Enotes 1984 Guide

1984 Study Guide
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eNotes | TABLE OF CONTENTS
1984 STUDY GUIDE 1
SUMMARY 5
Summary 5
CHAPTER SUMMARIES 7
Chapter Summaries: Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary 7
Chapter Summaries: Part 1, Chapters 4 and 5 Summary 9
THEMES 30
Themes 30
CHARACTERS 32
Characters: List of Characters 32
Characters: Winston Smith 36
Characters: Julia 38
Characters: O'Brien 39
ANALYSIS 40
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Analysis 40
Key Ideas and Commentary: Commentary 43
Key Ideas and Commentary: The Principles of Newspeak 44
Style, Form, and Literary Elements: Places Discussed 46
Style, Form, and Literary Elements: The Plot 48
Style, Form, and Literary Elements: Literary Style 49
Style, Form, and Literary Elements: Literary Techniques 50
Historical and Social Context: Background 51
Historical and Social Context: Historical Context 53
Historical and Social Context: Compare and Contrast 54
Historical and Social Context: Literary Precedents 55
Bibliography 56
Bibliography: Bibliography and Further Reading 56
Connections and Further Reading: Adaptations 58
Connections and Further Reading: Media Adaptations 59
QUOTES 59
Essential Quotes: Essential Passage by Character: Winston Smith 59
Essential Quotes: Essential Passage by Character: Julia 61
Essential Quotes: Essential Passage by Theme: Totalitarianism 63
Essential Quotes: Essential Passage by Theme: Free Will 64
Quotes: Important Quotations 67
SHORT-ANSWER QUIZZES 76
Short-Answer Quizzes: Part 1, Chapter 1 Questions and Answers 76
Short-Answer Quizzes: Part 1, Chapters 4 and 5 Questions and Answers 80
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4
Summary
Summary
In the year 1984, London is the principal city of the Oceanian province known as Airstrip One. Oceania, alongside
Eurasia and Eastasia, is one of the three totalitarian superpowers into which the world is now divided. The ruling
power in Oceania is known as the Party and headed by the mysterious Big Brother, whose face appears all over the
city on posters reading “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.” The Party’s rule is supported by four Ministries: the
Ministry of Love, the Ministry of Peace, the Ministry of Plenty, and the Ministry of Truth, where thirty-nine-year-old
Winston Smith works in the Records Department. His job is to alter, or “rectify,” records and documents in order to
make them agree with current Party policy, thereby ensuring that the Party always appears infallible. Engraved on
the front of the huge white building that houses the Ministry of Truth are three Party slogans: “WAR IS PEACE,”
“FREEDOM IS SLAVERY,” and “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.” Through the telescreens installed in every Party
member’s home and throughout the city, the Party is able to keep its citizens under constant surveillance while
simultaneously subjecting them to an endless stream of propaganda. Most of Oceania’s populace is made up of the
“proles,” or proletariat, whom the Party regards as natural inferiors. Meanwhile, the nation is perpetually at war with
either Eurasia or Eastasia, though as they are currently at war with Eurasia, the Party claims they have never been
at war with Eastasia. An equally important enemy is Emmanuel Goldstein, a discredited former leader of the
revolution that brought the Party to power who supposedly now heads an underground resistance from abroad.
Winston still dimly remembers the time before the Party seized power and before his parents disappeared, and he
secretly harbors unorthodox ideas. He begins a diary in which he writes “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER” and other
dangerous entries that could get him arrested by the Thought Police and executed for thoughtcrime. Though he
doesn’t believe anyone but the Thought Police will ever read his diary, Winston feels he is addressing it to O’Brien, a
high-ranking Inner Party member whom Winston believes might share his anti-Party sentiments. Meanwhile,
Winston also becomes convinced that a young woman who works in the Fiction Department is spying on him. One
evening he takes the risk of skipping the government-sponsored group activities at the Community Center to take a
solitary walk. In a prole pub, he attempts to question an old man about whether life was better or worse before the
revolution but receives only the man’s vague and disconnected recollections in answer. Afterward, Winston takes the
further risk of going into the junk shop where he bought his diary and chatting with the proprietor, Mr. Charrington,
from whom he buys a beautiful antique glass paperweight. On his way out, Winston sees the woman from the Fiction
Department coming toward him and rushes home in terror. Sometime later, in a corridor at the Ministry of Truth,
Winston sees the same woman trip and fall on her arm, which is in a sling. Winston feels empathy for her in spite of
his suspicions, and as he helps her up, she slips him a note that says “I LOVE YOU.” The two arrange a clandestine
meeting in the countryside and begin a love affair, although non-procreative sex between Party members who aren’t
married to each other is strictly forbidden. Winston regards the first time he sleeps with the free-spirited, sexually
liberated young woman, who is named Julia, as a political act and believes unfettered sexual desire has the power
to destroy the Party.
Winston rents a room above the junk shop from Mr. Charrington, and this room becomes his and Julia’s sanctuary.
The room is old-fashioned, lacks a telescreen, and prominently displays the antique glass paperweight that Winston
bought at the shop and now imagines represents the private world he and Julia have created. They often hear a
prole washerwoman singing in the courtyard below the shop. Winston comes to strongly believe that the only hope
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for the future of humanity lies in the proles’ becoming politically conscious and mounting a rebellion against the
Party. He and Julia talk about rebelling against the Party as well but are unsure how to do so. Winston believes the
two of them should think of themselves as “the dead” since there is no doubt that their transgressions will eventually
lead to their arrest, torture, and execution in the Ministry of Love (the most terrifying of the Ministries, which deals
with maintaining law and order). They agree that although they will be forced to confess under torture, the Party
cannot truly “get inside” them or make them betray their feelings for each other.
One day at the Ministry of Truth, Winston is approached by O’Brien, who gives him his address. Winston is
convinced that he has finally made contact with the rebellion he always dreamed of. When he and Julia visit
O’Brien’s apartment, the Inner Party official indeed recruits them for the Brotherhood, the underground resistance
led by Goldstein. Winston and Julia pledge to do whatever it takes on behalf of the Brotherhood, including murder
and suicide, as long as they don’t have to be parted. O’Brien warns them that their crimes against the Party will
inevitably lead to their arrest.
At the end of Hate Week, an event meant to stoke antagonism toward Oceania’s enemies, it is announced that
Oceania is now at war with Eastasia rather than Eurasia (and therefore has always been at war with Eastasia). That
same day, O’Brien sends Winston a copy of Goldstein’s book, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism.
Winston is finally able to read it in the room above the junk shop after the employees of the Ministry of Truth spend a
grueling week altering documents to reflect that the Party is and has always been at war with Eastasia. The book
explains how the Party claimed and maintains power, including its use of doublethink, a mental process by which an
individual can accept whatever the Party says and then forget they ever believed anything different or engaged in
this mental process at all. Winston finds the book a reassuring articulation of his own beliefs about Party doctrine
and believes its final message must be that hope lies with the proles. Before he can finish it, however, he and Julia
are arrested. It is revealed that an antique engraving on the wall of the rented room concealed a telescreen and that
“Mr. Charrington” is actually a member of the Thought Police. Winston’s cherished paperweight is smashed and the
lovers are separately dragged away.
Winston finds himself in the Ministry of Love, where he is kept in a windowless cell. Other prisoners come and go
until Winston is left alone, at which point O’Brien enters and reveals that he has been loyal to the Party the whole
time. For the next several weeks or months, Winston is brutally beaten by armed guards, then interrogated by Party
intellectuals until he confesses to a long list of invented crimes. In the next phase of his torture, O’Brien delivers
waves of pain and electric shocks to Winston while attempting to convince him to accept Party doctrine. This is all,
O’Brien says, done in the interest of “curing” Winston of the insanity that prevents him from seeing the only true
reality—the reality created by the Party. For a while after these “sessions,” Winston is left alone in a cell to recover,
but when he involuntarily shouts Julia’s name and then confesses that he still hates Big Brother, he is taken to the
ominous Room 101 for the final step in his “cure.” There, each prisoner faces the one thing they find completely
unendurable, which in Winston’s case is a cage containing two rats set to devour his face. As O’Brien lowers the
cage over Winston’s head, Winston finally betrays Julia by begging for his punishment to be transferred to her.
After his release, Winston is no longer of interest to the Party. He spends his days drinking copious amounts of gin at
the Chestnut Tree Café, occasionally going to work at his new job on a pointless Ministry of Truth sub-committee. He
and Julia see each other once in the park and confess that they betrayed each other. Rather than feeling the desire
he once had for Julia, Winston wants only to return to his usual table at the Chestnut Tree. His final defeat comes
when, after the telescreen in the café announces Oceania’s victory over Eurasia, Winston is overcome by love for
Big Brother and a joyous hope that he will soon be executed.
6
Chapter Summaries
Chapter Summaries: Part 1, Chapter 1

Summary
1984 opens on a cold day in April, 1984, at thirteen o’clock. Thirty-nine-year-old Winston Smith returns to his
apartment in Victory Mansions, a building where the electricity has been turned off in preparation for an event called
Hate Week. Winston ignores the posters on the walls, which depict the huge face of a handsome, mustachioed man
of about forty-five whose eyes follow Winston as he walks. The posters read “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.”
Inside Winston’s apartment, a voice reports the news from a plaque called a telescreen mounted on the wall. The
telescreen, which cannot be turned off, is also the instrument by which citizens can be monitored at all times by the
Thought Police. Through the window, Winston can see the cold-looking landscape of London, chief city of Airstrip
One, a province of Oceania. He sees decaying Victorian houses, bomb sites where makeshift dwellings have sprung
up, countless duplicates of the posters that hang in his building, and a poster that reads “INGSOC.” Towering above
it all is Winston’s place of work, a huge white pyramidal building called the Ministry of Truth (or Minitrue in Oceania’s
official language, Newspeak). On the front of the building are the three slogans of “the Party”: “WAR IS PEACE,”
“FREEDOM IS SLAVERY,” and “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.” The Party has four ministries, each with its own
enormous headquarters, in London: The Ministry of Truth (Minitrue), which deals with art, education, entertainment,
and news; the Ministry of Peace (Minipax), which deals with war; the Ministry of Plenty (Miniplenty), which deals with
economics; and the Ministry of Love (Miniluv), which deals with law and order. Winston is most frightened by the
windowless, heavily guarded Ministry of Love, which no one enters except on official business.
Leaving the only food he has—a hunk of bread—for tomorrow’s breakfast, Winston, who has come home on his
lunch break, then drinks a cup of incredibly harsh Victory Gin and takes out an ill-made Victory Cigarette. After
positioning himself in the one corner of his apartment where he cannot be seen through the telescreen, he takes an
antique blank book and pen from a drawer. Winston is about to start a diary, an act that is not illegal—because there
are no laws in Oceania—but is punishable by imprisonment in a forced-labor camp or even death. As soon as
Winston writes the date—April 4th, 1984—he is overwhelmed by a feeling of helplessness. He is not entirely certain
of the date, and while he thinks he is writing his diary for people who might read it in the future, he believes that if the
future is like the present, no one will listen to him. If the future is different, what he writes will have no meaning.
Winston has been preparing for weeks to write down the inner monologue he has been having for years, but he finds
himself paralyzed until, in a panic, he begins to write about the war film he saw last night. He writes of how the
audience laughed at a film showing refugees being bombed and describes a shot of a middle-aged woman putting
her arms around her young child before being killed.
Winston then remembers an incident that occurred at the Ministry that morning and was the impetus for his decision
to start the diary. At the weekly Two Minutes Hate in the Records Department where Winston works, two people
unexpectedly joined Winston and his coworkers: a dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department and a high-ranking
Inner Party member named O’Brien. Winston always feels uneasy around the girl, who he thinks of as being
dangerously loyal to the Party and potentially even a member of the Thought Police. O’Brien, however, he admires
and is drawn to, and Winston cherishes a hope that O’Brien might even harbor unorthodox political leanings. During
the Hate, the audience is whipped into a frenzy of hatred for Emmanuel Goldstein, the enemy of the Party, as he
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denounces the Party from the telescreen. Winston experiences this same hatred for Goldstein, but then he feels it
for Big Brother and the Party, and then for the dark-haired girl. When Big Brother’s face appears on the screen, the
group begins to chant “B-B!” As Winston chants along with them, he is overcome by a sense of horror. At that
moment he catches O’Brien’s eye, and for an instant he is certain O’Brien understands and shares his feelings. After
reflecting on this incident, Winston realizes he has written “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER” over and over again in his
diary. In so doing he has committed thoughtcrime, and he is certain he will eventually be arrested by the Thought
Police and vaporized, meaning all trace of his existence will be erased. When he hears knocking at his door, he
assumes the Thought Police have arrived.

Summary
Winston is relieved to find not the Thought Police but his neighbor, Mrs. Parsons, outside his door, asking him to
take a look at her blocked-up kitchen sink. In the Parsons’ messy apartment, Winston reluctantly fixes the disgusting
sink while Mrs. Parsons assures him that if her husband, Tom, were home, he would have fixed it right away. Tom
Parsons works with Winston at the Ministry, and Winston describes him as a stupid, unquestioningly enthusiastic
man who is a leading member of the Sports Committee and faithful participant at the Community Center. The young
Parsons children then appear, dressed in the uniforms of a children’s organization called the Spies. They menace
Winston with a toy gun, calling him a traitor, a thought-criminal, and a Eurasian spy. Winston finds this disturbing, but
Mrs. Parsons blames her children’s behavior on their disappointment at not being allowed to go and watch the
hanging of a group of Eurasian prisoners of war in the park that evening. As Winston is leaving, he feels a sudden
jolt of pain—the Parsons boy has shot him in the back of the neck with a catapult. Winston notes the look of terror on
Mrs. Parsons’s face as she drags her son, who calls Winston “Goldstein,” back inside. Winston reflects that most
people are afraid of their children nowadays, as organizations like the Spies teach kids to be so enthusiastically loyal
to the Party that they report their own parents to the Thought Police.
Winston returns to his diary and, while trying to think of what to write, remembers a dream he had seven years ago.
He was walking through a dark room when he heard O’Brien’s voice say, “We will meet in the place where there is
no darkness.” Though he doesn’t know if O’Brien is a friend or enemy, Winston believes there is a connection
between them and that the words from his dream will come true. His thoughts are interrupted by a newsflash on the
telescreen announcing Oceania’s defeat of Eurasia in South India, a victory that “may well bring the war within
measurable distance of its end.” This news is followed by the announcement of a reduction in the chocolate ration.
Winston, hidden from the screen, declines to rise for the national anthem. Outside, a rocket bomb explodes
somewhere in the city, and the poster reading “INGSOC” continues to flap in the wind. Faced with the ever-present,
all-seeing eyes of Big Brother and the indestructibility of the Ministry of Truth, Winston contemplates his own
isolation and the futility of his diary, which will likely only be read by the Thought Police. Although he knows that in
committing thoughtcrime he has already condemned himself to death, Winston decides that as long as his diary
helps him stay sane, writing it is not a futile act but rather a way of carrying on the “human heritage.” He scrubs the
ink from his fingers and places a grain of dust on the cover of his diary so that he will know if it has been moved,
then returns to work.
8
Summary
Winston dreams about his mother and younger sister, both of whom disappeared when he was ten or eleven. In the
dream, he sees them sinking deep down below him and understands that they are willingly sacrificing their lives for
his. Winston reflects that the tragedy and sacrifice of his mother’s death is something that wouldn’t be possible
today, when privacy, family, friendship, love, and complex emotions have been subordinated to fear, hatred, and
pain. The dream then shows Winston a sunlit field he often visits in his dreams and thinks of as the Golden Country.
Walking toward him across the field is the girl with dark hair, who tears off her clothes and throws them aside.
Instead of feeling desire for the girl, Winston feels admiration for that gesture, which seems to him to have the power
to destroy the Party’s whole ideology and to belong, like tragedy, to the “ancient time.”
Winston is awakened by the blast from the telescreen that acts as an alarm for every office worker. As he goes
through the Physical Jerks, the mandatory morning exercise routine, he reflects on his childhood. Winston dimly
remembers a time of relative peace when Airstrip One was called England. He recalls hiding with his family in a
Tube station from an unexpected air raid around the time an atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Colchester.
Since then the war has been continuous, and though Winston remembers that only four years ago Oceania was at
war with Eastasia and allied with Eurasia, the Party claims that Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia and
allied with Eastasia. In this altering of the past, the Party is aided by “reality control,” in Newspeak called doublethink,
a mental process by which a Party member can accept a lie as truth and then forget that truth was ever a lie.
Winston finds the Party’s ability to alter or even destroy the past terrifying. He thinks he remembers first hearing of
Big Brother and Ingsoc—English Socialism in Oldspeak—in the 1960s, but he can’t be sure. He does know that the
Party’s claim to have invented airplanes is a lie, and he remembers one occasion when he discovered
incontrovertible proof that the Party had falsified a historical fact. Before he can turn his thoughts to this memory,
however, the voice of the exercise instructress on the telescreen screams his name and encourages him to try
harder to touch his toes, causing Winston to break out in a nervous sweat because his facial expression may have
given away his feelings in front of the screen.
Chapter Summaries: Part 1, Chapters 4 and

5 Summary
Winston begins his work at the Records Department, where rolls of paper bearing messages in Newspeak are
deposited on his desk through a tube. Each message pertains to an article that needs to be altered, or “rectified,” to
reflect the infallibility of the Party and the accuracy of Big Brother’s predictions. Past inaccurate economic forecasts,
predictions about the war, and promises that there would be no reduction in the chocolate ration are all edited so
that it appears the Party was never wrong. Winston rectifies each article through a device called a speakwrite before
dropping each message through one of the countless “memory holes” in the Ministry of Truth—slits in the walls
through which waste paper is sent to be burned. Every kind of record, document, literature, and image is subject to
being altered in this way. In many cases, one completely made-up fact is simply replaced by another. One of
Winston’s coworkers, Ampleforth, alters classic poems to reflect the Party’s ideology. The main function of the
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Ministry of Truth, however, is the production of every kind of information and entertainment, both for the Party and,
separately, for the proles. One subsection called Pornosec deals exclusively in the production of pornography that is
sold to the proles; no other Party members are permitted to see it.
Despite Winston’s reservations about the Party, his life’s greatest pleasure is his work, particularly when he is
assigned complicated tasks like the one he receives after that morning’s Two Minutes Hate. The assignment is to
rewrite an article about a man called Comrade Withers who was awarded a medal by Big Brother but has since been
vaporized and made into an unperson—someone who has not only been executed but officially made to have never
existed at all. In his new version of the article, Winston imitates Big Brother’s style and replaces Withers with a
fictional soldier called Comrade Ogilvy who lived and died for the Party. This job leads Winston to reflect on the ease
with which historical “facts” can be produced.
In the canteen on his lunch break, Winston runs into his acquaintance, a philologist named Syme. Syme asks
Winston if he has any extra razor blades, which are currently in extremely short supply; Winston lies and says he
doesn’t. As the two men eat the revolting stew and drink the harsh Victory Gin provided, Syme tells Winston about
the new edition of the Newspeak dictionary he is helping to compile. Most of Syme’s work consists of destroying
words, restricting the possibilities of language and consciousness so much that thoughtcrime will become
impossible. He predicts that Oldspeak will have completely disappeared by 2050, except among the proles, whom
Syme does not consider human. Meanwhile at a nearby table, one man is rapidly, mechanically spewing Party
doctrine to a young woman. Syme explains that in Newspeak this kind of unconscious, quack-like speech is called
duckspeak. Though when applied to an opponent the term is an insult, when applied to a Party member it is a term
of praise. Winston thinks to himself that in spite of Syme’s orthodoxy and Party loyalty, the philologist is too
intelligent; he even frequents the “ill-omened” Chestnut Tree Café, where discredited former Party leaders used to
gather. True orthodoxy, as Syme himself says, is unconsciousness. Winston is sure Syme will eventually be
vaporized.
The two men are joined by Winston’s neighbor Parsons, a large, boyish, incredibly sweaty man who collects money
from Winston for their building’s Hate Week display. Parsons then approvingly talks of his children’s enthusiasm for
the Party, including his young daughter’s reporting of a possibly foreign man she spotted on a hike with the Spies.
The telescreen then delivers an announcement from the Ministry of Plenty about the rise in the standard of living and
that day’s spontaneous demonstrations by grateful workers. Parsons asks Winston for razor blades, but Winston
again lies. While smoking a Victory Cigarette, Winston thinks about how Syme, Mrs. Parsons, O’Brien, and he
himself will all eventually be vaporized, but Parsons, the quacking man, and the girl with dark hair will be spared due
to their unquestioning orthodoxy. He realizes then that the girl with dark hair is sitting nearby and staring at him.
When they meet eyes, she looks away, but Winston is seized by fear as he becomes convinced that she is watching
him, either as an amateur spy or an agent of the Thought Police. Resigning himself to his fate in the cellars of the
Ministry of Love, Winston listens to Parsons ramble on about his children’s enthusiasm for spying and violence until
the telescreen summons everyone back to work.

