of the Thought Police moved always among them, spreading false rumors and marking down and eliminating the few individuals who were judged capable of becoming dangerous … All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations.” Furthermore, the proles had privacy and were not subjected to telescreens, and were even allowed to be promiscuous. Winston remarks that while Oceania was supposedly socialist, seeing the name “Ingsoc,” it actually loathed socialism, for it viewed most of human society as being unworthy of analyzing. Thus, the ideal world of the Party is “something huge, terrible, and glittering—a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons—a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting—three hundred million people all with the same face. The reality was decaying, dingy cities where underfed people shuffled to and fro in leaky shoes, in patched-up nineteenth century houses that smelt always of cabbage and bad lavatories.”
Oceania by 1970 was supposedly dominated by Big Brother, for the rest of the original leaders of the Revolution had been deposed. Three of them, Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford, were subjected to prolonged torture until they came to love Big Brother and confessed to plotting against the Party. They were temporarily released by the Thought Police after making various “confessions,” and Winston saw them for himself at the Chestnut Cafe, noting that they were emotionally broken. Most importantly, “they were “doomed with absolute certainty to extinction within a year or two. No one who had once fallen into the hands of the Thought Police ever escaped in the end. They were corpses waiting to be sent back to the grave.” When it came to their physical conditions, both Aaronson and Rutherford suffered from broken noses. True enough, the three of them were eventually rearrested, tortured into confessing they had committed more crimes upon their releases, and were systematically executed. Winston had seen them in another way: a page of the Times demonstrated that the “confessions” extracted from them were lies, for it contained a picture of them that went against the supposed fact that they betrayed the Party by going to Eurasia. Winston kept the paper for himself, though he knew he was taking a large risk for doing so—the incident occurred ten or eleven years ago. Winston suffers from a sudden terrifying thought: what if the rest of the people of Oceania are indeed sane and he’s the lunatic who’s wrong about everything? Winston then discovered some more confidence, for he knew that declaring facts as facts is freedom in and of itself: “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” Winston then leaves to go to the area of London where the proles live, going so far as to buy an old man multiple beers to persuade him to tell him whether life was truly better now than in the past. Unfortunately for Winston, the old man’s memory was disorganized and he paid attention to the wrong things, ignoring the big topics by pursuing small ones. Thus, Winston gave up on trying to ascertain any information from him. It should also be noted that when Winston was walking to the bar, a bomb dropped near him, killing and wounding some people. While Winston was unscathed, a severed hand found its way in front of him, only to be unemotionally kicked away into the gutter by him, for it was so drained of blood it was white. Winston went to the same shop where he had bought his diary and was told by the owner of the shop, an old gentleman known as Mr. Charrginton, that he might be interested in purchasing other items. Winston decided to purchase glass with some coral from the Indian Ocean that was created a century or less ago. Winston, interested in its historical implications and its beauty, buys it for four dollars. The shop owner then took Winston to a room upstairs that included a double bed, a clock, a carpet, an armchair, a clock, a window, and most importantly, no telescreen, telling Winston that he lived in it with his wife until she died. Winston, knowing a rare opportunity was in front of him, paid the shop owner some money to rent the room. When he left the shop in a good mood, he spotted the dark-haired girl coming towards him. Knowing for certain that she was following him, he thought of committing suicide to avoid being arrested and brutally tortured, but knew that doing so would be very unpleasant, for most quick methods of death were unavailable. He recollects an experience he had with O’Brien, whom he felt understood him: O’Brien had whispered to him when they were in a dark area that they would meet in a place with no darkness, whatever that meant.
