Winston Smith is
a low-ranking member of the ruling Party in London, in the nation of Oceania.
Everywhere Winston goes, even his own home, the Party watches him through
telescreens; everywhere he looks he sees the face of the Party’s seemingly
omniscient leader, a figure known only as Big Brother. The Party controls
everything in Oceania, even the people’s history and language. Currently, the
Party is forcing the implementation of an invented language called Newspeak,
which attempts to prevent political rebellion by eliminating all words related
to it. Even thinking rebellious thoughts is illegal. Such thoughtcrime is, in
fact, the worst of all crimes.
As the novel opens, Winston feels frustrated by the
oppression and rigid control of the Party, which prohibits free thought,and any expression of individuality. Winston dislikes the party and has
illegally purchased a diary in which to write his criminal thoughts. He has
also become fixated on a powerful Party member named O’Brien, whom Winston
believes is a secret member of the Brotherhood—the mysterious, legendary group
that works to overthrow the Party.
Winston works in the Ministry of Truth, where he
alters historical records to fit the needs of the Party. He notices a coworker,
a beautiful dark-haired girl, staring at him, and worries that she is an
informant who will turn him in for his thoughtcrime. He is troubled by the
Party’s control of history: the Party claims that Oceania has always been
allied with Eastasia in a war against Eurasia, but Winston seems to recall a
time when this was not true. The Party also claims that Emmanuel Goldstein, the
alleged leader of the Brotherhood, is the most dangerous man alive, but this does
not seem plausible to Winston. Winston spends his evenings wandering through
the poorest neighborhoods in London, where the proletarians, or proles, live
squalid lives, relatively free of Party monitoring.
One day, Winston receives a note from the dark-haired
girl that reads “I love you.” She tells him her name, Julia, and they begin a
covert affair, always on the lookout for signs of Party monitoring. Eventually
they rent a room above the secondhand store in the prole district where Winston
bought the diary. This relationship lasts for some time. Winston is sure that
they will be caught and punished sooner or later (the fatalistic Winston knows
that he has been doomed since he wrote his first diary entry), while Julia is
more pragmatic and optimistic. As Winston’s affair with Julia progresses, his
hatred for the Party grows more and more intense. At last, he receives the
message that he has been waiting for: O’Brien wants to see him.
Winston and Julia travel to O’Brien’s luxurious
apartment. As a member of the powerful Inner Party (Winston belongs to the
Outer Party), O’Brien leads a life of luxury that Winston can only imagine.
O’Brien confirms to Winston and Julia that, like them, he hates the Party, and
says that he works against it as a member of the Brotherhood. He indoctrinates
Winston and Julia into the Brotherhood, and gives Winston a copy of Emmanuel
Goldstein’s book, the manifesto of the Brotherhood. Winston reads the book—an
amalgam of several forms of class-based twentieth-century social theory—to
Julia in the room above the store. Suddenly, soldiers barge in and seize them.
Mr. Charrington, the proprietor of the store, is revealed as having been a
member of the Thought Police all along.
Torn away from Julia and taken to a place called the
Ministry of Love, Winston finds that O’Brien, too, is a Party spy who simply
pretended to be a member of the Brotherhood in order to trap Winston into
committing an open act of rebellion against the Party. O’Brien spends months
torturing and brainwashing Winston, who struggles to resist. At last, O’Brien
sends him to the dreaded Room 101, the final destination for anyone who opposes
the Party. Here, O’Brien tells Winston that he will be forced to confront his
worst fear. Throughout the novel, Winston has had recurring nightmares about
rats; O’Brien now straps a cage full of rats onto Winston’s head and prepares
to allow the rats to eat his face. Winston snaps, pleading with O’Brien to do
it to Julia, not to him.
Giving up Julia is what O’Brien wanted from Winston all
along. His spirit broken, Winston is released to the outside world. He meets
Julia but no longer feels anything for her. He has accepted the Party entirely
and has learned to love Big Brother.
Winston Smith - A
minor member of the ruling Party in near-future London, Winston Smith is a
thin, frail, contemplative, intellectual, and fatalistic thirty-nine-year-old.
Winston hates the totalitarian control and enforced repression that are
characteristic of his government. He harbors revolutionary dreams.
Julia -
Winston’s lover, a beautiful dark-haired girl working in the Fiction Department
at the Ministry of Truth. Julia is pragmatic and optimistic. Her rebellion against
the Party is small and personal, for her own enjoyment, in contrast to
Winston’s ideological motivation.
O’Brien - A mysterious,
powerful, and sophisticated member of the Inner Party whom Winston believes is
also a member of the Brotherhood, the legendary group of anti-Party rebels.
Big Brother - Though he never
appears in the novel, and though he may not actually exist, Big Brother, the
perceived ruler of Oceania, is an extremely important figure. Everywhere
Winston looks he sees posters of Big Brother’s face bearing the message “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.” Big
Brother’s image is stamped on coins and broadcast on the unavoidable
telescreens; it haunts Winston’s life and fills him with hatred and
fascination.
Mr. Charrington - An old man who runs
a secondhand store in the prole district. Kindly and encouraging, Mr.
Charrington seems to share Winston’s interest in the past. He also seems to
support Winston’s rebellion against the Party and his relationship with Julia,
since he rents Winston a room without a telescreen in which to carry out his
affair. But Mr. Charrington is not as he seems. He is a member of the Thought
Police.