7 Summary
Winston struggles to write down a memory that torments him in his diary. As he does, he reflects that a person’s
10
nervous system is his or her own worst enemy, as any involuntary physical sign of tension could betray a person to
the Thought Police. Winston’s memory is of a time three years ago when he slept with a prole prostitute, an act that
is forbidden but usually only punished by imprisonment in a forced-labor camp rather than death. What the Party
truly discourages is sexual relationships between Party members. Although it isn’t a publicly stated goal, Winston is
aware that the Party aims to eradicate, or at least to distort, sexual desire. To this end, marriages are only approved
between Party members who show no sign of physical attraction to one another. Though they have been separated
for about a decade, Winston himself is married to a woman named Katharine. He remembers her as unquestioningly
loyal to the Party and devoid of independent thought. What made his life with her unbearable, however, was the
utterly joyless sex she insisted they have every week. Katharine clearly took no pleasure in the act but believed they
had to do their “duty to the Party” by attempting to have a child. This proved fruitless, and the couple separated after
a little over a year.
Winston resents the fact that this abhorrence of sex has been so ingrained in the women of the Party and that his
only other possibilities for sexual fulfillment lie in equally joyless encounters with prostitutes. A real love affair, he
thinks, would constitute a rebellion, and he wishes he could awaken desire in a woman just once in his life. With
these thoughts in mind, he sets again to the painful task of finishing the confession in his diary entry. He recalls how
when he clearly saw the prostitute he was about to sleep with in the lamplight, he realized she was an old woman
and, most horrible of all, had no teeth. Winston slept with her anyway and now finds that writing down this memory
has not helped to free him from it at all.
Chapter seven begins with Winston writing in his diary, “If there is hope it lies in the proles.” The proles make up
eighty-five percent of Oceania’s population, and Winston believes they have the power to defeat the Party if they
rebel. He has his doubts about this uprising, however; he remembers thinking once that a group of prole women
were starting a riot against the Party, only to realize they were simply upset over a market stall’s having run out of
saucepans. Though the Party claims to have liberated the proles from the oppression they suffered under the
capitalists, its members regard the proles as animal-like inferiors. The Party doesn’t bother to indoctrinate the proles
with its own ideology, choosing instead to control them by keeping them ignorant, poor, supplied with entertainment,
and free to engage in sex, crime, and religion.
Winston starts to copy into his diary a passage describing the evils of the capitalists from a children’s history
textbook he borrowed from the Parsons. He reflects on the impossibility of knowing whether or not the version of
history in the textbook is true, though he feels instinctively that life can’t be better now than it was before the
Revolution. Contrary to the glittering, triumphant vision of life in Oceania promoted by the Party, life in the London of
1984 is a dingy, depressing affair where the buildings are dirty and decaying and the people are poor, hungry, and
tired. Winston has only once seen undeniable, after-the-fact proof that the Party has falsified the historical record.
The story of this falsification begins during the purges of the mid-1960s, when all the original leaders of the Party
disappeared or were executed as traitors after confessing at public trials—all except Goldstein, who fled, and Big
Brother. In 1965, three original Party leaders named Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford were arrested. After vanishing
for a time, they reappeared to confess to crimes against Big Brother and were subsequently pardoned and reinstated
in the Party, though it was clear they would eventually be executed. Winston saw them once in the Chestnut Tree
Café and thought he remembered having heard of them long before Big Brother. He noticed that Aaronson and
Rutherford both had broken noses and that Rutherford, a political cartoonist, wept at an oddly mocking-sounding
song that played from the telescreen. Shortly after that day all three men were rearrested, then executed after
confessing anew.
Five years later, Winston found half a page of the Times among the documents deposited onto his desk. The page
11
showed a photograph of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford at a Party function in New York, contradicting the men’s
avowal that they had conferred with the Eurasian enemy in Siberia that day and thereby proving that their
confessions had been false. Winston dropped the photograph down the memory hole, but he thinks that today he
would have kept it. He wonders if it actually makes a difference that this piece of evidence once existed when the
past is continually being rewritten. What most torments Winston is that he doesn’t know the ultimate purpose of this
continual altering of history and that he might not only be insane but wrong in his perception of the past. The Party
encourages people to deny their common sense in order to accept the official version of reality, even if it is an
absurd statement like “Two plus two equals five.” If reality exists only in the mind and the Party is able to control
people’s minds, then their power is absolute. Winston is given courage by his belief that O’Brien is on his side and
that his diary, even if no one ever reads it, is addressed to O’Brien. Holding fast to his faith in unalterable truth and
external reality, Winston writes, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.”

Summary
Winston skips an evening at the Community Center for the second time in three weeks and strolls aimlessly through
the city instead. In so doing, he runs the risk of being accused of ownlife, Newspeak for the “individualism and
eccentricity” associated with a taste for solitude. As he walks through the slums, he reflects on the words he wrote in
his diary: “If there is hope, it lies in the proles.” His Party uniform (a set of overalls) draws wary looks from the people
he passes, and if a patrol were to see him here, it would raise the suspicions of the Thought Police. Suddenly
everyone runs for cover as a “steamer,” or rocket bomb, falls nearby, destroying a group of houses. Winston walks
on past the rubble, kicking aside a severed human hand lying in the street. The proles seem unaffected by the
explosion, and Winston overhears two men arguing about the Lottery, the largely imaginary public event managed
by the Ministry of Plenty; it consumes the proles’ attention. He soon realizes he is in the vicinity of the junk shop
where he bought his diary. Seeing an old man go into a pub, Winston realizes that only a prole who had reached
adulthood before the Party took power could answer his most urgent question: Was life better or worse before the
Revolution? He decides to follow the old man and question him.
In the pub, Winston buys the old man a beer and asks him if what he has read about pre-Revolutionary London is
true: that the majority of people were impoverished, starving, and terribly oppressed by the capitalists. Unfortunately,
the old man keeps going off on confused tangents and is unable to give a satisfactory answer to this or to the
question of whether life was better or worse before the Revolution. Winston realizes that he won’t learn anything
useful from the man or from any of the survivors of the pre-Revolutionary or “ancient” time: all they remember is
scattered details. Nothing exists to contradict the Party’s claims, not even memories. Winston leaves the pub and
walks on, eventually finding himself outside the junk shop. Although he swore he would never enter the shop again,
he ducks inside. He is greeted by the proprietor, a soft-spoken, intellectual-seeming man of about sixty. Winston
ends up buying an antique glass paperweight, drawn by its obvious origin in another, entirely different era and its
very un-utilitarian beauty. The proprietor then shows him an old-fashioned upstairs room that Winston is amazed to
realize doesn’t have a telescreen. On the wall is a print of what is currently the Palace of Justice. The proprietor
explains that it was once a church called St. Clement’s Dane. The proprietor introduces himself as Mr. Charrington
and teaches Winston part of an old rhyme featuring all the principal churches of pre-Revolutionary London. Winston
leaves the shop humming it, resolved to visit Mr. Charrington again and to learn the rest of the rhyme.
12
When he steps outside, however, Winston is horrified to see the girl with dark hair coming down the street toward
him. She looks straight at him before continuing on her way, and Winston is convinced that she has been spying on
him. He considers trying to kill the girl with the paperweight or going to the Community Center to establish a partial
alibi, but, consumed by fear, he instead returns home to drink gin and try to write in his diary. He tries to think of
O’Brien but instead thinks of the inevitable torture that he will be made to endure after being arrested by the Thought
Police. Why, he wonders, is this torture necessary when everyone who is arrested eventually confesses and is
executed anyway? The phrase from his dream, “We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,” comes
back to him; he believes that place is the “imagined future.” Staring at Big Brother’s face on a coin, he wonders what
kind of smile Big Brother’s mustache conceals and feels the three slogans etched on the Ministry of Truth weighing
heavily on him.

Summary
On his way to the bathroom at work, Winston sees the girl with dark hair coming toward him, her arm in a sling. He
thinks she was probably injured by one of the machines used to produce novels in the Fiction Department. Suddenly
the girl stumbles and falls, cries out in pain, then looks at Winston with a frightened expression. Feeling empathy for
the girl in spite of the fact that he regards her as a mortal enemy, Winston helps her to her feet. As he does so, the
girl slips a note into his hand. After she walks away, Winston struggles to keep his face expressionless in front of the
telescreen. At his desk he forces himself to wait to open the note, wondering if it is a threat from the Thought Police
or a message from the Brotherhood, an underground organization rumored to oppose the Party. When he finally
does open it, Winston is stunned to read the words “I love you” before he throws the note down the memory hole.
Winston is unable to concentrate for the rest of the day and longs to be alone, but he dutifully attends the Community
Center that evening. With his will to live rekindled by the note, he is no longer willing to take unnecessary risks.
Talking to the girl without raising suspicion, however, poses a problem; Winston decides the safest place to
approach her would be in the canteen. He is unable to talk to her for a week, including three days when he doesn’t
see her at all. He wonders if she has been transferred, if she is dead, or, worst of all, if she has changed her mind
about him. Finally she reappears in the canteen, but a coworker calls Winston over to sit with him before he can
approach the girl’s table. The next day, however, he succeeds in sitting down across from her. Speaking in low
voices without looking at one another, Winston and the girl arrange a meeting.
Later that evening, Winston arrives early at their chosen meeting place, Victory Square. He is seized by fear that the
girl won’t show up, but then he sees her standing at the base of a monument to Big Brother. He waits for more
people to gather so that he can approach her less obviously, but suddenly everyone in the square runs to the street
to watch a convoy of Eurasian prisoners of war. Winston and the girl join the crowd and stand beside each other,
pressed together, staring straight ahead. As they watch the trucks full of prisoners pass, the girl gives Winston
directions to a spot in the country where he is to meet her that Sunday. Just before they part, the girl squeezes
Winston’s hand. The two of them hold hands for only about ten seconds, but it seems like a long time to Winston,
who feels he learns the girl’s hand’s every detail.
13
Summary
On the first of May, Winston travels by train to the countryside to meet the girl with dark hair. Though he has
managed to avoid questioning by patrols, and though there are no telescreens in the country, he is still wary of the
possibility of concealed microphones or of being followed. After walking down a narrow path between bushes, he
picks bluebells for the girl until she arrives and silently leads him into a small clearing in the woods. The two kiss, but
Winston is nervous, intimidated by the girl’s youth and beauty. Winston learns that the girl’s name is Julia and that
she found this hiding spot when she got lost on a community hike. Winston confesses that when he first saw Julia,
he wanted to rape and murder her, believing her to be a pure and faithful Party member and possibly even a
member of the Thought Police. This amuses Julia, who rips off the red sash she wears—the emblem of the Junior
Anti-Sex League—before producing a piece of black-market chocolate. The chocolate stirs a faint, troubling memory
in Winston. Julia explains that she participates with seeming enthusiasm in the League and in Party activities to
avoid suspicion and that she was attracted by something in Winston’s face that told her he was against the Party.
She speaks of her hatred of the Party openly and Winston is unbothered by her swearing, which Party members are
not supposed to do. He puts his arm around her waist and finds it feels softer without the red sash.
The pair walk to the edge of the woods, where they look out across a field that strongly reminds Winston of the
Golden Country of his dreams. When a thrush alights on a nearby tree branch, they find themselves entranced by its
song. Winston wonders why the bird sings and who it sings for. The couple kiss and then return to the clearing,
where Julia flings her overalls aside almost exactly like she did in Winston’s dream. Kneeling down in front of her,
Winston asks Julia if she has done this before. Julia replies that she has done this scores of times, always with
Outer Party members. Winston is thrilled by this knowledge of other Party members’ corruption and tells Julia that he
wants everyone to be corrupt, that he hates purity, and that the more men she has slept with, the more he loves her.
What excites him the most is Julia’s assertion that she loves sex in and of itself, as he believes sexual desire has the
power to destroy the Party.
After they have sex, Winston watches Julia sleep. He reflects that although he feels tender toward her, pure love and
lust are no longer possible because the Party has ensured that every emotion is mixed up with fear and hate.
Sleeping together, he believes, was a political act.

Summary
Julia wakes up and assumes a businesslike demeanor as she explains to Winston how to get home by a different
route than the one he came by. Winston finds it natural to let Julia take charge of the practical details of their trysts,
and throughout that month the two of them meet fleetingly in crowded evening streets. The constant presence of
patrols and telescreens means the couple can only exchange a few words and don’t dare kiss, except for one
occasion when a rocket bomb explodes nearby and Winston thinks for a moment that Julia has been killed. Their
busy schedules also make it difficult to meet, but Julia nevertheless convinces Winston to spend one night a week
14
doing munition work in order to appear more like a loyal Party member.
The next time the two are able to make love, they meet in a ruined church tower in an abandoned part of the
countryside where an atomic bomb once fell. Winston learns that Julia is twenty-six, hates living in a hostel with thirty
other women, and enjoys her work on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department, although she doesn’t
read books. She has only heard of the days before the Revolution from a grandfather who disappeared when she
was a child. She was chosen to work in Pornosec for a year due to her seemingly spotless character (including her
leadership in the Spies, the Youth League, and the Junior Anti-Sex League), and she had her first love affair at
sixteen. Though Julia hates the Party, she regards it as an unalterable fact of life and has no interest or belief in any
kind of organized rebellion; she simply aims to break the rules and enjoy herself without being noticed. She and
Winston don’t consider getting married, as their marriage would never be approved (given that they are obviously
attracted to one another) even if Winston wasn’t still technically married.
Winston tells Julia about his relationship with Katharine, and Julia explains to Winston her belief that the Party
represses people’s sexual instincts in order to channel that repressed energy into a hysterical enthusiasm for the
Party’s own agenda. Similarly, familial instincts are distorted so that while parents are still fond of their children,
children are encouraged to surveil and report their parents. Winston has no doubt that Katharine would have
denounced him to the Thought Police if she had realized he harbored unorthodox opinions. He tells Julia about a
time a few months after his marriage when he and Katharine got lost on a community hike and he considered
pushing her into a quarry. Julia says she would have done it, but Winston realizes that killing Katharine wouldn’t
have accomplished anything. Though Julia knows she will one day be caught and executed, on another level she
still believes she can achieve an individual victory over the Party by living in a secret world of her own. She has not
accepted as Winston has that happiness is not possible in the Party’s world and that the only victory they can hope
for will come long after their deaths. “We are the dead,” he tells her, but Julia disagrees, pointing out that they are
alive and enjoying themselves now. She then turns to the practical business of arranging their next meeting.

Summary
June arrives. Winston has rented the room above Mr. Charrington’s shop, which he and Julia are now using as their
meeting place. Winston originally formed the idea of renting the room while imagining how the glass paperweight
would look in it. The paperweight now sits on the old-fashioned table there. Mr. Charrington is aware that Winston is
conducting a love affair in the room and has promised to keep this information to himself. Winston is aware that he
and Julia are committing the most obvious, flagrant crime it is possible for Party members to commit with their trysts
in the rented room, but the temptation of having a private place to be together is too much for either of them to resist.
While he waits in the room for Julia, Winston watches through the window as a huge prole woman pegs diapers on a
clothesline in the courtyard. She sings a popular song produced for the proles by the Ministry of Truth’s Music
Department on a machine called a versifactor, and Winston thinks her singing is almost pleasant. He reflects on how
difficult it was to arrange meetings with Julia before he rented the room: both of them have been working much more
than usual in preparation for an event called Hate Week, and the last time they made plans to meet at the clearing in
the woods, Julia canceled after getting her period early. This made Winston angry, as he had begun to feel that he
needed and had a right to Julia, but in the next moment he was overcome by tenderness as she squeezed his hand.
15
He wished they had a place where they could be alone and at ease, and the next day he thought of renting the room
above the junk shop. Both he and Julia know how dangerous this is, and Winston thinks now of the torture they will
inevitably face in the Ministry of Love.
Julia arrives with her tool bag full of real coffee, tea, and sugar she bought on the black market. She then makes
Winston face away from her. As he watches the prole woman contentedly hanging laundry and singing again, he
thinks how dangerously unorthodox it would seem for a Party member to spontaneously burst into song. When Julia
tells him to turn around, he sees that she is wearing makeup—something Party women simply don’t do. Winston
thinks she looks much prettier and more feminine this way. When he embraces her, he realizes she is also wearing
perfume—the same perfume the prole prostitute had worn, but that doesn’t matter to him. Julia tells Winston that in
their private room she will be not a Party comrade but a woman. Winston takes all of his clothes off in front of Julia
for the first time, and the two make love. Lying in the old-fashioned bed together afterward, their peace is interrupted
by the appearance of a rat. Julia throws a shoe at it and indifferently speaks of the huge brown rats that attack
children in the poorer parts of London. Winston is completely horrified by the thought of rats and is reminded of a
recurring nightmare he has in which something terrible waits for him on the other side of a wall of darkness. In the
nightmare he always thinks he knows what that something is but is too afraid to admit it to himself.
Winston half-forgets this panic as Julia gets up, makes coffee, and looks around the room. Together they look at the
paperweight, which Winston explains he likes because of its lack of usefulness and because it is like an unaltered
piece of history. He tells her the print on the wall is of St. Clement’s Dane and is stunned when she knows part of the
rhyme taught to him by Mr. Charrington. Julia says her grandfather taught it to her before he disappeared. While she
takes off her makeup, Winston gazes into the paperweight, imagining the timeless world he has created inside this
room with Julia is the coral embedded safely in the glass.

Summary
At the Ministry of Truth, Syme disappears and Winston recognizes that his acquaintance has been vaporized.
Meanwhile, workers at every Ministry are consumed with preparations for Hate Week. Winston works overtime
altering news items to be quoted in speeches. London is plagued by sweltering heat, more rocket bombs than ever,
and a series of unexplained explosions. The “Hate Song” competes for popularity with the song sung by the prole
washerwoman, “It Was Only a Hopeless Fancy,” and a new poster showing a Eurasian soldier pointing a
submachine gun now outnumbers posters of Big Brother. The proles are whipped into a patriotic frenzy that leads
them to burn the new posters, effigies of Goldstein, and the home of an elderly couple suspected of being foreign
spies.
Winston and Julia continue to meet in the rented room, which Winston thinks of as a paradise in spite of the bugs
that infest the bed. He finds that his health is improving: he drinks less gin, gains weight, and finds relief from his
chronic cough and varicose ulcer as well as from his former feeling that life was unbearable. The rented room has
become its own tiny, inviolable world, and all that matters to Winston is knowing it exists. Winston often stops to talk
with the quiet, solitary Mr. Charrington, who, like the room he rents, seems to be a relic of the past. In spite of the
fact that they know their secret world cannot last forever, Winston and Julia both feel safe inside the room above the
shop. They fantasize about escaping detection their whole lives, somehow managing to get married, committing
16
suicide together, or disappearing from the Party and living as proles, but they have no intention of acting on these
daydreams. They also discuss actively rebelling against the Party, but neither knows how. Julia believes that most
people secretly hate the Party and trusts Winston’s intuition that O’Brien is on their side, but she doesn’t believe in
Goldstein or the Brotherhood, whom she regards as inventions of the Party. She also surprises Winston with her
belief that it is the Party itself that drops the rocket bombs on London and with the confession that she often feels an
urge to laugh during the Two Minutes Hate. Yet Julia only questions Party doctrine when it personally affects her.
Winston only manages to convince her with great difficulty that the Party didn’t actually invent airplanes and that just
four years ago Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Julia is unable to grasp the significance of Winston’s story about
finding the photograph of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford, and she remains unbothered by the continuous
alteration of the past that so troubles Winston. She has no concern for the future of their society and becomes bored
to the point of falling asleep when Winston voices his deeper concerns about Party doctrine. This causes him to
reflect on the fact that the Party most successfully imposes its worldview on people who are incapable of truly
understanding that worldview. It is these people who, through their lack of understanding, are able to remain sane.

Summary
While walking down a Ministry corridor near the spot where Julia gave him the note, Winston is approached by
O’Brien, who compliments him on his use of Newspeak in his articles for the Times. O’Brien says his opinion of
Winston’s writing was shared by a friend of Winston’s, an expert whose name he cannot remember. Winston
recognizes this clear reference to Syme, who, as an unperson, should never be mentioned, as a deliberate act of
thoughtcrime meant to make himself and Winston accomplices. Pausing in the middle of the corridor, O’Brien then
observes that Winston used two words in one of his articles that have recently become obsolete. He invites Winston
to his apartment to borrow his advance copy of the tenth edition of the Newspeak dictionary, saying he thinks
Winston will be particularly interested in the newly reduced number of verbs. In full view of the telescreen, O’Brien
writes his address on a scrap of paper and gives it to Winston before continuing on his way. Winston quickly
memorizes the address before dropping it down the memory hole a few hours later. He is certain that O’Brien invited
him to borrow the dictionary as a pretext for letting him know O’Brien’s address if Winston should ever want to talk to
him, as there are no longer any address books or other directories. What is also clear to Winston is that he has
finally received a message from the underground rebellion he has always dreamed of, a message he feels he has
been waiting for his whole life. The visit to O’Brien, whenever he makes it, will be the next step in a process that
began with Winston’s first unorthodox thoughts, continued when he began his diary, and will end with his torture in
the Ministry of Love. Although Winston accepts this fate as inevitable, he is frightened by the chilling sense of
stepping into his own grave—a sensation that begins while he talks to O’Brien.