Four days later, when he was working, the dark-haired girl walked towards him. She tripped and fell on her arm and Winston helped her up, which she then thanked him for. As she got back up (two or three seconds before moving on), she slipped a piece of paper into his hand. Winston notes that the whole affair took a maximum of half a minute, yet much has been done in that time frame. Five minutes after sitting down in his cubicle, he worked up the courage to open the piece of paper, fearing that it would contain a threatening message. However, it was the opposite: it read “I love you.” Winston then knew that she wasn’t trying to have him arrested, for such a message is likely to land her in severe trouble if discovered. What’s more, he genuinely desired to be with her: “Nor did the idea of refusing her advances even cross his mind. Only five nights ago he had contemplated smashing her skull in with a cobblestone; but that was of no importance. He thought of her naked, youthful body, as he had seen it in his dream. He had imagined her a fool like all the rest of them, her head stuffed with lies and hatred, her belly full of ice. A kind of fever seized him at the thought that he might lose her, the white youthful body might slip away from him! What he feared more than anything else was that she would simply change her mind if he did not get in touch with her quickly.” Recognizing that trying to arrange a meeting would be of the utmost difficulty, he waited a week before trying to secretively approach her when no telescreen was around, but was stopped by “A blond-headed, silly-faced young man named Wilsher, whom he barely knew, [who] was inviting him with a smile to a vacant place at his table. It was not safe to refuse. After having been recognized, he could not go and sit at a table with an unattended girl. It was too noticeable. He sat down with a friendly smile. The silly blond face beamed into his. Winston had a hallucination of himself smashing a pickaxe right into the middle of it. The girl’s table filled up a few minutes later.” For all their difficulties, the day after being denied a chance to interact with her by Wilsher, he sat next to her, and while they were eating, they succeeded in inconspicuously communicating with each other. In just a few clauses, they agreed to meet in Victory Square once they are done with their workday. That night, when they met in Victory Square, they went next to each other in a large crowd to decrease the likelihood of being recognized by telescreens. The dark-haired girl, who was confident and in control, took charge of the scene and “began speaking in the same expressionless voice as before, with lips barely moving, a mere murmur easily drowned by the din of voices and the rumbling of the trucks.” As before, in just a moment, they agreed to meet Sunday at 3:00 PM in a secret area whose location was outlined in meticulous detail by Julia. They then witnessed some foreign POWs, with Winston thinking that the only time they are seen for who they are in the flesh is when they are reduced to being captives. Those present jeer at the prisoners, who are disoriented and in chains. Winston and the dark-haired girl succeeded in meeting in their destination, which turned out to be a circle of trees in a beautiful countryside that afforded privacy to those within it. When they were in the safety of the trees, Winston informed her that he didn't know her eyes were brown until then. He asks her why she’s so attracted to him, seeing how he’s “‘thirty-nine years old. I’ve got a wife that I can’t get rid of. I’ve got varicose veins. I’ve got five false teeth.’” The dark-haired girl tells him that she couldn’t care less, for she enjoys engaging in romantic relationships with multiple people for enjoyment and to spite the Party. Winston upon hearing this isn’t offended or saddened, for he expected no less, and he felt genuinely happy that he could experience her presence to begin with. The dark-haired girl tells Winston her name is Julia, and he in turn tells her his name. Winston, upon being asked by Julia how he thought of her, informed her honestly that he wished to brutalize her before due to wanting to be with her, and that he was terrified that she might be a spy. Julia responds well to this, telling Winston that he had reasons to think so of her, and that she wasn’t a fanatic—on the contrary, she loathed the Party. Julia then exposed her body by throwing her clothes off. Winston, ecstatic to experience this, notes the beauty of her physique (especially her face) and asks Julia if she had done things like this before. Julia responds by saying she has engaged in numerous relationships with Outer Party members, for Inner Party members are more dangerous, though she acknowledges many of them would do so if given the opportunity. Orwell details Winston’s reaction: “His heart leapt. Scores of times she had done it; he wished it had been hundreds—thousands. Anything that hinted at corruption always filled him with a wild hope. Who knew? Perhaps the Party was rotten under the surface, its cult of strenuousness and self-denial simply a sham concealing iniquity.” (119). Winston and Julia proceeded to enjoy much pleasure in their copulation and slept for half an hour with each other upon finishing. Winston notes that his copulation with Julia was much more than a personal action, for it involved defying the Party: “No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, their climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.”