Syme - An intelligent,
outgoing man who works with Winston at the Ministry of Truth. Syme specializes
in language. As the novel opens, he is working on a new edition of the Newspeak
dictionary. Winston believes Syme is too intelligent to stay in the Party’s
favor.
Parsons - A fat, obnoxious,
and dull Party member who lives near Winston and works at the Ministry of
Truth. He has a dull wife and a group of suspicious, ill-mannered children who
are members of the Junior Spies.
Emmanuel Goldstein - Another figure who
exerts an influence on the novel without ever appearing in it. According to the
Party, Goldstein is the legendary leader of the Brotherhood. He seems to have
been a Party leader who fell out of favor with the regime. In any case, the
Party describes him as the most dangerous and treacherous man in Oceania.
Winston
Smith
Orwell’s
primary goal in 1984 is to demonstrate the
terrifying possibilities of totalitarianism. The reader experiences the
nightmarish world that Orwell envisions through the eyes of the protagonist,
Winston. His personal tendency to resist the stifling of his individuality, and
his intellectual ability to reason about his resistance, enables the reader to
observe and understand the harsh oppression that the Party, Big Brother, and
the Thought Police institute. Whereas Julia is untroubled and somewhat selfish,
interested in rebelling only for the pleasures to be gained, Winston is extremely
pensive and curious, desperate to understand how and why the Party exercises
such absolute power in Oceania. Winston’s long reflections give Orwell a chance
to explore the novel’s important themes, including language as mind control,
psychological and physical intimidation and manipulation, and the importance of
knowledge of the past.
Apart from his thoughtful nature, Winston’s main attributes are
his rebelliousness and his fatalism. Winston hates the Party passionately and
wants to test the limits of its power; he commits innumerable crimes throughout
the novel, ranging from writing “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER” in his diary, to having an illegal
love affair with Julia, to getting himself secretly indoctrinated into the
anti-Party Brotherhood. The effort Winston puts into his attempt to achieve
freedom and independence ultimately underscores the Party’s devastating power.
By the end of the novel, Winston’s rebellion is revealed as playing into
O’Brien’s campaign of physical and psychological torture, transforming Winston
into a loyal subject of Big Brother.
One reason for Winston’s rebellion, and eventual downfall, is his
sense of fatalism—his intense (though entirely justified) paranoia about the
Party and his overriding belief that the Party will eventually catch and punish
him. As soon as he writes “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER” in his diary, Winston is positive that
the Thought Police will quickly capture him for committing a thoughtcrime.
Thinking that he is helpless to evade his doom, Winston allows himself to take
unnecessary risks, such as trusting O’Brien and renting the room above Mr.
Charrington’s shop. Deep down, he knows that these risks will increase his
chances of being caught by the Party; he even admits this to O’Brien while in
prison. But because he believes that he will be caught no matter what he does,
he convinces himself that he must continue to rebel. Winston lives in a world
in which legitimate optimism is an impossibility; lacking any real hope, he
gives himself false hope, fully aware that he is doing so.
JuliaO’Brien
Julia is Winston’s lover
and the only other person who Winston can be sure hates the Party and wishes to
rebel against it as he does. Whereas Winston is restless, fatalistic, and
concerned about large-scale social issues, Julia is sensual, pragmatic, and
generally content to live in the moment and make the best of her life. Winston
longs to join the Brotherhood and read Emmanuel Goldstein’s abstract manifesto;
Julia is more concerned with making practical plans to avoid
getting caught by the Party. Winston essentially sees their affair as
temporary; his fatalistic attitude makes him unable to imagine his relationship
with Julia lasting very long. Julia, on the other hand, is well adapted to her
chosen forms of small-scale rebellion. She claims to have had affairs with
various Party members, and has no intention of terminating her pleasure
seeking, or of being caught (her involvement with Winston is what leads to her
capture).
One of the most fascinating aspects of 1984 is the manner in which Orwell shrouds
an explicit portrayal of a totalitarian world in an enigmatic aura. While
Orwell gives the reader a close look into the personal life of Winston Smith,
the reader’s only glimpses of Party life are those that Winston himself
catches. As a result, many of the Party’s inner workings remain unexplained, as
do its origins, and the identities and motivations of its leaders. This sense
of mystery is centralized in the character of O’Brien, a powerful member of the
Inner Party who tricks Winston into believing that he is a member of the
revolutionary group called the Brotherhood. O’Brien inducts Winston into the
Brotherhood. Later, though, he appears at Winston’s jail cell to abuse and
brainwash him in the name of the Party. During the process of this punishment,
and perhaps as an act of psychological torture, O’Brien admits that he
pretended to be connected to the Brotherhood merely to trap Winston in an act
of open disloyalty to the Party.
This revelation raises
more questions about O’Brien than it answers. Rather than developing as a
character throughout the novel, O’Brien actually seems to un-develop: by the
end of the book, the reader knows far less about him than they previously had
thought. When Winston asks O’Brien if he too has been captured by the Party,
O’Brien replies, “They got me long ago.” This reply could signify that O’Brien
himself was once rebellious, only to be tortured into passive acceptance of the
Party. One can also argue that O’Brien pretends to sympathize with Winston
merely to gain his trust. Similarly, one cannot be sure whether the Brotherhood
actually exists, or if it is simply a Party invention used to trap the disloyal
and give the rest of the populace a common enemy. The novel does not answer
these questions, but rather leaves O’Brien as a shadowy, symbolic enigma on the
fringes of the even more obscure Inner Party.
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