Summary
Winston wakes up in tears from a vivid dream that seemed to take place inside the glass paperweight and that
involved an arm gesture made by both his mother and the Jewish mother he saw on the news film. He tells a sleepy
17
Julia that until now he had believed he had, metaphorically, murdered his mother. In his dream, he remembered the
last time he saw his mother, when he was ten or twelve years old. On waking, he remembered the rest of that day.
London was in chaos at the time, and Winston spent his afternoons scrounging for scraps of food in the garbage
with other boys. Since his father’s recent disappearance, his mother had changed, seeming to completely lose spirit
and to be quietly waiting for something inevitable. Winston lived with her and his sickly two- or three-year-old sister
in a small, dark room. His strongest memory of this time is of his continuous hunger and the tantrums he threw at
mealtimes in spite of the fact that, as the boy in the family, he was always given more than his share of food. When a
ration of chocolate was issued for the first time in weeks, Winston begged for the whole piece until his mother gave
three quarters to him and one to his sister. Winston took the chocolate from his sister’s hand and ran, stopping when
his mother called for him to come back. As he watched her put her arm around his sister in a protective gesture, he
knew that his sister was dying and that his mother was thinking of the event she never mentioned but was always
waiting for. Then he turned and ran outside. When he returned to the apartment, his mother and sister had
disappeared. Winston is still unsure whether the two of them are alive or dead.
The meaning of the dream seems to Winston to be contained in his mother’s protective gesture, and he is reminded
of his earlier dream in which he saw his mother and sister sinking below him. Although his mother was not an
unusual woman, Winston thinks of her as noble and pure because she lived according to her own private morals and
feelings. For her, as for others of her generation who valued individual relationships and personal loyalties, an action
such as shielding a child with one’s arm did not lack meaning just because it was ultimately ineffectual in the grand
scheme of things. Under the Party, however, people have become convinced that their own feelings and actions
make no difference, as they will inevitably vanish and leave no impact on the future. It occurs to Winston that this
does not apply to the proles. He remembers kicking aside the severed hand the day he returned to the junk shop and
thinks to himself that while the proles have remained human, Party members have not. When Julia wakes up,
Winston tells her that if she walks away from their relationship and stays away from people like him, she might be
able to survive. Julia refuses. They discuss their future arrest and torture, when they will be alone and powerless.
While both acknowledge they will be forced to confess, they decide there is one thing the Party cannot do: they
cannot “get inside” people or make them believe the things they are forced to say. They therefore cannot force
Winston and Julia to commit the “ultimate betrayal” of ceasing to love each other. Winston believes the one way they
can defeat the Party is not by staying alive but by staying human, and no matter what tortures the Party inflicts on
them in the Ministry of Love, his and Julia’s feelings will remain unalterable.

Summary
Winston and Julia finally visit O’Brien’s apartment. The building is intimidatingly lavish, and this, combined with the
danger of his and Julia’s arriving together, makes Winston terribly nervous. They are admitted by O’Brien’s servant,
who Winston thinks might be Chinese, and led into a room where O’Brien sits at a desk delivering a message in
Ministry jargon into a speakwrite. Winston is terrified when O’Brien walks toward them. He wonders if he has made a
horrible mistake and is then shocked when O’Brien switches off his telescreen. O’Brien explains that turning off the
telescreen is a privilege granted to Inner Party members and invites Winston to speak. Winston nervously explains
that he and Julia, who he admits are having an affair, have come because they believe O’Brien is part of a secret
anti-Party organization that they want to join. The servant enters, and O’Brien explains that his name is Martin and
that he is one of them. All four sit down together, and O’Brien pours them each a glass of wine, which Winston and
18
Julia have never seen before. They drink to Emmanuel Goldstein, the Leader of the Brotherhood. O’Brien then asks
Winston what he and Julia are prepared to do for the Brotherhood. The pair agree they would commit murder,
sabotage, treason, and suicide, distribute drugs or diseases, lose their identities, and even throw acid in a child’s
face. But when O’Brien asks if the two of them would be willing to part and never see each other again, Julia
immediately says no. After a few moments, Winston says no as well. O’Brien warns Julia that the Brotherhood
sometimes surgically alters its members until they are unrecognizable, but she murmurs her agreement. Winston
wonders if Martin has been surgically altered, but he can’t see any scars. Following O’Brien’s instructions, the
servant memorizes Winston’s and Julia’s faces before returning to the pantry.
Winston and Julia listen raptly as O’Brien explains the methods of the Brotherhood. He promises to send them a
book describing the true nature of Oceanian society and how the Brotherhood intends to destroy it, a book that will
make them full members of the Brotherhood once they have read it. He warns them, however, that their knowledge
of the organization and of other members will always remain extremely limited so that they will have very little to
confess when they are arrested. Their instructions will come from O’Brien, through Martin. Winston notes that when
O’Brien discusses the things they must do to topple the Party, his tone is ironic rather than passionately fanatical, as
though he recognizes that these actions are unavoidable means to a better future. O’Brien seems undefeatable, and
Winston feels intense admiration for him. As he paces up and down, O’Brien explains that the Brotherhood can
never be destroyed, because it is held together only by an idea rather than by comradeship. He warns Winston and
Julia that they won’t see the results of their work within their lifetimes, echoing Winston’s previous words: “We are
the dead.” The only results they can hope to achieve by individually spreading knowledge and sanity will be in the
distant future. When they are arrested, they will receive no help from the Brotherhood except perhaps in the form of
a smuggled razor blade. The three finish off the wine, drinking, at Winston’s suggestion, to the past. Julia then
leaves so that she and Winston won’t be seen leaving together.
When O’Brien asks Winston if he and Julia have a hiding place, Winston tells him about the room above the junk
shop. O’Brien then tells Winston that one day he will receive a message at work with a misprint. The next day,
Winston should come to work without his briefcase; a man on the street will hand him a briefcase just like his own
that will contain a copy of the book written by Goldstein, which Winston will have two weeks to read. A few minutes
before Winston is due to leave, O’Brien says, “We shall meet again—if we do meet again—” and Winston finishes,
“In the place where there is no darkness?” O’Brien repeats the phrase without surprise, then asks Winston if he has
any further messages or questions. Winston thinks of the room where he lived with his mother and of the room
above the junk shop with its paperweight and engraving. He asks O’Brien if he knows the old rhyme Mr. Charrington
taught him. To Winston’s amazement, O’Brien recites it, supplying the last line of the stanza. He then bids Winston
farewell by crushing his palm in a powerful handshake. As Winston leaves, he looks back at O’Brien and sees him
waiting to turn the telescreen back on, his mind apparently already turning back to his work.

Summary
Everyone at the Ministry of Truth has been working almost nonstop for the past five days. Winston, overwhelmed
with fatigue, is on his way to the rented room to rest, the rush of work finally over. In his hand is a briefcase
containing Goldstein’s book, which he hasn’t had a chance to open since receiving it six days ago, on the sixth day
of Hate Week. On the night of that sixth day, just as Londoners’ hatred of Eurasia was approaching a climax spurred
19
on by parades, songs, films, decorations, displays of Oceania’s military power, and the promise of a public hanging
of two thousand Eurasian war criminals, an announcement was made that Oceania was not at war with Eurasia but
with Eastasia. Winston was at a demonstration that night, listening to a grotesque-looking Inner Party orator deliver a
furious anti-Eurasian speech that stirred the crowd of thousands to a wild, hate-filled roar. Then a messenger
handed the orator a slip of paper. He continued his speech without a pause, but now he condemned Eastasia
instead of Eurasia. The crowd, accepting this immediately, assumed the anti-Eurasian posters and banners
everywhere were the result of acts of sabotage by agents of Goldstein and ripped them from the walls. Meanwhile
the orator continued his speech. After a few minutes, the crowd returned to yelling in rage, only this time at a
different target. Winston is impressed, looking back, by how the orator shifted so seamlessly into directing his
speech at Eastasia. At the time, however, he was distracted by a man handing him a briefcase, just as O’Brien had
promised, and by the vast amount of work he knew he would have to begin. Immediately after the demonstration, he
and the entire staff of the Ministry of Truth returned to their posts to remove every trace of evidence of the war with
Eurasia and the alliance with Eastasia from the record. The work was not only seemingly endless but difficult, and
Winston found himself concerned only with completing it rather than with the fact that he was producing lies. Finally,
when every relevant record had been rectified, the workers were released until the next morning. Winston now
arrives at the rented room and sits down to read Goldstein’s book while he waits for Julia.
The book, which is worn and heavy, is titled The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism. Chapter one is
titled “Ignorance Is Strength.” Winston reads for a while and then pauses to appreciate the fact that he can do so in
safety and privacy. With a blissful sense of having eternity to read the book, he opens it to chapter three, “War Is
Peace,” which describes the splitting up of the world into three perpetually warring superstates. This continuous war
is very different from the previous wars of the twentieth century: none of the three superstates could conceivably
defeat the others, acts that would previously have been considered war crimes are normal and right when performed
by one’s own country, the actual fighting is done by small numbers of specialists, and there is no real ideological
reason for the fighting. Since each superstate has its own self-contained economy, there is also no economic reason
to fight except to obtain labor power from people living in the disputed territories near the superstates’ constantly
fluctuating borders. The primary purpose of modern warfare, according to Goldstein, is for each superstate to have a
way to use up whatever it can produce without raising the standard of living for its inhabitants. Before 1914, he says,
people looked forward to a future in which technological progress and the new surplus of consumer goods would
lead to a higher standard of living for everyone. Industrialization did raise the standard of living for a time, but a
series of wars interfered. Moreover, it became apparent that an equal distribution of wealth would be fatal to the
hierarchical basis of society. Even if power remained concentrated in the hands of a privileged few, people who had
previously been kept powerless by poverty and ignorance would now have the chance to realize their subjugated
position and topple the hierarchy. Reversing industrialization or restricting the output of goods, however, would
weaken a country’s military power. Continuous warfare was therefore the only practical way to continue producing
goods without increasing the wealth and power of the masses. Human labor is used to build weapons and other
implements of war that are either destroyed or provide no tangible benefit. In this way the vast majority of the
population is purposefully kept in a state of poverty. The differences in quality of life between the Inner Party, the
Outer Party, and the proles keep the social hierarchy in place, while the constant awareness of being at war makes
people more willing to hand over power to a small elite. The constant state of war serves the function of keeping up
Party members’ morale, encouraging them to heights of fanaticism, hatred of the enemy, and love of the Party. In
addition, it helps Party members to perform doublethink, which allows them to simultaneously know that the war is
false and to wholly believe that the war is real and will end with Oceania achieving world domination.
Science and technological innovation have been largely discontinued in Oceania and are only applied when they can
be used to help the Party solve two great problems: how to find out what another person is thinking and how to
20
instantly kill vast numbers of people without warning. All three superstates already possess atomic bombs, but after
an atomic war in the 1950s nearly wiped out civilization (and hence each superstate’s power), they have continued
to produce and hoard atomic bombs without using them. Each world power supposedly plans to use its atomic
arsenal to one day conquer the others, but all realize this is actually impossible. In addition, no superstate ever
actually invades another as that would necessitate assimilating the conquered population. This would pose a
problem because each society depends on its inhabitants’ regarding foreigners with fear and hatred rather than with
understanding and empathy.
Living conditions, social structures, and philosophies are extremely similar in all three states: Oceania has Ingsoc,
Eurasia has Neo-Bolshevism, and Eastasia has “Obliteration of the Self.” Each ideology fuels an intensely
hierarchical society and a purposeful denial of reality that allows the superstates to engage in a mutually beneficial
war without end. The fact that war is now continuous and lacks any real danger also means that it has become
detached from physical reality; thus reality can now be distorted by the ruling class like never before. Citizens of
Oceania are cut off from facts, from the rest of the world, and from the past, at the mercy of whatever twisted version
of reality the Party wants to present. The endless war, Goldstein writes, is not waged by one nation on another but
by a nation against its own citizens in order to preserve the social order. The state of the world would remain much
the same if the three superstates decided to live in a state of permanent peace rather than permanent war, since
each would continue to operate as its own separate universe. This is the true meaning of the slogan “WAR IS
PEACE.”
Winston pauses when he hears a rocket bomb explode, but he still feels at peace, as well as reassured by the fact
that Goldstein’s book has articulated and confirmed his own beliefs. Julia arrives for their first meeting in a week but
seems disinterested when he tells her he has the book. Lying in bed together later, listening to the prole
washerwoman singing as usual, Winston tells Julia they both have to read the book in order to join the Brotherhood,
and she tells him to read it aloud to her. He begins at the beginning, with the chapter titled “Ignorance Is Strength.”
Goldstein explains that human society has been composed throughout recorded history of three groups: the High,
Middle, and Low. The High want to maintain power, the Middle want to usurp power from the High, and the Low,
when they are able to form aims beyond the drudgery of their daily lives, want to abolish the prevailing social
structure and form an equal society. The same struggle is therefore repeated throughout history: the Middle, claiming
to be fighting for justice and aided by the Low, overthrow the High as soon as the High falter; the Middle then take
the place of the High and force the Low to return to their former positions. When a new Middle forms, the struggle
begins again. Thinkers became aware of this pattern in the late nineteenth century, with some deciding that history
was cyclical and inequality necessary. Socialist Middle groups after 1900 began to abandon their former Utopianism
and the pretense of fighting for equality; Ingsoc, Neo-Bolshevism, and Obliteration of the Self openly aimed to
perpetuate inequality. Each group wanted to take the place of the High and remain there permanently. The main
impetus for the formulation of each group’s ideology was the fact that, with the spread of mechanization, social
equality had now become a real possibility—one they wanted to prevent at all costs. The utopian visions of the future
that once provided at least some inspiration for Middle groups in revolt died out when those visions became feasible,
and by the 1940s authoritarian ideology had become the norm.
Ingsoc and its rival theories emerged out of totalitarian thought after a decade of war and revolution, along with a
self-consciously power-hungry new ruling class intent on stamping out opposition. In this they were aided by the new
ability to not only subject their citizens to a constant stream of propaganda but keep them under constant
surveillance and cut them off from any other method of communication, thereby enforcing total obedience and total
uniformity of thought. The Party, whose ideology grew out of Socialism, also abolished private property under the
21
guise of collectivism, meaning that everything was now public property and therefore belonged to it. The Party’s next
challenge was to prevent both the development of a new Middle group and dissent within its own ranks, which the
Party achieved by continually influencing the consciousness of its members as well as the masses. Everything good
in Oceanic society is attributed to Big Brother, who represents the top of the social pyramid, above the Inner Party,
the Outer Party, and the proles. Membership in the Inner or Outer Party is not hereditary, although proles never
become Party members. Instead, proles who show signs of intellectual promise are eliminated. Unlike the hereditary
oligarchies of the past, the Party is concerned only with perpetuating its worldview, structure, and power. There is no
danger of the proletariat rebelling, because the Party ensures that they have no way of knowing the world could be
or ever was different. Since there is no longer any real need to advance militarily or commercially, there is no need
to educate the proletariat. Since the proles are regarded as having no intellect, there is no need to control their
opinions. Party members, however, live under constant surveillance by the Thought Police. Every aspect of a Party
member’s life and behavior is subject to scrutiny, and although there are no laws in Oceania, any hint of a failure to
conform to Party doctrine could lead to vaporization. Party members are supposed to have the correct emotions and
beliefs without having to think about it, and they are meant to turn the dissatisfaction they might otherwise find with
their lives outward in the form of hatred of enemies and love of Big Brother. They are trained in a mental discipline
that begins with crimestop, which encompasses the ability to stop oneself before fully forming a heretical thought
and the inability to understand or be interested in the heretical ideas of others. Then there is blackwhite, the ability to
not only believe but know with certainty that black is white—and to forget it was ever otherwise—if that is the version
of reality the Party chooses to present through its continual alteration of the past.
The Party alters the past for two reasons: to prevent its members from unfavorably comparing their present to the
past and to ensure the Party presents an appearance of total infallibility. History is therefore rewritten and records
“rectified” to show that the Party is always right and never changes doctrines, enemies, or allies. The central tenet of
Ingsoc is that the past can be altered because it has no objective reality; it exists only in records and memories. The
training of Party members’ memories to agree with the records is therefore the most important aspect of the
alteration process. The ability to rearrange one’s memories in this way and then forget that one has done so is
known as doublethink and comprises the very essence of Ingsoc. Doublethink is what the Party employs when it
knowingly practices deception while at the same time acting with what appears to be total honesty. It is also what
has allowed the Party to arrest history and attain a seemingly permanent position of power. All past oligarchies fell
either due to the ruling class’s unconscious weakness or conscious making of concessions. Doublethink, by contrast,
allows the Party to be conscious of and learn from its past mistakes while at the same time believing itself to be
infallible. It is the highest-ranking members of the Party who display the greatest talent for doublethink and the truest
enthusiasm for the war. In other words, the most intelligent people are the least sane, the most knowledgeable are
the most ignorant, and the most cynical are the most fanatical. Everything about the Party is contradictory on
principle, in particular its rejection of all the original tenets of the Socialist movement in the name of Socialism. The
four Ministries also serve as examples of these deliberate contradictions: the Ministry of Peace deals with war, Truth
with lies, Love with torture, and Plenty with starvation. By basing the entirety of society on contradictions, the Party
has established “controlled insanity” as the prevailing mental state. In so doing, it has apparently succeeded in
permanently preventing the advent of social equality.
The one question that remains, Goldstein says, is the question of why the Party wants to prevent social equality.
Just as Winston reaches a passage that seems to be about to explain the Party’s true, original motive for seizing
power and establishing the Thought Police, the endless war, and the practice of doublethink, Winston realizes that
Julia has fallen asleep. He stops reading and lies down beside her, thinking to himself that after what he has read,
he understands how the Party operates but not why. Nevertheless, the book has reassured him that he is not insane
and that objective truth really exists. He falls asleep feeling safe and confident, murmuring, “Sanity is not statistical.”
22
Summary
Winston wakes up with the feeling that he has slept for a long time, but the clock says otherwise. Julia notes that it
has gotten colder and wants to make coffee, but the stove has, strangely, run out of oil. The two of them get dressed
and look out the window at the singing prole woman as she hangs up a seemingly endless series of diapers. For the
first time Winston realizes that the woman is beautiful, though her sturdy, coarsened body shows the effects of years
of hard work and childbearing. With his arm around Julia’s soft waist, Winston reflects on the fact that the two of
them can never have a child; they can only pass on their ideas. In contrast, the prole woman has no ideas to pass
on, but she continues to sing after having spent a lifetime raising children and doing domestic work. Winston feels a
sense of reverence toward her. Gazing at the sky, he thinks how strange it is that the sky is the same for people all
over the world and that the majority of the world’s people are the same in spite of the ignorance, hatred, and lies that
separate them. One day, Winston believes, these masses will rise up and create a world of equality and sanity.
Though he still hasn’t read all of the book, he feels certain Goldstein’s final message is that hope lies with the proles.
Winston compares the proles to birds who will stay alive to pass on their undefeatable vitality from generation to
generation, a vitality the Party lacks. He asks Julia if she remembers the thrush that sang to them, and Julia replies
that the thrush wasn’t singing to them or even to itself; it was simply singing, just as the proles do. The future
belongs to them, Winston believes, and though he and Julia will never see it, they can share in it by passing on the
knowledge that two plus two is four.
Winston says, “We are the dead.” Julia repeats the phrase, and then a third, “iron” voice repeats it as well. Terrified,
Winston and Julia leap apart. The voice commands them not to move, and neither thinks of disobeying. The picture
of St. Clement’s Dane crashes to the floor, exposing a telescreen, which is where the voice comes from. Winston
hears the tramping of boots and a cry of pain from the courtyard. Julia says to Winston that they may as well say
goodbye. The voice from the telescreen echoes her before a different, familiar voice recites a line from the rhyme Mr.
Charrington taught Winston: “Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head!”
The room then fills with men in black uniforms. All Winston can do is try to stay still so that the men won’t hit him with
their truncheons. One of the men smashes the glass paperweight, and Winston thinks how small the piece of coral
always really was. Another man kicks him, and yet another punches Julia. Still not daring to move, Winston watches
her writhe on the floor, feeling her pain and her struggle to breathe until two of the men pick her up and carry her
away. Then Mr. Charrington comes into the room and, his former cockney accent gone, commands one of the men
to pick up the broken pieces of the paperweight. Winston suddenly realizes it was Mr. Charrington’s voice he heard
on the telescreen. Though he is still recognizable, Mr. Charrington’s appearance has changed entirely: he is much
younger than he seemed and wears a cold expression. He is, in effect, a completely different person from the man
he once appeared to be, and Winston realizes that the proprietor of the junk shop is actually a member of the
Thought Police.