Julia and Winston separated, but not before Julia gave him another location to meet in soon. For the next few months they met each other occasionally and grew to care for one another, though they both exercised caution when doing so, and there were occasions in which they had to scrap their original plan due to the presence of a Party official. Julia kept herself relatively safe by continuing pretending being a zealous Party member, attending a vast amount of lectures and demonstrations for the Party, for she claimed that people can sometimes break a big rule if they keep all the small ones. She also encouraged Winston to adopt the same act. “So, one evening every week, Winston spent four hours of paralyzing boredom, screwing together small bits of metal which were probably parts of bomb fuses, in a draughty ill-lit workshop where the knocking of hammers mingled drearily with the music of the telescreens.” Winston later learned that Julia was twenty-six and lived in a hostel with thirty other girls. She worked in the Fiction Department, a department that focused on producing books the proles would enjoy, such as pornographic ones. Her job there consisted of handling an electric motor. Before getting her job, she did excellent in school, for she was the captain of the hockey team. Winston learned of her personality and motivations further: “She had her first love affair when she was sixteen, with a Party member of sixty who later committed suicide to avoid arrest … Since then there had been various others. Life as she saw it was quite simple. You wanted a good time; ‘they,’ meaning the Party, wanted to stop you having it; you broke the rules as best as you could. She seemed to think it just as natural that ‘they’ should want to rob you of your pleasures as that you should want to avoid being caught. She hated the Party … but she made no general criticism of it. Except where it touched upon her own life she had no interest in Party doctrine … Any kind of organized revolt against the Party, which was bound to be a failure, struck her as stupid. The clever thing was to break the rules and stay alive all the same.” Julia informed Winston that the reason the Party was so obsessed with sexual privation was that it needs people to have energy to spend on Big Brother, for “‘All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you’re happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?’” Winston tells Julia that they were doomed, for the Party will find them and break them eventually. Julia retorts by saying that she’s currently alive and enjoys it. Winston eventually invited Julia to spend time with him in Mr. Charrington’s room. They copulated and when they were finished, Julia spots a rat and discusses how dangerous they are, for the filth of London makes them so large they attack children when left alone and are prone towards mutilating them. Winston, hearing this, is horrified and can barely function, for his greatest fear is rats. When it comes to Winston’s working life, his prediction regarding Syme was correct: he was vaporized. Hate Week, an annual celebration of Oceania’s prowess, soon began, and the proles and Party members were lashed into a frenzy. During Hate Week Party members were worked extremely hard, and Winston had to work for many hours a day and would sleep in the building his office was located in at sporadic intervals. As for his relationship with Julia, “Four, five, six—seven times they met during the month of June [in Charrington’s room]. Winston had dropped his habit of drinking gin at all hours. He seemed to have lost the need for it. He had grown fatter, his varicose ulcer had subsided, leaving only a brown stain on the skin above his ankle, his fits of coughing in the early morning had stopped. The process of life had ceased to be intolerable, he had no longer any impulse to make faces at the telescreen or shout curses at the top of his voice. Now that they had a secure hiding place, almost a home, it did not even seem a hardship that they could only meet infrequently and for a couple of hours at a time. What mattered was that the room over the junk shop should exist. To know that it was there, inviolate, was almost the same as being in it. The room was a world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk.” Despite the happiness he shared with Julia, they both clearly knew that their state of somewhat contentment was only temporary, for they would soon be arrested and tortured. Furthermore, they didn't plan on committing suicide, for they constantly hoped that the day of doom would be another day, not-mentioning the utter lack of quick ways to do it. They also shared their thoughts of joining the Brotherhood, but both of them didn't know if it even existed. Julia also told Winston that she believed that the rocket bombs dropping on the proles of Oceania were probably done by the Party itself, for it needed to keep people in a state of constant fear. As mentioned before, Julia wasn’t ambitious (for good reason) and cared mostly for her own satisfaction, showing her boredom by falling asleep whenever Winston would speak to her about the future and of the strategies employed by the Party to stay in power.