Summary
23
Winston sits on a bench in a bright white, windowless cell that he thinks must be in the Ministry of Love. The only
other things in the cell are a door, a lavatory pan, and four telescreens. His stomach aches with hunger; though he
isn’t sure how many hours ago he was arrested, he has not been fed since. He sits as still as possible before giving
in to the temptation to fish for breadcrumbs in the pocket of his overalls, at which point a voice from the telescreen
yells for him to keep his hands out of his pockets. Keeping still again, Winston remembers the first place he was
brought after his arrest, an ordinary prison cell that resembled his current one except that it was dirty, noisy, and
crowded with ten to fifteen people at a time, including both Party members and proles. While the Party prisoners
looked terrified and said nothing, the prole prisoners seemed not to care about their situation, fighting with or trying to
bribe the guards and yelling at the telescreens. Most of the proles expected to be sent to forced-labor camps where
violent common criminals would form a privileged class and political prisoners would do the dirty work. At one point,
the guards hauled in a huge, kicking, yelling woman of about sixty and dumped her on top of Winston. The woman
slid off Winston’s lap, apologizing, then vomited on the floor. She seemed to like Winston and drew him nearer.
When she found out his last name was Smith, she exclaimed that that was her last name too and that she could be
his mother. Winston thought to himself that this was actually possible, considering how years in a forced-labor camp
might change a person. No one else spoke to Winston, and the other Party prisoners seemed terrified of speaking at
all, though Winston did overhear two women Party members whispering about something called “room one-oh-one.”
The pain in Winston’s stomach brings him back to the present. When the pain grows worse, all he can think about is
his hunger, but when it recedes, he is seized by panic at the thought of the torture he will be made to endure. He
knows that he loves Julia and won’t betray her, but he doesn’t feel love for her and is unable to concentrate on
thinking about her. Instead he thinks of O’Brien and hopes the Brotherhood will send him a razor blade, although he
isn’t sure he would use it if they did. Winston knows the lights will never be turned off in this cell and realizes that this
is the “place where there is no darkness” from his dreams.
A group of guards brings in a new prisoner: Winston’s old coworker Ampleforth, the poet. Ampleforth is shoeless,
unshaven, and troubled-looking. He only notices he isn’t alone in the cell when Winston says his name. Ampleforth
explains that he has also been accused of thoughtcrime—the “one offense”—and he thinks it may be due to the fact
that he once left the word “God” in a poem by Rudyard Kipling. The two men talk for a few minutes until a voice from
the telescreen tells them to stop. After a while the guards return and send Ampleforth to “Room 101.” Alone again,
Winston thinks repetitively of the pain in his stomach, the piece of bread he longs to eat, the torture in his future,
O’Brien, Julia, and the razor blade. These thoughts are interrupted by the return of the guards, who bring a
miserable-looking Parsons into the cell. Winston is shocked to see him. Parsons believes he will receive a fair
hearing and hopes to be sent to a forced-labor camp rather than shot. He does, however, fully admit to being guilty
of thoughtcrime and is unable to imagine the Party would arrest an innocent person. He explains that he was
denounced by his own daughter, who heard him repeating “Down with Big Brother!” in his sleep. Parsons is proud of
his daughter and plans to thank the Party for saving him from his crimes. He is removed some time later, and other
prisoners continue to come and go from the cell. Eventually there are six prisoners, including a man who resembles
a large rodent. Then an emaciated man with a skull-like face and a look of hatred in his eyes is brought in. Winston
realizes with horror that this prisoner is starving to death. The rodent-like man offers the starving prisoner a piece of
bread from his overalls but is immediately stopped by a shout from the telescreen. The guards return, and one
knocks the rodent-like man across the room with a blow to the mouth. The next time the guards enter, they take the
starving man to Room 101. The prisoner begs not to be taken there, asking the guards to send him to a labor camp,
kill him, or even kill his family instead. He offers to denounce anyone they want and accuses the man who offered
him the bread of being the real traitor, then holds on to the leg of the bench with all his strength. The guards are only
able to break his grip and silence his howls by breaking his fingers. The starving man is then led away.
24
Hungry, thirsty, aching, and dizzy, Winston is left alone for a long time. He tells himself he would double his own pain
in order to save Julia, but it is a thought without any feeling behind it: all he can feel in this cell is pain and the
knowledge of more pain to come. He wonders if it will even be possible to wish for his own pain to increase when he
is made to suffer it. Then Winston hears the guards returning and O’Brien comes into the room. Winston is shocked
to see that the Party has “got him” too, but O’Brien replies in an ironic tone that the Party got him a long time ago. A
guard holding a truncheon steps into the cell from behind O’Brien, who tells Winston not to pretend he didn’t always
know, deep down, that O’Brien was loyal to the Party. Winston admits to himself that O’Brien is right. The guard
deals a crippling blow to Winston’s elbow with the truncheon, and Winston falls to his knees in agony. He realizes
now that it is impossible to be a hero in the face of physical pain, which he believes is the worst thing in the world.

Summary
Winston regains consciousness to find himself strapped to some kind of cot, with O’Brien and a man holding a
syringe staring down at him. Though his memories of his time so far at the Ministry of Love are broken by bouts of
unconsciousness, he remembers having gone through a nightmarish period of routine brutal beatings, which he
eventually realized all prisoners are subjected to as a matter of course, just as all prisoners are forced to confess to
a long list of crimes. Sometimes he fought against confessing; sometimes he begged for mercy before the beating
even began. After a while the beatings stopped, and Winston was interrogated not by armed guards but by Party
intellectuals who questioned him for hours at a time. Though these interrogators made sure he was constantly
uncomfortable and in pain, their main method of breaking him down was the relentless questioning itself: they
accused him of lying and contradicting himself, screamed at him, threatened to have him beaten again, then called
him “comrade” and asked him to repent in the name of Ingsoc and Big Brother. These interrogations broke Winston
down even more than the beatings had, reducing him to tears until he confessed to every crime he was falsely
accused of and implicated almost everyone he had ever known. Since the Party recognizes no distinction between
thought and action, Winston reasoned that in a way these confessions were all true. Winston also has several
disconnected, dreamlike memories: He was diving into a pair of glowing eyes. He was sitting in a chair surrounded
by dials beside a man in a white coat when guards arrived to take him to Room 101. In another memory he traveled
down a huge, light-filled corridor along with Julia, Mr. Charrington, O’Brien, and all the employees of the Ministry of
Love while joyfully confessing his crimes, feeling forgiven and as though he had miraculously avoided something
terrible. All through this time, Winston had the feeling that O’Brien was the one directing every aspect of his
interrogation. At one point, the same voice that had said “we shall meet in the place where there is no darkness” told
Winston that he had watched over him for seven years and would now save him and make him “perfect.”
Now, strapped down flat on his back, Winston looks up at O’Brien’s face. When O’Brien moves his hand, Winston is
met with a wave of wrenching pain from a machine beside the cot. O’Brien correctly states that Winston’s greatest
fear at that moment is that his back will break. He then turns a dial that stops the pain. He warns Winston that he can
inflict as much pain on him as he likes at any time and that he won’t hesitate to do so if Winston lies to him or fails to
respond intelligently. Winston, O’Brien says, is suffering from mental derangement and a defective memory, but his
condition can be cured. According to O’Brien, Winston’s memory of Oceania’s having once been at war with Eurasia
rather than Eastasia is just one example of his illness; his “hallucination” of the photograph proving Jones, Aaronson,
and Rutherford’s innocence is another. O’Brien then produces the photograph, causing Winston to desperately
reach for it, but O’Brien drops it down a memory hole, asserting that the photograph does not exist and never did.
25
Winston argues that it exists in memory, but O’Brien replies that he does not remember it. Winston thinks with
despair that O’Brien might be telling the truth. O’Brien then asks him if he believes the past exists. Winston replies
that it exists in records and memories, but O’Brien says the Party controls all records and all memories and therefore
controls the past as well. There is, he says, no such thing as external reality: reality exists only in the collective mind
of the Party, and Winston must submit to the Party in order to see things as they really are. O’Brien then holds up
four fingers and asks Winston how many fingers there are if the Party says there are five. Winston replies that there
are still only four. O’Brien turns the dial and increases Winston’s pain every time he replies that he sees four fingers.
Eventually Winston says he sees five, but O’Brien can tell he is lying and asks him if he really wants to see five
instead of four. Winston says that he does. This time the pain is so great that he sees more fingers than he can
count and forgets why he is supposed to count them. When O’Brien asks him how many fingers he sees, Winston
doesn’t know. O’Brien says that this is an improvement, and Winston is given an injection that fills him with a feeling
of bliss. Even though he knows O’Brien is torturing him and will eventually have him executed, Winston feels an
intense love for his torturer in this moment.
With a look of insane enthusiasm, O’Brien tells Winston that the Party has brought him to the Ministry of Love not to
make him confess or to punish him but to cure him of his insanity. He explains that the Party has done something the
Medieval Inquisition and the Russian Communists failed to do: it has eliminated martyrdom by ensuring that every
prisoner brought to the Ministry of Love is truly converted before being executed. This is what happened to Jones,
Aaronson, and Rutherford, who came to love Big Brother before they were shot. Winston despairs as he realizes
that O’Brien, who is his intellectual superior, believes everything he is saying, meaning that in spite of how maniacal
O’Brien looks, it must be true that Winston is the one who is insane. What the Party does to Winston in the Ministry
of Love, O’Brien stresses, will be forever—he will not save himself, and he will never recover. Then two pads are
fixed to Winston’s temples, and O’Brien tells the man in the white coat standing by to turn the dial to three thousand.
Winston is met with a blinding flash of light and the sensation of having been knocked down. Afterward, feeling that
there is an empty space in his brain for O’Brien to fill, he accepts without argument what O’Brien tells him: that
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, that the photograph of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford wasn’t real,
and that O’Brien is holding up five fingers, not four. For an instant he really does see five fingers. O’Brien tells
Winston that he is right to think O’Brien is someone he can talk to, as he enjoys their conversations and even thinks
he and Winston are similar—except that Winston is insane. He invites Winston to ask a few questions. Winston asks
what has been done to Julia, and O’Brien tells him that Julia betrayed him and converted immediately. When
Winston asks if Big Brother exists in the same way that he himself exists, O’Brien replies that Winston does not
exist. Winston is too disheartened to argue. Instead, he asks if the Brotherhood exists, but O’Brien replies that
Winston will never learn the answer to that question. O’Brien appears to anticipate Winston’s next question and find
it amusing: Winston asks what is in Room 101. O’Brien says that Winston already knows the answer. After another
injection, Winston loses consciousness.

Summary
Winston’s “sessions” with O’Brien continue, though he is no longer strapped down so tightly. He is less afraid of the
dial now that he knows O’Brien usually only turns it when Winston shows stupidity. Today, O’Brien tells Winston that
his “reintegration” in the Ministry of Love has three phases—learning, understanding, and acceptance—and that it is
time for him to enter the second phase. He reveals that he himself is one of the authors of the book supposedly
26
written by Goldstein and tells Winston that while the book’s description of the Party’s methods is accurate, its
description of a gradual spread of free thinking followed by a proletarian rebellion is nonsense—the Party will remain
in power forever. O’Brien acknowledges that Winston understands how the Party maintains power and asks him why
he thinks the Party clings to that power. Winston, feeling weary at the sight of the unhinged enthusiasm in O’Brien’s
eyes, replies that the Party believes it is ruling over Oceania for the good of the masses, who are unfit to govern
themselves and are being given happiness in exchange for freedom. O’Brien sends Winston a jolt of pain with the
dial and tells him that was a stupid thing to say. He explains that the Party cares nothing for the good of the masses
and seeks power for its own sake. Unlike past oligarchies like the Russian Communists or the Nazis, the Party does
not bother to pretend to itself that its dictatorial rule is a means to an end. Rather, the Party regards power,
persecution, and torture as ends in themselves. Individuals can achieve power only by completely merging
themselves with the immortal Party. God is power, O’Brien says, and power is power over other human beings,
particularly their minds; the Party has already achieved absolute power over matter. Winston protests that it is
impossible to control external reality, but O’Brien replies that reality exists only within the human mind. O’Brien even
claims that he could float into the air if he chose, because the Party can rewrite the laws of nature however it sees fit.
The real struggle is to maintain power over human minds, and the way to assert power over human beings is to
make them suffer. The world the Party is creating is the opposite of the utopias people dreamed of in the past: it is a
world based on hatred, fear, and pain in which the only love left will be love of Big Brother, and the only pleasure will
be the pleasure of triumphing over an enemy. “If you want a picture of the future,” O’Brien says, “imagine a boot
stamping on a human face—forever.” The Party intends for there to always be “heretics” like Winston so that it can
continually triumph over them with ever-increasing brutality. O’Brien tells Winston that he will eventually come not
only to understand this world but to welcome it. Winston is horrified. Although he feels helpless against O’Brien, he
argues that the world the Party envisions is impossible, that it lacks the vitality to survive, and that life will defeat it.
O’Brien responds that the Party is immortal, that it controls every aspect of life and creates human nature. The
proles, O’Brien says, don’t count—humanity belongs only to the Party. Yet Winston persists in his belief that the
proles will one day overthrow the Party and that a universal principle he calls the “spirit of Man” will triumph. O’Brien
asks Winston if he considers himself to be morally superior to the Party. When Winston says he does, O’Brien plays
a recording of Winston agreeing to perform a long list of immoral acts on behalf of the Brotherhood. Then, calling
Winston the “last man” and the “guardian of the human spirit,” O’Brien orders him to stand up, take off his clothes,
and look in a mirror on the other side of the room. When he sees himself in the mirror, Winston is frightened: he has
become hunched, battered-looking, partially bald, and horribly emaciated. His body is scarred and dirty, his face
hardly recognizable, and his varicose ulcer inflamed. O’Brien pulls out a clump of Winston’s hair and even one of the
few teeth he has left. The state Winston is in, O’Brien says, is the state of the humanity in which Winston says he
believes. Winston begins to weep. O’Brien tells him that just as he brought this state upon himself, so too can he
escape it whenever he chooses. When O’Brien asks him if there is anything he hasn’t been made to suffer during his
torture, Winston says he has not betrayed Julia. O’Brien agrees, understanding that Winston means he has not
stopped loving Julia even though he has confessed to every aspect of their relationship. Winston then asks when he
can expect to be shot. O’Brien tells him not to give up hope: although Winston is a “difficult case,” he will eventually
be cured and shot.

5 Summary
Winston slowly recovers his physical strength in a new, slightly more comfortable cell. He is no longer beaten or
27
interrogated, and he is given better food, clean clothes, water to wash with, medicine for his ulcer, a set of dentures,
and even cigarettes. At first he spends almost all of his time asleep, dreaming “happy dreams” of peacefully talking
with his mother, Julia, or O’Brien. He is satisfied with being alone and thinks mostly about his dreams, feeling that
without the constant threat of pain, he has “lost the power of intellectual effort.” Eventually he begins to sleep less
and to build his strength by exercising. Though he is still very weak, he believes his body and even his face may be
getting back to normal. He thinks to himself that it was absurd of him to ever have tried to fight the power of the
Party, who had watched his every move for seven years before his arrest. Sanity is statistical, he thinks, and the
Party is both immortal and in the right. Taking up a slate and a pencil that have been left for him, Winston writes
“FREEDOM IS SLAVERY,” “TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE,” and “GOD IS POWER.” Accepting and surrendering to
Party doctrine, he now regards his memories of the war with Eurasia and the photograph of Jones, Aaronson, and
Rutherford as false memories. But when he tries to tell himself that because the Party dictates the laws of nature,
O’Brien could float off the floor if he wanted to, Winston runs up against his old belief that this is impossible and
could only occur as a hallucination, not as a real event. Though he stops himself immediately, telling himself that
there is no such thing as the “real” world and that reality is only in the mind, Winston knows he never should have
had the thought at all. He decides to train himself in crimestop by thinking up illogical statements the Party could
make and forcing himself to believe in them, exerting great mental effort to deliberately not understand the
arguments that would prove them false.
At the same time, Winston wonders when the Party will shoot him. He begins to imagine he is walking down the
sunny passage from his earlier dreams and then through the Golden Country, feeling joyful, healthy, and finally free
from fear, pain, and doubt as he waits to be shot. Suddenly, though, he returns to reality as he realizes that he has
just called Julia’s name. In that moment he felt that he loved her more than ever and that she needed his help.
Winston is horrified at what he has done, realizing that his cry has served as an involuntary confession of the fact
that although he has surrendered to the Party intellectually, in his heart he still hates them. He resolves that from
now on he will keep his surface thoughts and feelings entirely orthodox, but he will keep his hatred locked away,
concealed even from himself, until the moment before he is shot, when he will defy the Party by dying an
unrepentant heretic. “To die hating them, that was freedom,” he decides. Meditating on the degradation he will have
to inflict on himself in order to achieve this almost total orthodoxy, Winston asks himself how he really feels about
Big Brother. He is interrupted by the arrival of O’Brien and a group of guards. Clutching him by the shoulders and
looking at him closely, O’Brien tells Winston that he was stupid to think he could deceive O’Brien; he has progressed
intellectually but not emotionally. O’Brien asks Winston what his true feelings are toward Big Brother, and Winston
replies that he hates him. O’Brien says that Winston must now take the last step in his “recovery”: he must love Big
Brother. Winston is sent to Room 101.
In Room 101, deep underground at the very bottom of the Ministry of Love, Winston is strapped to a chair, unable to
move even his head. O’Brien reminds him that he already knows—that everyone knows—what is in Room 101: the
worst thing in the world, which varies from person to person according to their individual fears. A guard brings in a
cage with a mask-like attachment on one side. Inside are two rats. For Winston, rats are the worst thing in the world.
O’Brien even knows about Winston’s recurring nightmare about the wall of darkness, and he tells him that rats were
the horrible thing behind the wall that Winston never wanted to name. Winston cries out that O’Brien doesn’t have to
do this to him, but O’Brien says that Winston must face something unendurable in order to do “what is required” of
him. What that requirement is O’Brien refuses to say. Winston feels utterly alone as O’Brien brings the cage closer
and closer to his face, describing all the while how rats attack people in the poor quarters of London and how, when
the mask is fitted over his head, the starving rats in the cage will eat Winston’s face. After nearly blacking out from
panic, Winston realizes that he can save himself by putting another person’s body between himself and the rats.
When the mask touches his face, Winston suddenly understands that the only person to whom he can transfer his
28
punishment is Julia. He begs O’Brien to “Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia!” In the next instant Winston feels that he is
falling through space, away from the rats, and he hears a click as O’Brien shuts the door of the cage.

Summary
Winston sits in the corner that has become his usual seat at the Chestnut Tree Café, drinking gin and occasionally
glancing up at a poster of Big Brother as he waits for the telescreen to broadcast a bulletin from the Ministry of
Peace. Oceania is now and supposedly has always been at war with Eurasia, and for the first time in history,
Oceania’s own territory is threatened as the Eurasian army approaches Central Africa. Winston feels momentarily
excited as he thinks about the war but stops thinking about it a second later, having lately lost his ability to focus.
Though he continues to drink it, Winston hates the smell of the gin. It reminds him of the rats, which he avoids
naming or visualizing in his thoughts. Since his release, Winston has gained weight, and his skin has become
coarse and ruddy. The staff of the café know him, and a waiter now brings him more gin, a copy of The Times, and a
chessboard as usual. After listening to an announcement that the Ministry of Plenty has overfulfilled the bootlaces
quota laid out in the Party’s Tenth Three-Year Plan, Winston turns to the chess problem in the newspaper. Looking
up at the picture of Big Brother, he thinks to himself that in chess, “white always mates” and black never wins. To
Winston this represents the “eternal, unvarying triumph of Good over Evil.” The telescreen then announces that
important news will soon be broadcast. Winston has been thinking about the war off and on all day and expects the
news to be bad. He picks up a white knight, visualizes the African front, and imagines a mysterious third army
gaining control of Africa and cutting Oceania in two, thereby potentially bringing about the defeat of the Party—a
thought that causes Winston a momentary spasm of conflicting emotions.
When these feelings pass, he traces “2 + 2 = 5” in the dust on the table, reflecting on the fact that he and Julia were
wrong about the Party not being able to get inside them; O’Brien was right when he said what happened in the
Ministry of Love would be forever. Something has died in Winston. Since his release, he has only met with Julia
once, on a freezing day when he saw her in the park. Knowing that the Party no longer takes any interest in what he
does, he followed her, though she appeared reluctant to speak with him. She seemed to have changed in some
fundamental way. Julia had no reaction when Winston put his arm around her waist, and Winston felt nothing but
horror when he thought of having sex with Julia. The change in her, he realized, was that her waist had grown thick
and stiff and reminded him of a corpse he had once dragged from the rubble after a rocket bomb explosion. When
Julia looked at him, it was with contempt. They confessed that they had betrayed each other and that when they
begged for their punishments to be transferred, they meant it, caring only about themselves. This betrayal
irreparably altered their feelings for each other. Though they agreed to meet again, Winston was overwhelmed by a
desire to return to the Chestnut Tree Café as he followed Julia out of the park. Eventually he gave up on trying to
keep up with her.
Winston is jerked out of these memories by an oddly jeering note that comes into the music on the telescreen, and
his eyes fill with tears as he drinks another glass of gin. He now spends all day almost every day drinking gin in the
café, though he sometimes goes to his new job at the Ministry of Truth, where he works on a pointless sub-
committee charged with drafting a report related to the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak dictionary. As he fiddles
with the chess set, Winston finds himself remembering a rare happy day of his childhood when he played snakes
and ladders with his mother and sister. He immediately dismisses this as one of the false memories that still trouble
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him from time to time. Then there is a trumpet call from the telescreen, and a voice announces Oceania’s victory
over Eurasia. As he looks worshipfully up at the picture of Big Brother, Winston feels that the last of the changes
begun in him by his experience in the Ministry of Love has now occurred. He imagines being back in the Ministry of
Love, blissfully confessing, being forgiven, and being shot. His struggle finally over, Winston is filled with love for Big
Brother.
Themes
Themes
MIND CONTROL
Throughout 1984, George Orwell examines how in dystopian societies those in power seek to manipulate its citizens
through mind control tactics. Winston illustrates how members of the superstate of Oceania live in constant dread of
being found guilty of “thoughtcrime”—a term for harboring any thoughts considered criminal by powerful members of
the Party, the faction ruling over Oceania. He even writes in his diary that “Thoughtcrime does not entail death:
thoughtcrime IS death.” Because of the overpowering presence of telescreens, he must also constantly monitor his
emotional awareness, his conscious beliefs in opposition to the Party’s values, and “anything that carried with it the
suggestion of abnormality” that could be detected by the Party’s Thought Police.
Moreover, Winston becomes dissociated from reality due to his inability to reconcile the contradictions between his
memories and the present. This metaphysical conflict between emotional and physical existence, combined with his
lapsed perception of time, causes Winston to question what these repressed memories mean. For example, after
dreaming about his mother, Winston is aware “that he must have deliberately pushed [the memory] out of his
consciousness over many years.” He reflects upon the power that this self-awareness holds in a society that rejects
the existence of authentic human emotion:
But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make? They
could not alter your feelings: for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to.
They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner
heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.
This objective to “stay human” is central to Winston’s evolution as a character, and while he is imprisoned the forces
of mind control overpower him. As Winston sinks further into a dissociative state, O’Brien tells Winston his memories
are defective and simply reveal his evident insanity. Accordingly, after he is released back into the world, Winston
explains how “from now onwards he must not only think right; he must feel right, dream right.” Yet he is aware of his
hatred—which he portrays as “a ball of matter which [is] a part of himself and yet unconnected with the rest of him”—
towards the ideology he is forced to submit to.
CONFORMITY VS. INDIVIDUALITY