Winston was told by O’Brien, whom he believed was a sympathizer, to meet him in his house with Julia. Hoping for the best, Winston informs Julia of the situation. She decides to go meet O’Brien with Winston, but not before being told by Winston of how he contributed to the potential deaths of his sister and mother. That is, when he was in the period between childhood and adolescence, he took more than his fair share of food due to his hunger, causing his mother (who had lost her husband to a political purge) and infant sister much pain. On one occasion, when chocolate was rationed, he took all of it, running away from them. Thus, “He never saw his mother again. After he had devoured the chocolate he felt somewhat ashamed of himself and hung about in the streets for several hours, until hunger drove him home. When he came back his mother had disappeared. This was already becoming normal at that time … To this day he did not know with any certainty that his mother was dead. It was perfectly possible that she had merely been sent to a forced-labor camp. As for his sister, she might have been removed, like Winston himself, to one of the colonies for homeless children (Reclamation Centers, they were called) which had grown up as a result of the civil war; or she might have been sent to the labor camp along with his mother, or simply left somewhere or other to die.” Winston realizes that Party members have been indoctrinated into believing that interpersonal relationships don’t matter and that private, symbolic gestures are useless, for the Party desires to turn them into unthinking automatons that do nothing but perform certain actions while abstaining from others while spouting mindless slogans. The proles, on the other hand, have kept their humanity, for they still allow themselves to feel emotion. That is, the proles “had not become hardened inside. They had held on to the primitive emotions which he himself had to relearn by conscious effort. And in thinking this he remembered … how a few weeks ago he had seen a severed hand lying on the pavement and had kicked it into the gutter as though it had been a cabbage stalk.” O’Brien later “revealed” himself to be a member of the Brotherhood, inviting Winston and Julia into his relatively luxurious property. After “turning off” his telescreen, he asks Winston and Julia what they’ll be willing to do for the Brotherhood. They affirm that they will do anything except separate from each other, for they do genuinely love each other. O’Brien, learning of this, presents them both with a copy of Goldstein’s book, the official text of the Brotherhood. He then tells Winston and Julia that there is no chance of the collapse of the Party in their lifetime and that the Brotherhood is organized in a unique way, for “‘The members of the Brotherhood have no way of recognizing one another, and it is impossible for any one member to be aware of the identity of more than a very few others … Nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible. You will get no comradeship and no encouragement. When finally you are caught, you will get no help. We never help our members. At most, when it is absolutely necessary that someone should be silenced, we are occasionally able to smuggle a razor blade into a prisoner’s cell. You will have to get used to living without results and without hope. You will work for a while, you will be caught, you will confess, and then you will die. Those are the only results that you will ever see. There is no possibility that any perceptible change will happen within our own lifetime. We are the dead … We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation after generation. In the face of the Thought Police there is no other way.’” Furthermore, O’Brien has a servant named Martin, described by Orwell as having the face of a Mongolian, who was supposedly sympathetic to the Brotherhood. During Hate Week, the principle of doublethink (those loyal to the Party are able to believe insane things contrary to reality on command) is demonstrated, for it was believed for some time that Oceania was at war against Eurasia and was allied with Eastasia. When a Party member was giving a speech full of false information about Eurasia’s atrocities and unjust aggressions to a massive audience, he was given a note that informed him that Oceania was at war with Eastasia now. Without hesitating, he shifted his words, and the crowd, drunk with aggression and hatred, utilized doublethink to shift their perception of reality. While Winston was forced to work eighteen hours in Hate Week and was given only two three-hour breaks a day (like everyone else), he was able to read much of Goldstein’s book, titled The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism.
Goldstein’s book discusses how Eastasia, Eurasia, and Oceania came into being: Europe was absorbed by Russia, America acquired the British Empire, and Eastasia was formed after much confused fighting in the Pacific. Goldstein focuses heavily on politics, describing that the war that is currently going on involves comparatively few deaths when compared to total war, for all three nations are careful to maintain a state of constant emergency to keep their citizens (or prisoners) captives. Goldstein details that the world of 1984 is much worse than the historical reality of the early twentieth century and the anticipated future, for poverty is rampant and the atmosphere is one of hysteria and bigotry. Goldstein states that the Party is focused on two things: how to decipher the thoughts of others and how to kill hundreds of millions with little delay. Scientific progress is virtually extinct, for anything that leads to an increase in the quality of life is stamped out by the authorities. Furthermore, scientists have become “a mixture of psychologist and inquisitor, studying with extraordinary minuteness the meaning of facial expressions, gestures, and tones of voice, and testing the truth-producing effects of drugs, shock therapy, hypnosis, and physical torture; or he is chemist, physicist, or biologist concerned only with such branches of his special subject as are relevant to the taking of life.” The three countries, despite loathing each other, follow virtually the same structure and behavior: the only differences are in their names, for Oceania follows Ingsoc, Eurasia Neo-Bolshevism, and Eastasia Death-worship (also known as “Obliteration of the Self”). The Party motto “War is Peace” is true in a sense, for the constant state of war still allows for most members of society to function relatively unhindered. It is later described by Goldstein that atomic bombs were used in large numbers in the 1950s, causing all three superpowers to stop doing so due to the potential for mutual obliteration. In the world of 1984, all main governments were totalitarian. Thus, it is poignantly described: “The earthly paradise had been discredited at exactly the moment when it became realizable.” The leaders of the Party are the most dangerous of all tyrants, for they desire not luxury but power over the thoughts and actions of others, seen in how every thought crime is punished with imprisonment, torture, and execution. The Party is not an oligarchy or autocracy in the traditional sense, for it is quite meritocratic in certain elements: Party officials, if they have children, don’t pass their positions down to them. Admission to the Party is comprised of an examination by those who are sixteen, and a variety of people, held together not by race or wealth but a fanatical ideology, come into power. Orwell describes that “The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living. A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors. The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood but with perpetuating itself. Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same.” Doublethink (otherwise known as “reality control”) is fantastically described in the following sentences: the Party can alter the past, for it can create a new version of the past, and to the Party member, “it never has been altered in any specific instance. For when it has been recreated in whatever shape is needed at the moment, then this new version is the past, and no different past can ever have existed … At all times the Party is in possession of absolute truth, and clearly the absolute can never have been different from what it is now. It will be seen that the control of the past depends above all on the training of memory. To make sure that all written records agree with the orthodoxy of the moment is merely a mechanical act. But it is also necessary to remember that events happened in the desired manner. And if it is necessary to rearrange one’s memories or to tamper with written records, then it is necessary to forget that one has done so. The trick of doing this can be learned like any other mental technique.” Winston comes across a section of the book that promises to reveal the true motive of the Party concerning its desire to inflict suffering on every member of Oceania, but before he can get to that part, he talks with Julia. However, their time finally ran out, as it is revealed that O’Brien worked in the Ministry of Love and was tricking them all along. Furthermore, the room they were sleeping in was bugged by a camera hidden behind a painting: all their lovemaking was observed and recorded. Mr. Charrington was in fact a member of the Thought Police. When the Thought Police entered the room, one of them brutally punched Julia in the solar plexus, causing her to collapse. As for Mr. Charrington, his appearance vastly changed, for he was thirty-five years old and made himself appear old thanks to makeup: “He was still recognizable, but he was not the same person any longer. His body had straightened, and seemed to have grown bigger. His face had undergone only tiny changes that had nevertheless worked a complete transformation. The black eyebrows were less bushy, the wrinkles were gone, the whole lines of the face seemed to have altered; even the nose seemed shorter … It occurred to Winston that for the first time in his life he was looking, with knowledge, at a member of the Thought Police.”