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The Party’s goal is to convince members of society that individualism is dangerous. Thus the Party intends to
methodically enforce social conformity through fear-mongering, surveillance and censorship laws, and emotional
manipulation. Early on in the novel, when Winston describes the events of Hate Week, he captures the pervasive
herd mentality among citizens, which results from the Party’s efforts to eradicate any sense of identity from each
human. This dissolution of identity ostensibly enables the Party to suppress the dissemination of ideas that could
lead to rebellion. Accordingly, members are expected to abstain from pleasure under the belief that “marriage and
the care of a family [are] incompatible with a twenty-four-hour-a-day devotion to duty.” Members are to solely
concern themselves with the Party’s principles. Consequently, Winston notes how “nothing was your own except the
few cubic centimeters inside your skull” due to the Party’s process of eliminating individuality.
In detailing the relationship between Winston and Julia, Orwell illustrates the power of ideas as a source of individual
freedom and expression, as well as the consequent eradication of that power. Initially, Julia succeeds in appearing
to conform to social norms, advising Winston to “always yell with the crowd,” because “it’s the only way to be safe.”
Winston, however, does contemplate how her naiveté leads to a degree of indifference; after all, she has no
memories of the former world to hold on to. Ultimately, neither Winston nor Julia successfully rebels against the
system, and the Party’s conformist ideology reigns supreme. Nevertheless, their journeys show that individuality can
never be completely eradicated.
HUMANITY AS A DESTRUCTIVE FORCE

Orwell examines the process by which the ruling powers of the Party exploit human instincts to commit violent acts—
described by Winston as “a hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness”—by removing all other values and sources
of pleasure. Reflecting upon his mother’s death, Winston explains that the only emotions that matter are “fear,
hatred, and pain." As O’Brien tells Winston near the end of the book, the only principle that truly matters in Oceania
is power. There is no other value in human nature that will supercede it:
We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining that there is something called human nature
which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are
infinitely malleable. Or perhaps you have returned to your old idea that the proletarians or the slaves will
arise and overthrow us. Put it out of your mind. They are helpless, like the animals. Humanity is the
Party. The others are outside—irrelevant.
In denying that human nature exists on its own, O’Brien suggests that essential human values—such as family, love,
and compassion—are arbitrary and eradicable. In Oceania, this dehumanization process begins in childhood, during
which phase children are “systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their
deviations,” thereby preventing non-Party values from having any influence. Orwell thus emphasizes the ethical
implications of seeking power at all costs. In capitalizing upon these destructive human instincts, the Party maintains
its control over the public.
KNOWLEDGE VS. IGNORANCE

Winston continually struggles to hold onto his own conceptions of truth in the face of the Party’s aggressive efforts to
erase and rewrite history. Their concerted efforts to absolve any reliance on knowledge and intelligence allows the
Party to coerce the citizens of Oceania to capitulate to Party values and thus believe the Party’s version of the truth.
Internally, Winston’s narrative is driven by his hypervigilance in confronting these methods of deception and
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reclaiming both personal and objective truths. Despite his efforts, Winston is ultimately aware of his powerlessness
in this endeavor.
Winston’s frustration with accepting the obsolescence of truth, history, and knowledge is illustrated in the following
passage:
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential
command… And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and
the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists; its laws do not
change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s centre.
Winston’s growing commitment to defending the truth ultimately leads him to pursue rebellion, which then leads to
his imprisonment. During Winston’s detainment, O’Brien aims to make Winston believe that “whatever the Party
holds to be the truth, is truth,” and instructs him to “humble [him]self” in “an act of self destruction” in order cure his
supposed insanity and absorb the Party’s versions of the truth.
This cycle—in which the Party disguises lies as truth and erases history to justify political and ethical decisions made
in the present—is referred to as “reality control.” Winston’s job at the Ministry of Truth ensures that this cycle
continues. While engaging in his daily tasks, he communicates that history is “a palimpsest, scraped clean and
reinscribed.” This process of reality control thus further provides the ruling members of the Party with ammunition to
assert their power over the powerless. Even Winston acknowledges that “the only evidence” of past events exists
“inside [his] own mind,” methodically erased for the purpose of representing the Party and Big Brother as eternal and
omnipotent forces in history. In order to obstruct the quest for absolute truth, the Party enforces blind faith and “a
loyal willingness” to believe in unreliable truths among citizens as a means of control. In this way, Orwell suggests
that the Party’s dangerous effectiveness in achieving this power arises out of the crucial conflict between ignorance
and knowledge.
Characters
Characters: List of Characters

WINSTON SMITH
Winston Smith is the pensive, fatalistic, and justifiably paranoid protagonist of George Orwell’s novel 1984. He is a
member of the Outer Party and works in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth. His job is to “rectify”
historical records to align with the current rhetoric of the party. However, despite working for the Party, Winston
secretly resents it. As the novel progresses, Winston becomes increasingly rebellious, coming to trust his own
intellect over Party doctrine. He believes that the proles—short for proletariat—hold the key to liberating society and
that his job is to spread dissent in the hope that they will one day revolt. (Read extended character analysis of
Winston Smith.)
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JULIA
Julia is a twenty-six year old Outer Party member who works in the Fiction Department of the Ministry of Truth. She
has dark hair and pale skin. Julia is a member of the Junior Anti-Sex League and prominently wears the red
membership sash, much to Winston’s disgust. She also participates passionately in the Two Minutes Hate. After she
hands Winston a note saying she loves him, they become illicit lovers. Beneath the veneer of Party loyalty, Julia is
secretly rebellious. She has conducted a large number of sexual affairs and frequently buys black-market goods.
(Read extended character analysis of Julia.)
O’BRIEN
O’Brien is an Inner Party Member whom Winston comes to greatly admire. He is described as a brutally ugly man
with an imposing presence. Winston believes that O’Brien may also harbor anti-Party sentiments and becomes
fixated on the idea that O’Brien may be a member of the Brotherhood. Winston is proved correct when a few months
after his affair with Julia begins, O’Brien approaches and invites him to join the Brotherhood. However, after Winston
and Julia are arrested, O’Brien reveals that he was always a Party loyalist. O’Brien takes the lead during Winston’s
rehabilitation, “saving” him and making him into the “perfect” Party member. (Read extended character analysis of
O'Brien.)
BIG BROTHER
Big Brother is the leader and figurehead of the Party. His visage is printed on posters and coins, and he is
broadcasted on the telescreen regularly. Loyalty to Big Brother and to the Party are considered one and the same.
The slogan “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU” conveys the sense that Big Brother—and by extension, the Party
—is omniscient. Every move a Party member makes is carefully monitored. However, rather than being presented
as a menacing surveiler, the name “Big Brother” is meant to convey a sense of safety and camaraderie. The
message suggests that Big Brother watches over and protects Oceania. So, the people of Oceania should love and
respect Big Brother in return. Yet for a thoughtcriminal like Winston, Big Brother becomes a more menacing
presence. Instead of a beloved authority figure, Big Brother’s perceived omniscience becomes a source of anxiety.
The question of whether or not Big Brother truly exists remains unanswered. O’Brien claims Big Brother will never
die. This implies that even if Big Brother is a real person, he essentially represents a bigger concept: Big Brother is
the embodiment of the Party’s ideals. It is easier for the Party to focus people’s affections on an individual as
opposed to a faceless organization. Ironically, the Party, which relies on the suppression of humanity, appeals to the
human instinct to bond with and admire others. Just as they direct the negative emotions of Party members against
Goldstein, they direct the positive ones towards Big Brother.
EMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN
The Party claims Emmanuel Goldstein was a high-ranking Party official during the revolution who betrayed them and
formed the Brotherhood, a radical political sect opposed to the Party. He allegedly wrote a book called The Theory
and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, which is distributed to Brotherhood members. The book explains the
sociopolitical theories used by the Party to suppress the population of Oceania and singles out the proles as
humanity’s best hope. However, during Winston’s torture, O’Brien claims that he and several other Inner Party
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members wrote the book themselves. O’Brien refuses to confirm whether Goldstein truly exists at all.
Emmanuel Goldstein can be read in two ways. First, he is a real person who heads a secret underground resistance.
As a former Party leader, he understands the tactics the Party uses. This means Goldstein can disrupt Party activity
and convert Party members to the Brotherhood. His mere existence is a threat because it offers the hope of
revolution to those harboring anti-Party sentiments. As a result, the Party does everything in its power to promote a
negative response towards the Brotherhood. Rituals such as the Two Minutes Hate and the frequent arrests of
purported Brotherhood members serve to inspire fear in any prospective rebels.
By a different reading, Goldstein is a fabricated scapegoat. The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism
suggests that Oceania must constantly be at war in order for the Party to justify its oppressive policies and routine
supply shortages. Viewed as a lie made up by the Party, Goldstein serves the same purpose as the constant
warfare. With the constant threat of treachery from within the Party, the existence of the Thought Police becomes
justifiable. Furthermore, the Two Minutes Hate allows the Party to redirect negative sentiments away from itself and
towards Goldstein. The Party uses Goldstein as a fictional excuse for their surveillance activities. The wars provide
an external enemy, and Goldstein represents an internal threat that ensures people remain suspicious of one
another but loyal to the Party.
SYME
Syme works in the Ministry of Truth as a philologist. He is on the team of researchers responsible for compiling the
Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak dictionary. He enjoys the “destruction of words.” He believes that if people do not
have the words to express an idea or emotion, they cannot experience those ideas or emotions. Syme predicts that
some day, language will be so reduced that people will be unable to think “as we understand [thought] now.” Unlike
Winston, Syme does not view these predictions with dread. He is a “venomously orthodox” Party supporter. In his
mind, “Orthodoxy means not thinking.”
Winston finds Syme’s company pleasant because he is intelligent and provides interesting language insights.
However, Winston also believes that Syme is “too intelligent” and “sees too clearly” to remain in favor with the Party
for long. Winston’s predictions prove true when despite his apparent devotion to the party, Syme is vaporized. This
suggests the Party finds intelligence and clear-sightedness threatening. Though Syme devoutly follows the Party, his
analytical powers put him at odds with his own definition of Orthodoxy.
MR. CHARRINGTON
Mr. Charrington is the owner of the antique shop where Winston buys his illicit journal. He also rents out the room
above his shop to Winston and Julia so that they can conduct their affair. He endears himself to Winston by claiming
to share an interest in history and beauty. He is later revealed to be a member of the Thought Police.
MR. PARSONS
Parsons works at the Ministry of Truth. He lives in the same building as Winston, who sometimes helps repair things
for the Parsons family. Parsons is sweaty, unintelligent, and seemingly loyal to the Party. Winston regards him as
someone who will never get into trouble with the Party because he lacks the intelligence necessary for rebellion. To
his shock, Winston briefly shares a cell with Mr. Parsons at the Ministry of Love. Parsons was arrested after his
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daughter heard him mumbling “Down with Big Brother” in his sleep and reported him. Parsons is unable to
conceptualize the idea that he might be innocent, because that would mean that the Party made a mistake. Instead,
he intends to thank the Party for preventing him from committing further thoughtcrimes.
KATHARINE
Katharine is Winston’s Party-assigned wife. Winston describes her as “vulgar” and “stupid,” nicknaming her “the
human soundtrack” for her tendency to repeat Party slogans. Winston and Katharine lived together for fifteen
months, but they separated, because their marriage proved childless. Over the course of their marriage, Winston
developed a deep resentment towards women, coming to view them as cold, asexual, and dogmatically loyal to the
Party.
JONES, AARONSON, AND RUTHERFORD

Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford are former Party members who were publicly denounced as traitors. After their first
arrest, they confessed to a string of crimes, including murder and treason. They were then reinstated as Party
members, only to be arrested again. After their second arrest, they confessed to all of the original crimes, as well as
a number of new ones. Winston sees the three men sitting together in the Chestnut Tree Cafe after their first arrest
and subsequent release from the Ministry of Love. Over the telescreen, a song chimes, "Under the spreading
chestnut tree / I sold you and you sold me." The implication is that the three men sold each other out under torture at
the Ministry of Love, just as Winston and Julia do later on.
While working in the records department, Winston was asked to dispose of a photo of Jones, Aaronson, and
Rutherford at a Party function in New York. The photo was taken when Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford confessed
to being abroad, colluding with Oceania’s enemies. Winston views the photo as definitive proof that the Party
fabricates crimes and confessions. O’Brien produces a copy of the photo while Winston is being tortured, but he
encourages Winston to employ doublethink in order to deny its existence. After being released from the Ministry of
Love, Winston spends a lot of time at the cafe where he saw Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford.
ELDERLY PROLE MAN

The elderly prole man talks with Winston in a prole pub about the past. Winston follows him into the pub hoping to
learn what life was really like before the revolution. However, Winston is left disappointed by the conversation; he
believes the old man’s memory has gone bad. However, the old man actually provides insight into pre-Party life and
the proles' unchanging lives. The old man’s apparent inability to comprehend Winston’s questions suggests that, for
the proles, life is not much different under Party rule. They are still normal humans, capable of recalling anecdotal
stories about wearing top hats to weddings. There is no definitive split between pre- and post-Party life. For the old
man, and likely for most proles, “all wars” and all governments are essentially the same.
RED-ARMED PROLE WOMAN

The red-armed prole woman lives next to Mr. Charrington’s antique shop. She is constantly doing laundry and sings
to herself as she works. Winston comes to regard her as beautiful, despite her old age and haggard appearance. For
Winston, she represents the unconquerable spirit of the proles. Despite living a hard life full of poverty and manual
35
labor, she is still able to sing with joy.
AMPLEFORTH
Ampleforth is a poet who works in the Ministry of Truth. He helps revise classic works of literature into Party-
approved versions by removing unacceptable words and concepts. After Winston is arrested, he and Ampleforth
briefly share a cell. Ampleforth believes that he was arrested for not editing out the word “God” from a book of Kipling
poems. Winston notes that, despite the direness of their situation, Ampleforth still finds intellectual joy in ruminating
on poetry.
BUMSTEAD
Bumstead is an overweight man who briefly shares a cell with Winston in the Ministry of Love. When the starving,
skull-faced man is brought into the cell, Bumstead offers him a piece of bread that he has hidden in his overalls. In
response, the guards come in and brutally beat Bumstead. Bumstead represents the human impulse towards
empathy. Even though Bumstead knows that the circumstances are hopeless, he still offers the skull-faced man a
piece of bread.
THE SKULL-FACED MAN

The skull-faced man is a prisoner who briefly shares a cell with Winston and Bumstead in the Ministry of Love.
Winston is horrified by his emaciated appearance, and Bumstead offers the skull-faced man a piece of bread. When
the guards come to take the skull-faced man to Room 101, he attempts to redirect their attention to Bumstead by
accusing him of saying illicit things. The skull-faced man even offers to let the Party kill his family in front of him if it
means that he will be spared from Room 101. The skull-faced man foreshadows the horrors that lay ahead of
Winston. He is willing to betray anyone, even someone who has just shown him kindness, to avoid Room 101. In
contrast to Bumstead, who has not yet been tortured, the skull-faced man is incapable of empathy or kindness. The
Party has successfully eradicated his humanity.
Characters: Winston Smith

Winston Smith is the pensive, fatalistic, and justifiably paranoid protagonist of George Orwell’s novel 1984. He is a
member of the Outer Party and works in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth. His job is to “rectify”
historical records to align with the current rhetoric of the party. However, despite working for the Party, Winston
secretly resents it. As the novel progresses, Winston becomes increasingly rebellious, coming to trust his own
intellect over Party doctrine. He believes that the proles—short for proletariat—hold the key to liberating society and
that his job is to spread dissent in the hope that they will one day revolt.
Winston was born before the Party came into power. Unlike younger generations, he remembers the time before the
Party existed. However, he was too young during the revolution to remember explicit details and only has vague
impressions. These vague memories give him the intellectual motivation to rebel. His ability to conceive of a reality in
which the Party does not exist helps him discern the Party’s lies, such as their claim that they invented the
aeroplane. For Winston, rebellion is about asserting the truth of his own experiences. Though he cannot recall the
36
pre-Party world in explicit detail, he has a “feeling in his bones” that humans are not meant to live the way that the
Party forces them to.
WINSTON'S JOB
Winston is fascinated by the past. Because of his position at the Ministry of Truth, he has a connection to the past
that many Party members do not. More so than most others, Winston is privy to the fallibility of the Party and the
meaninglessness of documentation. However, it is not until he holds the definitive proof of the Party’s lies—the
picture of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford—that he truly begins to develop rebellious thoughts. At that moment, the
past ceases to be mutable for Winston. The physical proof of the Party’s lies gives him permission to trust his own
memory again.
WINSTON AND THE NOTEBOOK

Purchasing the notebook represents Winston’s first act of physical rebellion. Though he has committed
“thoughtcrimes” for years, it is the act of writing “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER” in his notebook that, in Winston’s
mind, truly seals his fate. From that moment on, Winston views himself as one of “the dead.” This change is freeing
for him. Since he knows he will inevitably be caught and killed, he takes risks that he otherwise may not have. Only
by abandoning his instinct for self-preservation is Winston able to reconnect with the forgotten past and his own
body.
WINSTON'S PAPERWEIGHT AND ULCER

Both the glass paperweight and Winston’s ulcer represent the ill effects of repressing of human nature. Winston’s
fascination with the paperweight speaks to his desire to connect with the past. Winston admires beauty. His
humanity has not been entirely snuffed out. He longs for the eras in which useless things could exist just because
they were beautiful. However, the harsh, ascetic world he lives in strives to suppress beauty, love, and aesthetic
appreciation. The paperweight provides a symbolic safe-haven from this dystopia.
After Winston begins his affair with Julia, he imagines the paperweight as a protective barrier between them and the
Party. Under this illusion, Winston feels more human. He comes to trust in his own thoughts and feelings,
experiencing real happiness for the first time in decades. This is reflected physically, as his ulcer—which represents
Winston’s repressed humanity—stops itching. Under Party rule, sexuality, creativity, and individuality are all
suppressed in favor of conformity and Party orthodoxy.
WINSTON'S ATTITUDE TOWARDS WOMEN

Prior to receiving Julia’s note, Winston views women negatively. He accuses them of accepting Party rhetoric too
easily, especially the anti-sex rhetoric. He resents Julia for wearing the Junior Anti-Sex League sash, which indicates
that she is not sexually available. His sexual frustration manifests in violent fantasies about assaulting and
murdering Julia and other women. This frustration can, at least in part, be attributed to Party oppression. By
estranging citizens from natural sexual instincts, the Party not only isolates them from other people but also from
themselves. As a result, their desires are “mixed up with fear and hatred” and fueled by frustration and resentment
towards women—whom the Party has portrayed as frigid and sexless.
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After Winston starts his affair with Julia, he begins to think and feel more freely. Julia offers him sexual and
intellectual freedom. As a result, his ulcer subsides and he becomes healthier and happier. His violent fantasies also
subside. Over the course of the affair, Winston reclaims ownership of his mind and body. As his belief in himself
grows, so too does his hatred of the Party. Winston comes to believe in an unconquerable element of human nature
that cannot be destroyed or controlled. This leads him to view the proles as a symbol of hope, since they are not
subject to the same dehumanization that Party members are. It also leads him to believe his love for Julia cannot be
stolen by the Party.
WINSTON'S RE-EDUCATION
Tragically, Winston’s reclamation of self and his belief in his own mental independence informs his eventual “re-
education” by O’Brien. Throughout much of 1984, Winston is resigned to death. This makes him reckless, and he
begins taking unnecessary risks, which include following the elderly prole man into the bar and visiting Mr.
Charrington’s antique shop a second time. Only after he begins seeing Julia and planning to join the Brotherhood
does his life acquire meaning. However, just as he begins to feel secure in his purpose going forward, he is arrested.
During Winston’s torture, O’Brien explains that the Party does not allow people to die with rebellious thoughts.
Rather than killing its enemies, the Party re-educates them to truly love Big Brother. In Winston’s case, all of his acts
of rebellion were carefully orchestrated by O’Brien. The implication is that the Party intentionally built Winston up
only to then break him. When Winston first began rebelling, he had no hopes for the future. Getting caught by the
Party at that point would have simply confirmed his expectations. However, after he begins his affair with Julia and is
allegedly indoctrinated into the Brotherhood by O’Brien, he finds meaning. Ultimately, in order for the Party to assert
their control over Winston, they had to give him something worth losing.
During Winston’s time at the Ministry of Love, he is estranged from himself in every way. O’Brien starves him, beats
him, and then forces him to confront his changed appearance. Unable to recognize the man he sees in the mirror,
Winston is shaken. However, he retains his belief that he will be able to die loving Julia and hating the Party. It is not
until he is taken to Room 101 that his beliefs are shattered. By forcing Winston to renounce his love for Julia, O’Brien
disproves Winston’s belief that the Party cannot truly alter his mind. In that moment, Winston yields to despair and
loses his humanity altogether. Although there is no hope for Winston, there is hope for the future. Winston knew that
he alone could not change his society and instead places his hope for the future in the Proles.
Characters: Julia
Julia is a twenty-six year old Outer Party member who works in the Fiction Department of the Ministry of Truth. She
has dark hair and pale skin. Julia is a member of the Junior Anti-Sex League and prominently wears the red
membership sash, much to Winston’s disgust. She also participates passionately in the Two Minutes Hate. After she
hands Winston a note saying she loves him, they become illicit lovers. Beneath the veneer of Party loyalty, Julia is
secretly rebellious. She has conducted a large number of sexual affairs and frequently buys black-market goods.
In comparison to Winston, who can remember a pre-Party world, Julia is young. For her, the Party is a deeply
ingrained reality. When Winston asks her why she does so much community service, she says it helps her blend in
and diverts suspicion from her more unorthodox activities. In contrast to Winston’s quest for ideological and
38
intellectual fulfillment, Julia’s rebellion is focused on survival and personal pleasure. She hates the Party, but only
because it limits her personal pursuits of pleasure; since it's an unalterable reality, she focuses on working within
rather than against it.
Julia is a sexual person and is not shy about expressing her desires. Though the Party works to suppress sexual
instincts in women, Julia has learned how to hide her desires. However, her desires seem to transcend sex. The
Party dictates that sex should be solely for procreation—independent of love, pleasure, and desire. Under the Party,
women's only function is to produce children. Femininity, beauty, and sensuality are repressed. By buying cosmetics
and pursuing pleasureful rendezvous with other Party members, Julia attempts to reclaim her womanhood through
sexuality and expressions of femininity.
Though Winston accuses her of only being a rebel “from the waist down,” Julia actually resists the deconstruction of
her gendered identity simply by existing. Rather than allowing the Party to restrict her bodily autonomy and self-
expression, Julia weaponizes her womanhood. She is not just another sexless “Party comrade.” Julia is proud to be
a woman, a radical act in a world that suppresses both pride and femininity.
Julia is cunning and cautious, having conducted many affairs with other Party members prior to meeting Winston.
Unlike Winston, who is fatalistic and pessimistic, Julia possesses a degree of optimism and a drive to find pleasure
where she can. She believes that with enough caution and cunning, she can evade the Party and enjoy her life. Julia
is a pragmatist; Winston is an idealist. Winston and Julia balance each other’s sensibilities, and they ultimately fall in
love. However, it is Julia’s love for Winston that brings about her downfall.
Julia’s decision to join the Brotherhood with Winston can be read in different ways. By one interpretation, Julia’s love
for Winston compels her to join him in his rebellious pursuits. Though she lacks interest in Goldstein’s teachings,
Julia loves Winston enough to overcome her normally cunning and cautious nature and join the Brotherhood. By this
reading, Julia’s downfall is the direct result of her decision to pursue Winston. The Party likely knew about her
affairs, but it is not until she expresses truly rebellious thoughts that she becomes a traitor.
However, Julia can also be read as an Inner Party collaborator. Winston himself expresses doubt as to why a young
woman like Julia would be interested in him. She also has access to a number of Inner Party products, like chocolate
and coffee. By this reading, either Julia herself specifically targeted Winston or the Inner Party manipulated her into
pursuing him in order to spur on his rebellious impulses. O’Brien mentions that he has been watching Winston for
years on suspicion of thoughtcrimes and that he orchestrated Winston’s rebellion. If Julia truly conducted as many
illicit affairs as she claims, it is unlikely that she would not have attracted the Party’s notice. Regardless of whether
or not Julia is fully aware of the Inner Party’s machinations, it is likely that she was specifically chosen to help
facilitate Winston’s downfall.
Characters: O'Brien
O’Brien is an Inner Party Member whom Winston comes to greatly admire. He is described as a brutally ugly man
with an imposing presence. Winston believes that O’Brien may also harbor anti-Party sentiments and becomes
fixated on the idea that O’Brien may be a member of the Brotherhood. Winston is proved correct when a few months
after his affair with Julia begins, O’Brien approaches and invites him to join the Brotherhood. However, after Winston
and Julia are arrested, O’Brien reveals that he was always a Party loyalist. O’Brien takes the lead during Winston’s
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rehabilitation, “saving” him and making him into the “perfect” Party member.
Most of the information about O’Brien is unreliable. However, his status as an Inner Party member offers a glimpse
at the privileges enjoyed by the upper echelons of Party membership. O’Brien lives in relative luxury, with access to
good wine and cigarettes. He can even turn off his telescreen if he wants to. The freedoms enjoyed by the Inner
Party in comparison to the Outer Party and proles suggest that maintaining the status quo is ideal for most Inner
Party members.
O’Brien makes it clear that he has watched and studied Winston closely over the years. He knows exactly what to
say in order to trap Winston, such as quoting what Winston has said on other occasions. His habit of adjusting his
glasses endears him even further to Winston, who views the gesture as friendly and disarming. O’Brien intentionally
positions himself as a mentor figure, someone who will teach and guide Winston through both rebellion and
rehabilitation. Winston trusts O’Brien—even when Winston is being tortured, he still views O’Brien as his “protector”
and “friend.”
O’Brien claims to genuinely care about Winston. O’Brien believes their minds are similar and says he took a special
interest in Winston because he admired him. Though he tortures him, O’Brien says it will make Winston a better
Party member. He views Winston’s rebellious thoughts as a disease and hopes to “save” him. O’Brien proves
masterful at doublethink and genuinely believes that 2+2=5. In his mind, definitive reality does not exist; the Party
shapes reality. Winston is astounded by O’Brien’s “lunacy” but also impressed by his intelligence. For Winston,
O’Brien is his intellectual superior. As a result, Winston is unable to entirely resent him. Despite everything, O’Brien
makes Winston feel understood.
O’Brien’s true relationship with the Brotherhood is left open to interpretation. He claims that The Theory and Practice
of Oligarchical Collectivism, allegedly written by Emmanuel Goldstein, was actually written by the Party. He refuses
to confirm or deny the Brotherhood’s existence for Winston. However, when Winston expresses his belief that
O’Brien has been caught by the Party, O’Brien remarks that the Party “got [him] a long time ago.” By one
interpretation, this line implies that O’Brien has always been loyal to the Party. However, it can also suggest that
O’Brien was rehabilitated and indoctrinated into the Inner Party. This leaves open the possibility that he was once a
member of the Brotherhood or at least resisted joining the Party.
Ultimately, O’Brien’s defining characteristic is his dogmatic belief in the Party. He believes that so long as someone
is committed to the Party, “then all that they are will continue to be so long as the Party exists.” He believes that Big
Brother will live forever. The Party has no grand mission or purpose beyond obtaining power for power’s sake.
According to O’Brien, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”
Analysis
Analysis
Considering 1984’s publication four years after World War II, Orwell’s dystopian society reflects on how the trauma
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of war impacts civilization. Given the apocalyptic destruction wrought by the deadly global conflicts of the first half of
the twentieth century, Orwell illuminates the dangerous influence that nationalist policies had in enabling
totalitarianism and extremism in the prior decade.
1984 thus paints a picture of a future society embroiled in eternal war in which the Party forcibly manipulates the
public to embrace their message—“WAR IS PEACE / FREEDOM IS SLAVERY / IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH”—
through propaganda and aggressive surveillance tactics. Orwell thus traces a parallel between recent history and the
Party’s implementation of dehumanizing and politically corrupt policies into social structures that ensure that the
powerless submit to the powerful.
Halfway through the novel, Winston reads Emmanuel Goldstein’s The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical
Collectivism, a controversial text recounting the transformation of civilization as a result of the world’s obsession with
war. In the text, Goldstein explains how war “is no longer the desperate, annihilating struggle that it was in the early
decades of the twentieth century” but rather a necessary means for the Party to maintain a hierarchical society. He
asserts that “an all-around increase in wealth threatened the destruction” of this purposeful imbalance of power:
The social atmosphere is that of a besieged city, where the possession of a lump of horseflesh makes
the difference between wealth and poverty. And at the same time the consciousness of being at war,
and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural,
unavoidable condition of survival.
A central concern in 1984 is the role of consciousness in combating this system. Because the Party’s ideology
essentially reduces human lives to the mere “products of human labour,” intelligence and thought threaten to destroy
these hierarchical structures. Accordingly, the Party prohibits moral reasoning and emotional awareness. In their
system, any individual expression is considered “thoughtcrime.”
In highlighting the conflict between the Party’s objectives and the presence of human consciousness, Orwell
investigates the methods by which humans have preserved truth and knowledge throughout history. In particular,
books—especially historical texts—symbolize the preservation and dissemination of truth. Winston’s job entails
rewriting these texts to destroy any record of history before the Party came into power. For example, he describes
having to change the political literature to reflect that “Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia” and not
Eurasia. Additionally, early on in the novel, Winston has a discussion with his co-worker, Syme, who explains that
“the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of human thought” through “the destruction of words” in order to
eliminate the possibility of influential ideas that could lead to rebellion. In some respects, then, Winston’s diary—
which reflects his intellectual awareness and sense of identity—is considered dangerous, because preserving
memories and engaging in reflection threatens the Party’s power.
Furthermore, Goldstein explains in his book the purpose of “doublethink,” in which intentional contradictions in
language function for the purpose of exerting mind control:
The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with
torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they
result from ordinary hypocrisy; they are deliberate exercises in DOUBLETHINK. For it is only by
reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely. In no other way could the ancient
cycle be broken. If human equality is to be for ever averted—if the High, as we have called them, are to
keep their places permanently—then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.
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As this passage communicates, the Party is able to achieve its primary objective of absolute power by manipulating
the powerless into submission. The Party achieves this by convincing its citizens that any ideas that contradict the
Party’s values are irrelevant, nonexistent, or insane. Considering how modern societies, on the other hand,
inherently value freedom of speech and freedom of the press as necessary to maintaining a civilized, just, and
peaceful society, this contradiction remains an especially grave concern. Modern societies carefully examine how
past patterns of war and devastation might recur in the future.
1984 reflects upon the horrors wrought by World War II—the deadliest and most catastrophic war in history—in
depicting a dystopian future ravaged by total war. When Winston is imprisoned in the third part of the novel, O’Brien
explains to him how the Party’s strategies have been more effective than those of past oligarchies:
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.
O’Brien then illustrates how the Party, on the other hand, is transparent in their motive “to seek power entirely for its
own sake,” firmly believing that “power is not a means, it is an end.” As recent events in history demonstrate—
especially the unspeakable evils committed during the Holocaust—this obsession with absolute power at the
expense of the powerless leads to both totalitarianism and demagoguery, and these hierarchal social structures thus
rely on discrimination and persecution to enforce their ideologies. The Party instills fear of foreigners as a means to
maintaining control over the masses, a tactic that Goldstein explains in the following excerpt:
If [a citizen] were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to
himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives
would be broken, and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might
evaporate.
This distrust of foreigners also gives the Party fuel to implement extremist policies that capitalize upon the human
capacity for hatred, such as portraying foreigners as inhuman forces of pure evil. Likewise, Big Brother—
representing the dangers of blind worship and religious extremism—symbolizes the omnipotence and omnipresence
of the Party’s values. Further, Goldstein describes Big Brother as a tool used by the Party to serve as a “focusing
point for love, fear, and reverence” in order to prevent individuals from engaging in conscious thought and pursuing
innovative ideas. He asserts that:
Every success, every achievement, every victory, every scientific discovery, all knowledge, all wisdom,
all happiness, all virtue, are held to issue directly from his leadership and inspiration...
Big Brother is simply a construct—a vehicle for the Party’s ideology and a means by which they strategically promote
the idea that “ignorance is strength.” If ignorance is the source of strength, then the possibility for implementing
progressive policies—especially social and economic equality—diminishes. Moreover, the influence of ignorance
continues to threaten progressive humanism. In Goldstein’s words, “everywhere there is the same pyramidal
structure, the same worship of semi-divine leader, the same economy existing by and for continuous warfare.”
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Orwell’s futuristic society in 1984 remains one of the most influential literary works because of its eerie relevance to
historical events since its publication. The novel is thus a cautionary tale that investigates the ways in which
humanity veers towards authoritarianism, particularly focusing on the deleterious social effects of warfare. While
Winston initially believes in the power of the human mind, in the end he is methodically stripped of this belief, and he
succumbs to living out a meaningless existence. The ultimate question the novel presents, then, is whether any hope
exists for a promising future if humanity continues to engage in deadly global conflicts.
Key Ideas and Commentary: Commentary

Nineteen Eighty-Four is George Orwell’s unswervingly grim vision of a dystopian future. The author always intended
it as more warning than prophecy, so that even though its title date has passed, its lessons about the dangers of
conformity, mental coercion, and verbal deception retain their validity and relevance. Orwell’s careful use of clear,
understandable language makes the unfamiliar world of Nineteen Eighty-Four comprehensible to every level of
reader, and his theme of personal individuality and human emotion, particularly love, trying to establish themselves
in spite of the relentless pressure of the modern industrial state has perennial appeal to young adult audiences.
The novel depicts a world divided into three totalitarian superpowers that are constantly at war with one another:
Oceania, dominated by the former United States; Eurasia, dominated by Western Europe; and Eastasia, dominated
by China and Japan. Since the novel belongs to the genre of the dystopia, a negative Utopia, much of its content is
necessarily involved in describing Oceanian society—not only in the features of its everyday life, much of which
reflects British life in 1948 (a year whose inverted numbers may have suggested the novel’s title), but also in detailed
explanations of the historical origins of Ingsoc and Oceania, as well as its official language, Newspeak. Orwell, rather
clumsily in the view of some critics, gives much of this information in the form of a book-within-a-book, the supposed
handbook of the revolutionaries, and an appendix to the novel itself about Newspeak.
Not until the second main part of the novel does the story really begin. Winston Smith is a writer for the ironically
named Ministry of Truth, whose chief job is to assist in the constant rewriting of history so that it conforms with the
predictions and pronouncements of Big Brother, the possibly mythical ruler of Oceania, whose minions in the Inner
Party are nevertheless omnipotent and omniscient. Winston, who was born in 1945 and thus was named after
Britain’s wartime leader Winston Churchill, vaguely remembers life before the revolution and the establishment of
Ingsoc, and he gradually comes to believe that life was not always as dreary, mechanical, and deadening as it now
is in Oceania, although he has no means of proving it. Another worker in the Ministry of Truth, Julia, a young woman
whom Winston suspects of spying on him, turns out to be attracted to him, and they enter into a complicated,
dangerous love affair that they both internally believe can only end in disaster.
O’Brien, an Inner Party member to whom Winston has been vaguely drawn, provides a ray of hope when the lovers
become convinced that he is a secret member of the Brotherhood, the revolutionary group committed to the
overthrow of Ingsoc and Big Brother. O’Brien—naturally, one is almost tempted to say—turns out to be a double
agent, and the last part of the novel depicts in graphic detail Winston’s torture and conversion by O’Brien into an
unconditional acceptance of the power of the party and Big Brother. To accomplish this acceptance, Winston must
master the mental skill of “doublethink,” a form of reality control involving “the power of holding two contradictory
beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” To some critics, the descriptions and explanations
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in this section of the novel are the book’s weakest parts. This ordeal culminates in Winston’s betrayal of his love for
Julia. A broken man, Winston is set “free” to spend his last days in a semi-alcoholic stupor, mindlessly cheering on
huge mythical victories by the forces of Oceania as he awaits the inevitable bullet in the back of the head. Nineteen
Eighty-Four ends with the chilling—and inescapable—sentence “He loved Big Brother.”
Key Ideas and Commentary: The Principles

of Newspeak
SUMMARY
This section defines Newspeak, the official language of Oceania, and sets forth its purpose: to meet the specific
needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism while making all other methods of thought impossible. When Oldspeak has
become obsolete, the last link with the past will have been destroyed.
The vocabulary of Newspeak has been built by inventing new words, eliminating old words, and stripping existing
words of their finer shades of meaning. Newspeak, based on English, has three classes of vocabulary words:
1. “A” – words used for everyday life; reserved for simple thoughts, concrete objects, or physical actions.
2. “B” – words created for political purposes with the proper mental attitude; all are compound; made up without a
plan.
3. “C” – supplementary; scientific and technical terms.
ANALYSIS
The straightforward manner of the appendix and the elaborate care taken to construct the grammar and vocabulary
lend credibility to the existence of Oceania.
Some critics believe that Orwell was pointing out the importance of language as a shaper of thought and the
inadvisability of narrowing vocabulary to limit its range. When we consider the nature of the words in the “B”
vocabulary, the satirical purpose of the novel becomes more obvious, for words like “honor,” “justice,” “democracy,”
and “religion” no longer exist. Instead, a few general words cover these terms, and, as Orwell illustrates throughout
the novel, destroy them. Winston’s job at the Ministry of Truth makes him an agent of this destruction, just as his
attempts to write the illicit diary signify his rebellion against the power of language to destroy thought.
STUDY QUESTIONS
1. What is Newspeak?
2. What is the purpose of Newspeak?
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3. When is it expected that Newspeak will become the only language in Oceania?
4. Which dictionary will contain the perfected version of Newspeak?
5. What purpose will be served by cutting down the choice of words in the language?
6. Give the composition of the “A” vocabulary.
7. What is the purpose of the “A” vocabulary?
8. What words make up the “B” vocabulary?
9. What kind of words make up the “C” vocabulary?
10. What is the delay in Newspeak becoming a fully adopted language at the present time?
ANSWERS
1. Newspeak is the official language of Oceania.
2. Newspeak aims to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism.
3. Newspeak will probably supersede Oldspeak (Standard English) by 2050.
4. Perfected Newspeak will be found in the eleventh edition of the dictionary.
5. Cutting down the choice of words diminishes the range of thought.
6. The “A” vocabulary consists of words needed for everyday life, words already in existence. 7. The “A” vocabulary
aims to express simple thoughts involving concrete objects or physical actions.
8. The “B” vocabulary is comprised of words made up for political purposes.
9. The “C” vocabulary contains scientific and technical terms.
10. The delay revolves around problems translating classic and utilitarian literature.
SUGGESTED ESSAY TOPICS

1. Discuss the structure and composition of the “A”, “B”, and “C” vocabularies. Which vocabulary seems closest to its
-final stage of development? Which vocabulary has undergone the most change from its Oldspeak structure? Why is
the “C” -vocabulary termed “supplementary”?
2. Discuss the reasons for the delay in implementing the perfected, finalized version of Newspeak. Why does
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literature present an especially difficult problem? What problems would people such as Winston Smith have in
adapting to this new language?
Style, Form, and Literary Elements: Places

Discussed
LONDON
London is the capital of a future (from the perspective of 1949, when George Orwell wrote the book) political unit
called Airstrip One in the superstate Oceania that is the setting for the novel. London’s skyline is dominated by four
government ministries, whose enormous bulk and tasteless architecture distinguish them from the surviving historical
structures surrounding them. Residential sectors of the city segregate members of the unnamed Party from proles
(“proletarians”), but both Proles and Outer Party members live in crumbling tenement buildings that are unsanitary,
crowded, and poorly maintained. Police patrols are highly visible; posters of Big Brother—the ever-present,
seemingly loving personification of the state—are ubiquitous.
The city’s squalor is symptomatic of the Ingsoc government’s disdain for the welfare of its own citizens. This is the
result of a change in the fundamental principles and core values of the society; human rights are nonexistent, and all
available resources support building and maintaining government structures that administer and preserve the
collective. The life of the individual is barren; this barrenness is suggested by lack of luxury, beauty, and privacy.
Inner Party member Winston Smith has a fascination with the past that he acts out by paying clandestine visits to the
oldest and meanest areas of the city, where the proles live and work. Because the proles are considered by Inner
Party leaders to be beneath concern, their sectors are largely ignored by the government and have become de facto
museums of prerevolutionary culture, customs, and mores. Only within the prole neighborhoods can Winston enjoy
the smell of real coffee, the sounds of unconstrained conversation and songs, and the sights of uninhibited children
playing and adults gathering to talk—all of which reminds Winston of his own childhood and suggest the complexity
and fullness of prerevolutionary life.
VICTORY MANSIONS
Victory Mansions. Run-down London building in which Winston has a flat on the seventh floor. The building has bad
plumbing, no heat, a broken elevator, and the inescapable stench of rancid cabbage. The one thing in the building
that works flawlessly is its network of telescreens, which broadcast ceaseless propaganda and, in turn, watch
residents through television cameras.
CHARRINGTON’S SHOP
Charrington’s shop. Cramped, dilapidated antique store in a prole sector of London that Winston frequents. He sees
the shop as a microcosmic remnant of the past, but it is, in fact, a carefully maintained surveillance tool. Its upstairs
apartment, which Winston rents for trysts with Julia, becomes the place of their downfall. Though infested by biting
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bedbugs and large, aggressive rats, the room also has a private entrance to facilitate Winston and Julia’s secret
meetings. There they abandon themselves to sensuality only because they think the room has no telescreen.
However, it does have a telescreen, which, ironically, is obscured by something that would never be found in the
home of a Party member—an engraving of a medieval church. The illusion of privacy leads Winston and Julia to
incriminate themselves, and furthermore leads Winston inadvertently to betray his abject horror of rats to the
Thought Police watching him and Julia through the telescreen.
MINISTRY OF TRUTH
Ministry of Truth. Government ministry building in which Winston is one of many writers who revise historical records
to match the government’s constantly changing definitions of reality. Each time Oceania’s military alliances shift,
history must be rewritten to show that Oceania has always had the same allies and same enemies. Winston often
rewrites the same news stories many times, making something different happen each time, and he comes to
appreciate the power of the government precept that whoever controls the past controls the future.
MINISTRY OF LOVE
Ministry of Love. Site of Winston and Julia’s detention, torture, and reintegration into the Party. One of four
enormous pyramidal steel and concrete structures that dominate the London skyline, “Miniluv” has no windows.
Standing behind heavily guarded barricades, it is protected by barbed wire and automatic gun pods. Inside, brilliant
lights gleam on sparkling clean white walls, which Winston comes to think of as “the place where there is no
darkness,” a phrase he remembers either from a prescient dream or from his confused memory. The absence of
clocks and windows creates a sense that time is suspended or has no influence, an impression rendered more
powerful by the contrast with life outside, where all activities are maintained on a rigorous schedule. Thus Miniluv
becomes a mockery of heaven, and by extension, Winston’s indoctrination and reintegration into the Party by
O’Brien become a mockery of the loving inclusion into Paradise and communion with God promised by the saints.
GOLDEN COUNTRY
Golden Country. Place about which Winston dreams frequently. It is an abandoned pasture that, although once
hedged, is being reclaimed by nature. Winston associates it at first with the distant past, and early in the novel,
dreams of having a sexual encounter with Julia here; after this dream, he awakens speaking the word
“Shakespeare.” Less than a month later, Winston and Julia have their first sexual experience in a rural spot outside
London that Winston realizes is almost identical to the place of his dreams. In the midst of his first encounter with
Julia, the Golden Country comes to represent for him an animal sensuality unburdened by reason, the antithesis of
calculation and cold restraint. Such freedom, for Winston, is possible only in a place largely untainted not just by
Ingsoc, but also by the political and philosophical milieu from which it has arisen. The disappearing traces of human
domination and the return of the pasture to an idyllic state suggest perhaps not just a yearning for the past, but also
a hope for the future. Nevertheless, it is a hope so wild that Winston can hardly allow himself to indulge it except in
dream.
CHESTNUT TREE CAFÉ