Winston then met the same treatment as Julia and was brought into a secretive area that had no darkness and was completely closed in, making Winston oblivious to the time. He was in an extremely filthy cell with many other people. A man Winston knew, Ampleforth, was soon brought into the room: he was there for replacing the word “rod” with “God” in a poem, for there was no other word to complete the rhyme. He was then brought into Room 101, a torture chamber where the prisoner would be brought face-to-face with their greatest fear to cause them to suffer a mental collapse and to love Big Brother. To Winston’s astonishment, Parsons was thrusted into the room: his own daughter turned him in. That is, she listened at the keyhole of his room using a listening device gifted to her by the Spies and listened to him talking in his sleep, and heard him repeating “‘Down with Big Brother!’” The true depth of the fanaticism of the members of the Party is then demonstrated, for Parsons tells Winston that he’s proud of his daughter and is grateful to the Party for arresting him when they did, and he says that he hopes that given his previous unblemished and patriotic record, they’ll only send him to a labor camp for five or ten years. The guards later brutally punched a prisoner who offered another who was starving to death some bread. The prison who was suffering from intensive starvation was then informed by an officer that he’ll be going to Room 101. Upon hearing it, he begged to be spared from that fate, promising that he’ll implicate anyone and will do anything: “‘You’ve been starving me for weeks. Finish it off and let me die. Shoot me. Hang me. Sentence me to twenty-five years. Is there someone else you want me to give away? Just say who it is and I’ll tell you anything you want. I don’t care who it is or what you do to them. I’ve got a wife and three children. The biggest of them isn’t six years old. You can take the whole lot of them and cut their throats in front of my eyes, and I’ll stand by and watch it. But not Room 101!’” The guards refused his request, leading him to become so desperate as to start hysterically howling, clutching one of the legs of the bench. A guard kicked his hand, breaking a finger, causing him to accept his fate. O’Brien then entered the room and told Winston that the Party got him a long time ago and that he knew all along that he wasn’t actually a member of the resistance. A guard brutally struck Winston on the elbow, leading him to remark that “Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase of pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes”. Winston was extensively tortured. As expected, he agreed to admit to committing all manners of crimes in an attempt to spare himself. Orwell details that “How many times he had been beaten, how long the beatings had continued, he could not remember. Always there were five or six men in black uniforms at him simultaneously. Sometimes it was fists, sometimes it was truncheons, sometimes it was steel rods, sometimes it was boots. There were times when he rolled about the floor, as shameless as an animal, writhing his body this way and that in an endless, hopeless effort to dodge the kicks, in his ribs, in his belly, on his elbows, on his shins, in his groin, in his testicles, on the bone at the base of his spine. There were times when it went on and on until the cruel, wicked, unforgivable thing seemed to him not that the guards continued to beat him but that he could not force himself into losing consciousness. There were times when his nerve so forsook him that he began shouting for mercy even before the beating began, when the mere sight of a fist drawn back for a blow was enough to make him pour forth a confession of real and imaginary crimes … Sometimes he was beaten till he could hardly stand, then flung like a sack of potatoes, onto the stone floor of a cell, left to recuperate for a few hours, and then taken out and beaten again.” After the initial phase of physical torture, the frequency of the beatings greatly decreased and were replaced with Party intellectuals who focused on disorienting him and damaging him emotionally, for they denounced him verbally without empirical evidence and would physically abuse him at times. O’Brien then personally interrogated and brainwashed Winston, asserting that he is suffering from a mental disorder that makes him disconnected from reality. Winston still knew then that he was in fact the sane one, but it didn't matter from a practical standpoint, for he was stretched on a rack and O’Brien could choose to stretch him whenever he received an unsatisfactory answer. O’Brien later tells Winston that years ago, he saved a picture of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford, for he believed they were innocent. O’Brien proceeded to burn the picture and tells Winston that he doesn’t remember the existence of the photograph, leading Winston to remark that it was a prime example of doublethink, and that trying to reason with O’Brien, a fanatic of the highest degree, was simply impossible. O’Brien shows Winston four fingers and asks him that if the Party says that if there are five fingers, then there are indeed five. Winston disagrees and is brutally stretched. Though he resists for some time, he eventually assents to believe whatever O’Brien wishes.