Chestnut Tree Café. Sidewalk coffeehouse associated with Party members who have been reintegrated and
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subsequently targeted for vaporization. Early in the novel, Winston destroys an exculpatory newspaper photograph
of three enemies of Big Brother whom he later sees at the café, before their disappearances but after their much-
publicized but false confessions. A year later, in the novel’s final episode, Winston himself, now a doomed outcast,
again sits at the café, drinking sweetened clove-flavored gin, the café specialty, and solving newspaper chess
problems. As the telescreen announces a military victory for Oceania’s armies, Winston, who throughout the novel
has reacted to such questionable government claims with cynical skepticism, can no longer resist proclaiming his joy
and his love for Big Brother.
OCEANIA
Oceania. One of three superstates that cover most of the globe. The superstates are conglomerates of nations and
regions that first formed alliances then annealed into new entities under the pressures of revolution. The three states
are engaged in a constant state of war and shifting alliances, on which Ingsoc broadcasts interminable news
bulletins through the telescreens. Oceania itself comprises the lands of the Western Hemisphere, Australia and its
surrounding islands, the British Islands, and part of Southern Africa. The easternmost province of Oceania is Airstrip
One, which corresponds to what had once been the United Kingdom.
EASTASIA
Eastasia. Superstate that comprises China, Southeast Asia, Japan and its surrounding islands, and varying portions
of Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet.
EURASIA
Eurasia. Superstate that comprises most of Europe and northern Asia, from Portugal to eastern Siberia. When the
novel opens, Oceania is at war with Eurasia; when it ends, Eurasia is Oceania’s ally.
Style, Form, and Literary Elements: The

Plot
Winston Smith begins a diary, an act tantamount to signing his own death sentence in a ruthlessly totalitarian state
bent on eradicating individuality. He is determined to stay alive—and “human”—as long as he can. To do so, he
must escape the all-seeing eye and all-hearing ear of the Thought Police behind the omnipresent telescreen.
Winston and Julia, who work in the Ministry of Truth, become lovers and find an illusory haven above Charrington’s
shop in the district of the “proles,” or masses outside the Party. Earlier, the lovers revealed themselves to O’Brien,
allegedly a member of the “Brotherhood” intent on toppling Big Brother. O’Brien sends them “the book,” supposedly
written by Goldstein, Big Brother’s enemy. The Thought Police smash into the lovers’ refuge and drag them away to
the Ministry of Love.
As he expected, Winston is maniacally tortured, but to his surprise his torturer is O’Brien, a self-styled therapist,
determined to return Winston to “sanity.” Winston masters “doublethink,” or the capacity to believe that two plus two
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equals five, or any other number suggested. Confident that he has satisfied O’Brien’s insane demands without
betraying the self that loves Julia, Winston is totally unprepared for the horror of what awaits him in Room 101.
Knowing that Winston has a phobia of rats, O’Brien has devised a wire mask to fit over his head with a door his
tormentors can open into a cage of starving rats. Winston in mindless terror screams, “Do it to Julia! Not me!”
Internally devastated by the horrible recognition of his betrayal, Winston accepts self-annihilation as a “victory over
himself.” The last sentence confirms his conversion: “He loved Big Brother.”
Style, Form, and Literary Elements: Literary

Style
POINT OF VIEW
Orwell’s 1984 is told in the third person, but the point of view is clearly Winston Smith’s. Through his eyes, readers
are able to see how the totalitarian society functions, in particular how an individual deals with having illegal thoughts
that can be detected easily by spies and telescreens that monitor one’s every movement. Because readers are in
Winston’s head, they make the mistakes he makes in judging people. At one point he looks around a room at work
and tells himself he knows just who will be vaporized within the next few years and who will be allowed to live. His
perceptions of who is a loyal party member and who is not turn out to be inaccurate, however. In this way, Orwell
shows that in a paranoid society, where personal relationships with others are at best only tolerated and at worst
illegal, no one can really know his fellow man.
Winston is a well-drawn character with clear opinions (clear to the reader, that is; he cannot reveal his opinions to
anyone in his society). Often, critics have claimed that these opinions echo George Orwell’s. For example, Winston
admires the spirit of the proletariat, but looks down on them because they will never have the means or intelligence
to change their lives and their government. On the other hand, he admires the sophistication of the wealthy, cultured
O’Brien, even though he is an evil character. This may reflect Orwell’s own class prejudices, as someone who was
far more educated and worldly than most of the people from the economic class in England (the lower middle class).
SETTING
Written between 1947 and 1948, 1984’s original title was 1948, but Orwell changed it so that it would be set in the
future, but still be close enough to the present to be frightening. The action takes place in London, which is now part
of a country called Oceania. Oceania is one of three world superpowers, and it is continually at war with one of the
other two superpowers, Eastasia and Eurasia. Enemies can change overnight and become an ally, although the
Party automatically rewrites history when this happens so that no one will remember that circumstances were ever
any different. This perpetual state of war consumes most of the state’s resources, so city buildings are in a constant
state of disrepair. All consumer goods, from food to clothing, are rationed, just as they were in England during World
War II. Winston lives in what was once London, now a drab, gray, and decaying urban area.
LANGUAGE AND MEANING

Orwell was very aware of the power of language, so he has the totalitarian government of the future create a new
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language called Newspeak. Newspeak is used throughout the book by the citizens of Oceania and explained in
detail in an appendix. The language is derived from Standard English and will go through many versions over the
years until it reaches its final version in the year 2050. The 1984 version, however, still bears a strong resemblance
to English.
The basic idea behind Newspeak is to take all words that refer to ideas the Party disagrees with and strip them of
their original meaning or eliminate them entirely. The purpose of Newspeak is to narrow the range of ideas that can
be expressed, so as the language develops it contains fewer and fewer words. Word forms and grammar are
simplified, as is pronunciation, so that eventually the number of readers can be kept to a minimum. Newspeak also
contains words to express new ideas, such as oldthink, which means the way people thought before the revolution.
Naturally, it has a wicked and decadent connotation.
When Newspeak appeared citizens were unable to read about old ideas and express new ones that were counter to
what the Party wanted them to think. An entire passage from the Declaration of Independence “We hold these truths
to be self-evident . . . ,” can be reduced to one word: crimethink. Simplistic slogans replace more complicated ideas.
The Party’s most famous slogans are “War Is Peace,” “Freedom Is Slavery,” and “Ignorance Is Strength.”
Through the device of a fictional language, Orwell is able to point out that language can be misused to mislead
people. In creating Newspeak, Orwell was influenced both by political rhetoric that takes the place of substantive
communication and advertising lingo that makes ridiculous and vague promises.
STRUCTURE
1984 is divided into three parts plus an appendix. Part one sets up Winston’s world, which readers see through his
eyes and his thoughts. They understand his loneliness and why this leads him to take risks that will lead to his
downfall.
In part two, the lengthiest part of the narrative, Winston becomes connected with people he believes are rebels like
himself. He has an affair with Julia and follows O’Brien to an underground meeting of dissidents. Also in part two,
Orwell includes lengthy sections from the fictional Emmanuel Goldstein’s political tract. It is interesting to note that
his publishers originally wanted Orwell to delete this material, because it stops the action of the narrative.
In part three, Winston and Julia have been caught by the Inner Party and separated. Winston undergoes severe
torture and brainwashing at the hands of O’Brien. His dialogue and interaction with O’Brien has much dramatic
tension because underlying their battle is mutual respect. Unfortunately for Winston, this respect does not translate
into O’Brien freeing him. O’Brien successfully brainwashes Winston into loving Big Brother.
The book ends with an appendix on the development and structure of the language called “Newspeak.” The
appendix is written as if it were a scholarly article, and while it serves to clarify the use of Newspeak in the novel it is
interesting to note that the publisher originally wanted to cut it, thinking it unnecessary.
Style, Form, and Literary Elements: Literary

50
Techniques
Orwell arranged Nineteen Eighty-Four into three parts, devoting the first two thirds of the novel to creating the
distorted identity of Oceania and establishing the liaison between Winston and Julia. The last third is comprised
primarily of Winston's "re-education" interspersed with didactic polemic. Fusing realism and fantasy, Orwell presents
a vivid impression of life as it could be in the future as well as a persuasive argument in favor of prevention. In
addition, by utilizing religious metaphor to emphasize the transference of devotion into the extended arms of Big
Brother, Orwell casts an ironic spell on the action of the novel. Written in direct, lucid prose, Nineteen Eighty-Four is
unquestionably a technical achievement and deserving of its critical reputation as a modern classic.
Historical and Social Context: Background

1984 is George Orwell’s most famous and enduring work, with the possible exception of his political fable Animal
Farm. The novel has been translated into more than 60 languages, condensed in the Reader’s Digest, made into
two movies, and presented on television.
The widespread impact of 1984 is evidenced by the changes in language that it effected. Today, the word
“Orwellian” refers to any regimented and dehumanized society. Words like “Newspeak,” “unperson,” “doublethink,”
and “thoughtcrime” have become part of the English language. And the familiar phrase “Big Brother Is Watching
You” has become synonymous with the concept of a totalitarian state.
1984’s influence on other twentieth-century works has been considerable: Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1954)
shares the theme of repression and the destruction of a culture (in this case, books), and Anthony Burgess’s A
Clockwork Orange (1962) shares a British setting as well as an invented language, much like the Newspeak of
Oceania.
Orwell thought of writing 1984 as early as 1940, during World War II but he did not complete it until 1948 when the
Cold War was beginning. The anti-Fascist writing of the 1930s and 1940s had a profound influence on Orwell, and is
reflected in his writing.
Moreover, events in Communist Russia also impacted the plot and theme of 1984. From 1922 when Lenin suffered a
stroke until 1928—four years after his death—there was a power struggle between Leon Trotsky Minister of War,
and Joseph Stalin then Secretary of the Communist party. Stalin continued to grow even more influential as a
member of the Politbureau, a small group of party bosses where his function was to manage the day-to-day activities
of the Communist party. In 1921 Stalin became liaison between the Central Control Commission and the Central
Committee; in this capacity he could control the purges designed to keep the party pure. He used this position to his
advantage.
Stalin, along with allies Zinoviev and Kamenev, soon proved invincible as they utilized the secret police to put down
all plots against them. While resisting Trotsky’s urges to somewhat democratize the party, they eliminated his
followers by sending them abroad. Trotsky was forced to resign as Minister of War. He was later expelled from the
Politbureau, exiled from Russia, and eventually assassinated by one of Stalin’s secret police.
51
From 1928 until World War II, Stalin enjoyed supreme power in Russia. Among the changes he brought to Russian
life were collective agriculture, industrialization with forced labor, and the build-up of the authoritarian state combined
with the annihilation of all political opposition. In 1928 began the era of the Five-Year Plans, each of which set
ambitious goals for the next five years. The goals of the first Five-Year Plan were never actualized; nevertheless, the
government announced that they had been realized in 1932. Immediately, another Five-Year Plan went into effect.
Changes were felt in Russian society as well. Freedom to choose one’s job was non-existent; those who resisted
were sent to labor camps. Stalin’s dictatorship was complete when the vast majority of unskilled workers became
controlled by a minority of loyal skilled workers and bureaucrats who enjoyed certain privileges restricted from the
masses. Thus, the gulf between the classes widened and a new elite was created.
To refute contradictory information, Stalin had histories rewritten to show that Lenin had favored his accession to
power. He enjoyed a certain amount of hero-worship as cities were named in his honor.
There were critics, however, whom Stalin eliminated during the Great Purges of 1934-1938, which destroyed all
possibility of future conspiracies. By 1936, when Stalin proclaimed the constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics (USSR) “the most democratic in the world,” this was hardly an accurate description.
Under Stalin’s dictatorship, the USSR had become a one-party state where elections were a mockery. Although all
were eligible to belong to the Communist party, membership was, in fact, a privilege. The party was built upon a
pyramidical structure with power and privilege for an elite few. At each level of the pyramid existed organizations to
generate propaganda, train military personnel, and educate bureaucrats. All of these activities were designed to
increase party loyalty and strength. Stalin remained a dictator through World War II until his death in 1953. Some
elements in the plot of 1984 parallel this history.
Five books, in particular, seem to have had a direct impact on the creation of 1984. Fyodor Zamyatin’s We (1923),
reviewed by Orwell in 1946, provided the idea for a futuristic, anti-Utopian frame for the novel. There are several
resemblances between the works, both of which are also derived from H. G. Wells’ anti-Utopian satire When the
Sleeper Walks (1899). Likewise, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), to which 1984 is frequently compared, is
set in the future and deals with a regimented society. From Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1941), Orwell took
ideas about the atmosphere of a totalitarian society. This “concentration camp” literature details the struggle of its
main character to maintain his individuality after his arrest and torture. James Burnham’s The Managerial
Revolution (1941) gave Orwell the idea for a world controlled by superstates. These powers became the Oceania,
Eurasia, and Eastasia of 1984.
The novel’s bleak ending prompted readers and critics to take it as an attack on socialism in general and Communist
Russia in particular and a prophesy of what would happen in the West should communism spread. Orwell was asked
if his book should be interpreted as prophesy. He answered this question in a letter of June 1949:
I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily WILL, but I believe (allowing of course for
the fact that the book is a satire) that something resembling it COULD arrive. I believe also that
totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and I have tried to draw these
ideas out to their logical consequences. (1)
52
In 1949, some readers were also concerned that Orwell had set the novel in Britain. Orwell replied, “The scene of the
book is laid in Britain in order to emphasize that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else
and that totalitarianism, if not FOUGHT against, could triumph anywhere.” (2)
Opinions among critics have not been entirely favorable. Some point to the novel’s overwhelming pessimism and its
denouement as flawed, claiming the novel obviously is a reflection of Orwell’s last illness. Others believe that it
should be judged as a period piece bearing little relevance to today’s world. After all, there was no special
significance to the title. Orwell simply transposed the last two numbers of the year in which he finished the book.
Thus, it can be seen that a number of factors influenced the creation of 1984, including literary sources and historical
events. In order to understand the full impact of this novel, the student needs to be familiar with these influences.
Historical and Social Context: Historical

Context
TOTALITARIANISM
In 1948, when Orwell’s 1984 was published World War II had just ended. One of England’s allies had been Russia,
which was ruled by a despotic dictator named Joseph Stalin. Stalin ruled with an iron fist, and was famous for his
midnight purges: he would round up hundreds of citizens at a time and murder them in deserted areas, much as
Oceania citizens are “vaporized.” Stalin’s victims were his imagined enemies, such as political dissidents, artists, or
Jews. Meanwhile Adolf Hitler in Germany, had slaughtered his enemies as well, in the end killing six million Jews
plus nine million Slavs, gypsies, political dissidents, homosexuals, and mentally challenged people. Mao Tse-tung in
China was fighting for communism against Chinese nationalist forces under Chiang Kai-shek. Mao would finally
defeat the nationalists in 1949 and begin a long, oppressive totalitarian regime.
Other dictators of the time included Francisco Franco in Spain and Benito Mussolini in Italy. These oppressive rulers
controlled citizens through propaganda and violence. This state of affairs prompted Orwell to create Big Brother, the
ultimate totalitarian leader who dominates all political, social, and economic activities.
SOCIALISM AND COMMUNISM

Orwell fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War in the mid-1930s, supporting the socialist left. He was not a
communist, but a dedicated Democratic socialist who believed that the government, not private enterprise, should
control the production and distribution of goods, and as such he was greatly concerned about the lives of the poor
and working class.
All over the world, throughout the twentieth century, working class people had been fighting for better lives. In
America, workers fought a long and hard battle for labor reforms that would eventually include such benefits as job
security, safety regulation, overtime and hazardous duty pay, vacation and sick days, health insurance, pensions,
disability, and child labor laws, which modern workers sometimes take for granted. Some U.S. and British workers
turned to socialism and communism, thinking that perhaps these alternate forms of economic and social structure
53
would solve their problems. In the late nineteenth century Karl Marx of Germany proposed that to resolve the gross
inequality between the workers and the bosses, the working class, or proletariat, would have to revolt and establish a
new communist regime in which one authoritarian party would control the political and economic systems. He
believed workers ought to own their farms and factories and distribute the profits evenly among workers.
Here in America, the capitalist factory and mine owners eventually conceded to labor’s demands and the socialists
and communists were marginalized. This act deferred American workers from revolting against their government.
Communist revolutions did occur in Russia and in China, but eventually those countries modified their economic
systems.
America’s response to communism was extreme during the Cold War era of the 1950s; in fact, many people
believed the U.S. government was acting just as oppressively as communist governments were. Under the
leadership of Senator Joe McCarthy, the House (of Representatives) Committee on Un-American Activities
aggressively attacked public figures who were suspected communists, demanding that they name other communists
or be blackballed in their industries. Hollywood writers and filmmakers were especially hard hit by the mania and
many careers were destroyed before President Truman and public opinion turned against McCarthy and the witch
hunt ended. The paranoia that characterized the McCarthy era was similar to the paranoia in 1984, as people were
pressured to betray their friends, co-workers, and even parents in order to save themselves. Today, communism still
has some followers in the United States and England, as does Democratic socialism, which Orwell embraced
wholeheartedly.
TELEVISION
Aside from being concerned about labor and government, Orwell was very aware of an important invention that was
just becoming popular after World War II and would eventually be a dominant force in Western culture: the
television. The first BBC broadcast in Britain occurred in 1937, and TV was first demonstrated to the American public
in 1939 at the New York World’s Fair. Television’s popularity grew enormously throughout the 1950s, and today 98%
of American households own at least one color television set. Orwell recognized the enormous potential of this
communication tool, which would soon be in every home. He imagined that the television could one day not only
broadcast propaganda nonstop but that it could transmit back images of action in front of the screen, allowing the
broadcaster to spy on its viewers.
Historical and Social Context: Compare and

Contrast
1948: West Berlin, Germany, is blockaded by the Soviets. The Americans begin an airlift to help the stranded
Berliners.
1984: The Berlin wall, built in 1961 to keep East Germans from defecting to the West, remains in place.
Today: East and West Germany are reunified, after the Berlin wall was taken down in 1990.
54
1948/49: Mao Tse-tung battles Chiang Kai-shek and his nationalist forces, finally defeating them in 1949 and
establishing a totalitarian communist regime.
1984: China has survived the severe cultural purging of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in the 1960s.
Opened to the West in the 1970s because of President Nixon’s visit in 1972, China is now trading with the West and
incorporating some small democratic and economic reforms.
Today: In 1989, students demanding greater economic and civil rights reforms protested in Tiananmen Square in
Beijing and were gunned down by Chinese troops. China continues to trade with the West, but its democratic
movement has been slowed considerably.
1948/49: In September, 1949, President Truman announces that Russia, too, has the atom bomb, having
developed the technology on its own.
1984: In 1991 the Cold War continues as the arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States escalates.
Today: On December 8, 1987, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev sign an agreement
to dismantle all 1,752 U.S. and 859 Soviet nuclear missiles within a 300 to 3,400-mile range. In 1991 the former
Soviet Republic breaks up. American investors are helping the Soviets establish new businesses as the Soviets
concentrate their attention on revamping their economy.
1949: There are one million television sets in the United States and two dozen TV stations. There will be ten million
TV sets by 1951, fifty million by 1959.
1984: Eighty-five million U.S. households own a television set. Cable television reaches almost half of those
households. Computers start to become a household product in the United States with approximately 13% or
516,750 computers owned by consumers.
Today: Ninety-eight percent of U.S. households (95 million homes) own a color television set, 28 percent own three
or more televisions, 65 percent have cable access. New TV technology on the horizon includes high-definition
television. In 1995, over three million people owned a personal computer. Use of a vast computer network, called the
Internet, which originated in the 1960s and connects users from over 160 countries to each other via electronic mail,
exploded during the 1990s with an estimated count of 20 to 30 million users in mid-1995.
Historical and Social Context: Literary