O’Brien informs Winston that the reason people must believe in the Party is that their own individual perceptions are inaccurate and that only Big Brother is infallible. Winston then suffers from Stockholm Syndrome, for he deluded himself into believing that O’Brien was his protector and his friend despite his clear role in his torture and eventual execution. O’Brien informs Winston that the Party doesn’t wish to punish him for his actions against it, for it desires to make every person “sane” from its point of view. Thus, the Party doesn’t destroy its enemies: it changes them. O’Brien mentions the Inquisition, the Nazis, and the Communists: they were all failures. For instance, while the Russian Communists caused much destruction by subjecting its victims to the most intense physical and psychological pain, it messed up due to how it was obvious that its victims had been coerced into making their confessions. O’Brien elaborates that unlike them, the Party is “‘not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us; so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill him. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be. Even in the instant of death we cannot permit any deviation. In the old days the heretic walked to the stake still a heretic, proclaiming his heresy, exulting in it. Even the victim of the Russian purges could carry rebellion locked up in his skull as he walked down the passage waiting for the bullet. But we make the brain perfect before we blow it out. The command of the old despotisms was ‘Thou shalt not.’ The command of the totalitarians was ‘Thou shalt.’ Our command is ‘Thou art.’ No one whom we bring to this place ever stands out against us. Everyone is washed clean.’” O’Brien proclaims that he personally took part in the tortures of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford, who were stripped of their personalities and individuality and were reduced to thoughtless puppets. He reveals to Winston that even if he does everything the Party wishes, he will eventually be put to death: “‘No one who has once gone astray is ever spared … We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you could not recover, if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.’” O’Brien tells Winston that Julia betrayed him and that he doesn’t exist as an entity. He then informs Winston of the true motives of the Party: it desires to obtain power for the sake of power and wants nothing else. In his own words, “‘We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power … We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.’” O’Brien tells Winston that although he is quite old, he will not die in the traditional sense, for he has entrusted his mind and life to the Party and is only a cell in regards to it: “‘The weariness of the cell is the vigor of the organism.’” O’Brien explains the meaning of the slogan “Freedom is Slavery”: all humans will eventually die, and their deaths mean their extinguishment. Thus, it is imperative for them to relinquish their personal identities and to become one with the Party, for when they die biologically in such a state, they will live on in a sense in the Party. O’Brien affirms to Winston that the Party can bend the laws of reality, for he asserts that reality is determined by what people perceive. O’Brien states that the best way to demonstrate one’s power over another is by making the other party suffer and by making them believe what one wants them to think. The Party wishes to create a world not based on humanity’s better tendencies, but one consisting of humanity’s worst traits: “‘A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain … In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement … There will be no loyalty, except loyalty toward the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science … There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life … always there will be the intoxication of power … Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.’”
O’Brien admits that Goldstein and the Brotherhood are fabrications, for people, in order to be successfully controlled, need something to loathe. Furthermore, as the Party increases in power, it will become more and more intolerant, until life in Oceania is a living hell. Furthermore, O’Brien reveals he couldn’t care less if the Party causes life to become so terrible and unhappy that people will become insane by thirty, for it will survive so long as it has a large batch of believers. O’Brien then makes Winston look at himself in a mirror. When he saw himself, he was utterly horrified, for he was physically broken, seeing how he had many scars, was hunched over, missed most of his teeth, was utterly emaciated, was partially bald, and reeked of nauseous fumes. O’Brien tells Winston that he can be “cured” by the Party and shouldn’t give up hope and that he has suffered every degradation known to humans. Winston corrects him, telling him that he hadn’t betrayed Julia yet. O’Brien, upon hearing of this, knows this is true, and states to Winston that he will eventually be put to death. Winston then virtually surrenders to O’Brien and the Party, for he knew that they had outsmarted him: the Thought Police had spied on him for years. Accordingly, the authorities gave him much better treatment, providing him with decent food, a comfortable room, cigarettes, and even leisure time. Winston, though still physically damaged, grew fatter in a matter of days. Though being coerced into agreeing with the Party on many topics, he still disagreed with it in a few things, for he fundamentally loathed it. Although prisoners would usually be shot when they aren’t suspecting it, Winston thought that while “You could not tell when it would happen … a few seconds beforehand it should be possible to guess. It was always from behind, walking down a corridor. Ten seconds would be enough. In that time the world inside him could turn over. And then suddenly, without a word uttered, without a check in his step, without the changing of a line in his face—suddenly the camouflage would be down and bang! would go the batteries of his hatred. Hatred would fill him like an enormous roaring flame … They would have blown his brain to pieces before they could reclaim it. The heretical thought would be unpunished, unrepented, out of their reach forever. They would have blown a hole in their own perfection. To die hating them, that was freedom.” O’Brien later came to Winston after hearing him scream for Julia’s name in a dream and told him that he still isn’t emotionally orthodox, for he still despises Big Brother. Winston is brought into Room 101, which was located deep underground. Winston is then strapped into a chair and is equipped with a facial contraption that will allow ravenous and violent rats to maul his face if he doesn’t come to love Big Brother. O’Brien explains to Winston that although humans are sometimes capable of withstanding pain, for each individual their worst phobias are extremely likely to make them surrender to authority, just like how it is virtually impossible to prevent yourself from breathing after a deep dive underwater. Winston began panicking when the rats were put into the cage attached to his mask, so much so that he gave up the last vestibule of his dignity, screaming for Julia to be punished in his place, to be used as a shield between him and the rats. O’Brien, satisfied, spared him from being savaged by the rats. After this incident, Winston is completely broken mentally and becomes a dogmatic believer of the Party and Big Brother. After his torture in Room 101, he was temporarily released by the Party. Going to the Chestnut Cafe, he wrote “2 + 2 = 5” on the dust of the table. He had met Julia by accident in the park prior and noted that she, like him, was cauterized of human feeling: she betrayed him as well. They then permanently separated, for they had stopped loving each other due to what the Party had subjected them to. As for his job, the Party gave him a sinecure that was undemanding, for they had turned Winston into the ideal Party member (at least before he’ll be inevitably rearrested and shot). Winston heard while in the Chestnut Cafe that the army of Oceania had leveled the Eurasian one. Believing that it was true without a doubt, and repressing memories of his childhood, he becomes full of love towards Big Brother, signifying his personal transformation and the potential powerless of the individual towards an authority as terrifying, cruel, and powerful as that of the Party: “He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark mustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.” The appendix details the diction and syntax of Newspeak and how the Party has succeeded in controlling people’s thoughts to a large degree. Despite the moroseness of the text, the appendix does offer some hope, for it speaks of the society of Oceania in the past tense, humorously noting that it desired to simplify Newspeak so much that it planned for a date as late as 2050. Thus, it is possible that the Party fell from power in Oceania. It is also likely, seeing how Oceania is virtually cut off from the rest of the world, that it is a single or one of the few totalitarian countries in the world, in a way akin to how North Koreans are currently being brainwashed to believe that the Kim Dynasty is infallible and almighty due to their being isolated from other peoples, customs, and facts.
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Personal thoughts:
1984 is a phenomenal work of literature by Orwell due to how it effectively and nightmarishly portrays a world where technology is misused by malevolent individuals who won’t hesitate to terrorize others for the sake of power. The dynamics of the world of 1984 are intricate and detailed, making the story only more harrowing, for it was possible that the world could’ve ended up like this, as in order for it to be so, the Cold War needed to have escalated and imperialism returned, seeing how the three superpowers formed once countries absorbed others. The nature of fanaticism, intolerance, and bigotry is clearly demonstrated by the Party, for it deludes people into believing absurdities, cares nothing for evidence, and doesn’t hesitate to purge even loyal officials. I greatly appreciate how Orwell implies that the Party’s hold over Oceania collapsed after some time as noted by the language employed in the appendix, which does make some sense: even if the Party believed itself to be indomitable and permanent, it is not so, for nothing lasts forever, not even black holes, as the introduction of a few seemingly irrelevant factors may prove sufficient to drastically change, if not overthrow, the existing order. In my opinion, if Oceania did collapse, it was probably due to a revolution by the proles, though I do concede that it is very unlikely in regular circumstances: thus, a crisis may have incited them to overthrow the Party. I found the characters to be compellingly written, for Winston and Julia are regular people who desire things every person can relate to, such as companionship, safety, privacy, and a good quality of life. This causes the events of the book to be increased in their emotional impact, for it is painful to see how they were both changed for the worse. I highly recommend 1984 to anyone interested in classics, Orwell’s writings, dystopias, and critiques of totalitarianism and hatred.
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