Precedents
Written in the tradition of the Utopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four is perhaps best defined as dystopia, literally the
antithesis of perfect society. In this capacity, Orwell's novel shares a common identity with Aldous Huxley's Brave
New World (1932) and more significantly Eugene Zamiatin's We (c. 1920), both of which Orwell had read prior to the
publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Although considerably different in structural context, Orwell's novel is
comparable in thematic design and development. Noticeably dissimilar is that Huxley and Zamiatin create futuristic
55
societies totally unlike the present in which they were written, whereas Orwell deliberately constructed a remarkably
realistic and recognizable future.
First published in 1924, Zamiatin's We was an early fictional narrative critical of emerging Soviet Russia. Strikingly
similar to Nineteen Eighty-Four, the novel clearly influenced Orwell's perception of the totalitarian state and
confirmed much of his political and creative ideology. Zamiatin's novel can certainly be credited with providing Orwell
with thematic direction, character analysis, and conceivably the most effective vehicle with which to communicate his
artistic message.
Bibliography
Atkins, John. George Orwell: A Literary Study. London: Calder and Boyars, 1971. A long and detailed account of
Orwell’s climb to maturity as a political writer. Because it was written in 1954, this book presents a dated perspective
on Orwell’s work.
Gardner, Averil. George Orwell. Boston: Twayne, 1987. Examines Orwell’s novels, his longer nonfiction, and his
essays for theme, recurrent motifs, and critical response. Includes a chronology, an extended bibliography, and an
index.
Hynes, Samuel, ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of “1984”: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs,
N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971. Offers both favorable and negative criticism and the particular angles of many different
critics. The chapters are reviews, essays, and viewpoints; even a letter from Aldous Huxley to Orwell is included.
Lee, Robert A. Orwell’s Fiction. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969. A chronicle of the
development of Orwell’s career as a novelist. Themed sections include Orwell’s look at poverty and the stricken
individual, social strife, and his apocalyptic vision as expressed in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Williams, Raymond, ed. George Orwell: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974.
A chronological arrangement of essays on the development of Orwell’s writing. A study of not only Orwell’s
development over time but also the impact of his work over time, with essays from writers of three generations.
Bibliography: Bibliography and Further

Reading
SOURCES
Quotations from 1984 are taken from the following edition:
Orwell, George. 1984. Afterword by Erich Fromm. New York: Signet, 1992. In addition, Fromm’s Afterword was
indispensable to this study.
56
Alldritt, Keith. The Making of George Orwell. London: Edward Arnold Ltd., 1969.
Baruch, Elaine Hoffman. “The Golden Country: Sex and Love in 1984,” in 1984 Revisited: Totalitarianism in Our
Century. Harper & Row, 1983, pp. 47-56.
Bloom, Harold, ed. George Orwell: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.
Christgau, Robert. “Writing for the People,” in The Village Voice, February 1, 1983, pp. 54–5.
Crick, Bernard. George Orwell: A Life. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1980.
Esslin, Martin. “Television and Telescreen,” in On Nineteen Eighty-Four, edited by Peter Stansky. W. H. Freeman &
Co., 1983, pp. 126-38.
Gertrude Clarke Whittall Poetry and Literature Fund. George Orwell & Nineteen Eighty-Four. Washington, DC: U.S.
Government Printing Office.
Gottlieb, Erika. The Orwell Conundrum: A Cry of Despair or Faith in the Spirit of Man? Ottawa: Carleton University
Press, 1992.
Hammond, J. R. A George Orwell Companion—A Guide to the Novels, Documents, and Essays. New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1982.
Howe, Irving. “1984: Enigmas of Power,” in 1984 Revisited: Totalitarianism in Our Century, edited by Irving Howe.
Harper & Row, 1983, pp. 3-18.
Howe, Irving, ed. 1984 Revisited: Totalitarianism in Our Century. New York: Harper and Row, 1983.
Kalechofsky, Roberta. George Orwell. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1973.
Myers, Valerie. George Orwell. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991.
Smith, Marcus. “The Wall of Blackness: A Psychological Approach to 1984,” in Modern Fiction Studies, Winter,
1968-69, pp. 42-33.
Watt, Ian. “Winston Smith: The Last Humanist,” in On Nineteen Eighty-Four. W. H. Freeman, 1983, pp. 103-13.
Woodcock, George. The Crystal Spirit: A Study of George Orwell. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1966.
Wykes, David. A Preface to Orwell. London & New York: Longman Group, Ltd., 1987.
For Further Reading
Chilton, Paul, and Aubrey Crispin, eds. Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1984. Comedia Publishing Group, 1983. Collection
57
of essays focusing on the relevance of Orwell’s novel in contemporary political and social life.
College Literature, Vol. XI, No. 1, 1984, pp. 1-113. Issue devoted to studies of 1984.
Gross, Miriam, ed. The World of George Orwell. Simon & Schuster, 1972. Collection of critical and biographical
essays.
Kazin, Alfred. “Not One of Us,” in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XXXI, no. 10, June 14, 1984, pp. 13-4, 16,
18. Kazin discusses the political nature of Orwell’s novel.
Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 21, No. 1, Spring 1975, pp. 3-136. Issue devoted to Orwell criticism.
Munk, Erica. “Love Is Hate: Women and Sex in 1984,” in Village Voice, Vol. XXVIII, No. 5, February 1, 1983, pp. 50-
2. Munk criticizes Orwell's novel for its inattention to the roles (or lack thereof) of women in Oceania.
Podhoretz, Norman. “If Orwell Were Alive Today,” in Harper’s, Vol. 266, No. 1592, January, 1983, pp. 30-2, 34-7.
Podhoretz, using the text of 1984 as evidence, claims Orwell for the neo-conservatives.
Watt, Ian. “Winston Smith: The Last Humanist,” in On Nineteen Eighty-Four, edited by Peter Stansky. W. H.
Freeman & Co., 1983, pp. 103-13. Watt describes Winston Smith as a humanist and his destruction at the hands of
the Party as the destruction of the values of humanism.
Woodcock, George. Remembering Orwell, edited by Stephen Wadhams. Penguin, 1984. Woodcock disagrees with
writers such as Podhoretz who claim Orwell for the neo-conservatives, placing him instead in a line of English literary
radicals including Jonathan Swift and Charles Dickens.
Connections and Further Reading:

Adaptations
Seven years after the publication of the novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four was made into a motion picture (produced by N.
Peter Rathvon; directed by Michael Anderson; screenplay by William T. Templeton and Ralph Bettison; presented as
a Holiday Film Production by Columbia Pictures in 1956). Released under the title 1984 with Edmond O'Brien, Jan
Sterling, and Michael Redgrave in the major roles, the film version was considered an overly ambitious artistic
undertaking. Critical reaction to the film was generally unfavorable, citing the creative difficulties in transferring the
thematic complexities of the novel to the screen adaptation. However, the film was considered partially successful in
capturing the ominous tone and paralyzing effect of Orwell's futuristic vision.
In 1984, preconceived to coincide and consequently capitalize on the arrival of apocalypse, a new screen version
was released by Atlantic Releasing Corporation (directed and written by Michael Radford; director of photography,
Roger Deakins; presented by Virgin Films/Umbrella-Rosenblum Films Production). Suffering from similar
circumstances as the original version, Radford's 1984 was greeted with mixed critical reception. Due primarily to the
inherent importance of language, or more specifically the corruption of language, in the sequential and thematic
58
structure of the novel, it seems apparent that Orwell's narrative technique does not translate well into visual terms.
Most interesting in the film were the exceptional performances by Richard Burton, in his last screen appearance,
Suzanne Hamilton, and especially John Hurt in the role of Winston Smith.
Connections and Further Reading: Media

Adaptations
1984 (1984), a very fine adaptation of George Orwell’s infamous novel, 1984, by director Michael Kadford,
features John Hurt and Richard Burton in his final screen performance.
Quotes
Essential Quotes: Essential Passage by

Character: Winston Smith
For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? For the future, for the
unborn. His mind hovered for a moment round the doubtful date on the page, and then fetched up with
a bump against the Newspeak word DOUBLETHINK. For the first time the magnitude of what he had
undertaken came home to him. How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature
impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him: or it
would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.
1984, Part 1, Chapter 7, p. 7 (Plume: New York)
Summary
Winston Smith is a low-level Party member who revises history so that past facts are aligned with the Party’s present
stance on issues and events. He likes his job, though he does not have much liking for the Party itself. However, up
until this point, he has kept his opinions to himself, as such views would surely alert the Thought Police and Winston
would be summarily carted away to prison. Winston lives by himself in a small apartment in Victory Mansions, a
complex situated in London in Oceania (once known as England). His neighbors are fellow Party members, who
address him as "comrade," reminiscent of Soviet Russia. His sparsely furnished accommodations include a
telescreen, which is a television screen that not only presents information from the Party twenty-four hours a day, but
also monitors citizens at home and out in public. This constant surveillance is reflected in the motto displayed
prominently on posters throughout the city: “Big Brother Is Watching You.” Big Brother is the affectionate title given
to the supreme leader of the party. All love and tribute is paid to Big Brother as the personification of the Party.
One day Winston strolls through the proletariat (“prole”) district. The proles are individuals who are not part of the
59
Party. Making up about eighty-five percent of the population, proles are not as strictly regulated as the Party
members. This differentiation has led to a strict class system that prevents Party members from any real interaction
with the proles. Thus it is a bit dangerous for Winston to be in the prole district, though not illegal since technically
there are no laws against doing so. Winston has a strange attraction to the proles and is keenly interested in their
lives outside of Party control.
Winston, browsing through a second-hand book shop, discovers a blank book, filled with cream-colored pages,
meant to be a journal or diary. On a whim, Winston pays two dollars and fifty cents for the book and takes it home.
He hides it in his desk in the alcove. The alcove, because of the curious nature of the construction of the apartment,
is out of sight of the telescreen. Thus, while he is seated at his desk, Winston is invisible, though he can still be
heard.
Winston decides he wants to use the book as a diary. Although keeping a diary is not illegal, Winston believes that it
would be punishable by death, should he be discovered. He writes the date—April 4, 1984—at the top. He is unsure
exactly why he wants to keep a diary. First of all, he is not even sure of the date. More importantly, whom is he
writing for? He decides he is writing for the future. With this realization, he knows the deep significance of what he is
doing. He is not sure exactly what this diary will accomplish. If nothing changes, no one will care. If things do change,
he thinks, his predicament would be meaningless.
Analysis
Winston Smith is presented as a paradox, as signalized by his name. “Winston” alludes to Winston Churchill, the
prime minister of Great Britain during World War II. Like Churchill, Winston will stand as a bulwark against the dark,
braving the forces of darkness and tyranny in an earthly, as well as a spiritual, battle. The name “Smith” is the most
common English surname, making Winston something of an Everyman, representative of the common people, going
about their day-to-day business while the war goes on around them. In this dual nature, the conflict is set up
between Winston the citizen-savior and Big Brother.
There are elements of the classic hero archetype in Winston. Separated from his parents at an early age, he is
raised in an alien culture, destined to be its savior, should he choose the calling. His magic talisman could be said to
be this diary, with which he will set the future free from tyranny. Akin to the Arthurian legend of the Fisher King,
Winston’s varicose veins are an unhealable wound, one which begins to improve once he connects with Julia. The
exercise of free will inherent in their affair is an attempt to break the power of the evil Party. However, Winston fails
in his quest in that he submits to torture, betrays Julia, and grows to love Big Brother.
The necessity for hiding this diary signals that danger of thought to the Party. Winston is intelligent and, more
importantly, introspective. He thinks, and therefore he is dangerous. The danger, as Winston knows, lies in the fact
that thought usually leads to action, even small, insignificant twitches that may alert the Thought Police that he is
contemplating rebellion. He has observed co-workers and passersby who, by small facial expressions, alerted him to
the possibility that they might be having thoughts that they consciously know are against the dictates of the Party.
Winston’s biggest fear, he later states, is that he will talk in his sleep, revealing his unconscious thoughts. Though
the common method of “crimestop” is used to stop anti-Party thoughts before they come to full flower, Winston
pursues his thoughts, contemplating the ramifications of the actions he dreams of taking.
The words that Winston first writes down are “Down with Big Brother.” This bold declaration is certain death. Winston
believes that even after his death, his diary may spark the future with a desire for freedom. He does not write for
himself; he writes for the future. He thus continues the hero motif in being willing to lay down his life for the good of
60
his people. He continues to write, knowing that each word is damning him in the eyes of the Party if, and when, he is
discovered. Though his official job is to revise history, his mission in keeping this diary is to record that most
dangerous of concepts: Truth.

Character: Julia
He felt her shoulders give a wriggle of dissent. She always contradicted him when he said anything of
this kind. She would not accept it as a law of nature that the individual is always defeated. In a way she
realized that she herself was doomed, that sooner or later the Thought Police would catch her and kill
her, but with another part of her mind she believed that it was somehow possible to construct a secret
world in which you could live as you chose. All you needed was luck and cunning and boldness. She
did not understand that there was no such thing as happiness, that the only victory lay in the far future,
long after you were dead, that from the moment of declaring war on the Party it was better to think of
yourself as a corpse.
Summary
After their first sexual encounter, Winston and Julia manage to meet again only once, at an abandoned church,
where they make love. In this encounter, Winston discovers more facts about Julia. She is twenty-six years old, a
machine operator in the Fiction department, and lives in a hostel with thirty other girls, whom she despises. She
does not think she is clever as she has no particular interest in reading the books she helps create. She makes a
great show of being a Party loyal, participating in the Junior Anti-Sex League.
On the side, Julia is anything but a loyal P arty member. She has been sexually active since she was sixteen, her
first lover being a sixty-year-old man of the inner Party, who later committed suicide in order to avoid arrest. Winston
notices that she is neither overtly against the Party nor particularly enthralled by it. Julia breaks the rules in order to
break the rules, simply because they deprive her of doing what she wants.
Winston shares with her about his wife, Katherine, who disappeared a year and a half after they were married. He
describes their life together as a cold and loveless marriage. Katherine followed the Party line that sex was only for
creating children. It is not for pleasure, especially for the woman. As such, Winston does not have any particular
feeling of loss. Julia is not bothered by the fact that he is a married man. Because the Party does not allow for
divorce, they both know that there is no chance of the two of them ever getting married.
Julia explains her theory that the Party does not approve of sex because it is an attempt to manipulate people into
using that pent-up sexual energy in fighting and in adoration of Big Brother. Thus, to her, sex is a means of getting
back at Big Brother.
Winston relates to Julia about a time when he and Katherine were walking along a cliff. He had a strong desire to
push his wife over the edge. He regrets now that he did not, though he is not sure that he could actually have
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convinced himself to do it. However, he knows that it would have made no difference, so he cannot actually win. He
states that some kinds of failure are better than other kinds.
Julia, he knows, does not agree with him. She cannot accept the premise that the individual is always defeated in a
fight against Big Brother. She knows that she herself is doomed to be caught and killed by the Thought Police.
Paradoxically, she is trying to create for herself her own secret world, one in which she can do what she wants,
provided she is lucky and smart enough. She cannot understand that such things will not bring happiness and that
true victory will only come long after death.
In the meantime, Julia insists on being alive. She rejects Winston’s fatalism that they will both eventually die at the
hands of the Party.
Analysis
Julia functions as a personification of free will, intent on going against the Party’s dictates and pursuing her own
course. However, she rebels, not for the good of society, but for her own pleasure. She wants to do what she wants
to do, and the Party is simply standing in her way.
From an early age, Julia has rejected the Party’s position that women are beings who exist merely to work and to
bear children for the Party. The notion that women are not to enjoy sex is a target of contempt for her, and one that
she has repeatedly endeavored to prove wrong. Her involvement with the Junior Anti-Sex League is symbolic of this
fight. By holding up the restrictions on sex, speaking out against it, lauding it as one of the highest principles of Big
Brother, Julia sets herself up as an intentional paradox, pursuing the very thing that she is supposedly fighting
against. By making the Anti-Sex League her chief concern, she is also naming it as a target. It is through sex that
Julia will fight against the repressions of the Party. By restricting pleasure, the Party has handed Julia a weapon to
fight against them. She will engage in sex, frequently and with enjoyment, to prove the Party wrong.
Yet Julia’s rebellion against Big Brother is not part of Winston’s fight for the destruction of the Party. She takes little
interest in his ramblings about the evils of Big Brother and is only halfheartedly eager to meet with O’Brien in order to
join the Brotherhood, which is the underground organization of freedom fighters. The Party is not, to her, a tyrannical
beast, but merely a barrier to her fulfilling her desires and wishes.
By using her body to rebel against Big Brother, Julia serves as a foil against which Winston is highlighted as the
intellectual reasons for fighting totalitarianism. Julia does not pay much attention to Winston when he speaks of the
logic behind resistance; in fact, she usually goes to sleep. She is willing to go along with his quest, solely because
she is physically attracted to him. Her notion of love is the fulfillment of physical needs freely with a person of one’s
choice. To Winston, love is a bonding of souls and intellects. With his wife, Katherine, he experiences neither
physical nor intellectual satisfaction. With Julia, he has at least accomplished the physical relationship. The marriage
of true minds is still out of his grasp.
Julia accepts that fact that they will be caught and put to death. She has resigned herself to this fact as the price she
pays for choosing her own course. To do what one wants, for one’s own benefit and one’s own pleasure, is to her the
highest good. She uses her “noble hedonism” for the good of herself. The possibility of others having the same
freedom does not seem to occur to her, and if it did, it is doubtful that she would be interested. Her stand against Big
Brother is a lonely one, and even Winston’s love cannot convince her to view their fight from a higher plane.
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Theme: Totalitarianism
"The proles are not human beings,” he said carelessly. “By 2050—earlier, probably—all real knowledge
of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer,
Shakespeare, Milton, Byron—they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not changed into something
contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will
change. How could you have a slogan like ‘freedom is slavery’ when the concept of freedom has been
abolished? 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.”
Summary
Winston, in his job at the Ministry of Truth, is in charge of revising the news to more accurately reflect the image that
the Party wants to project of history. Mostly, it is tedious work, rewriting data to match new quotas, changing news
reports of the war, and so on. Among his co-workers is Syme, who works in the Research Department. Syme is
writing the new eleventh edition of the Newspeak dictionary, to him a fascinating work to decrease the vocabulary of
the English language. At lunch one day in the canteen, eating the unappetizing meals served to the workers, Syme
joins Winston at his table. The conversation starts with Syme asking Winston of he has any razor blades. Winston
replies that he does not, though in fact he does, hoarding two new blades since the supply has dried up a long time
ago. Syme speaks of the recent hanging of prisoners, an event that is open to the public. In fact, the public is
encouraged to attend. While Syme goes into graphic detail about the hanging, and specifically about the hangings
as he thinks they should be carried out, Winston tries to avoid entering into the conversation.
Winston switches topics by asking Syme how the dictionary is coming along. This sparks Syme’s interest, and he
goes off on a detailed description again, but this time about the glories of Newspeak. He discusses how much
improved the language will be, ridding itself of the numerous adjectives and adverbs, narrowing them down to just
one or two. Syme laments Winston’s lack of appreciation for Newspeak, pointing out that in his news revisions,
Winston still has a tendency to lapse into Oldspeak. “You don’t grasp the beauty of the destruction of words,” Syme
tells him.
Syme then tells Winston that the whole purpose of Newspeak is to “narrow the range of thought.” Its final goal is to
make thought-crime (thinking independently) impossible, because there will be no words to express it. Syme states,
“The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.”
Syme points out that by the year 2050, no one will be able to understand the conversation that he and Winston are
now having, because of the destruction of words. Winston starts to protest, “Except the proles,” but stops himself,
feeling that this remark would be “unorthodox.”
Syme, however, knew what he was about to say and replies, “The proles are not human beings.” He goes on to
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rejoice that, by the year 2050, Oldspeak will have disappeared. The great classics of the English language—
Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Byron—will have been destroyed. They will have been rewritten into Newspeak and
thus mean something totally different. Syme says that even the Party slogans will change. Why say “Freedom is
slavery” when the concept of freedom has been abolished? All thought will be gone.
Analysis
Syme and Winston both are employed in the destruction of information. Syme is destroying vocabulary. Winston is
destroying history. Both these areas fall, ironically enough, in the humanities. The humanities cover the study and
preservation of what humans have said and thought. By the destruction of the humanities, the Party is destroying
what it is to be human. In this is the root of totalitarianism.
The third principle of Big Brother is “Ignorance is Strength.” Syme very bluntly elucidates on this concept. The goal of
the Party is to eliminate thought. It is not the individual citizen who gains strength through his ignorance. The being
that is strengthened is the totalitarian state. By controlling thought, the Party will control actions. By controlling
actions, the Party will control history. And in a circular function, by controlling history, the Party will control thought.
Language and history are just two areas that are controlled by the Party. From the beginning, when the narrator
states that the clock strikes thirteen, the reader is clued in to the fact that reality has changed, even down to the
measurement of time. Rather than the standard clock of two twelve-hour sections, all time is military time of one
twenty-four-hour cycle. This use of military time also reflects that military state of mind that all society functions
under. War is a necessary part of society, in order to either gain power or to show power. “War Is Peace.” Without
war, peace would destroy the power of the totalitarian system, which would then result in its overthrow: peace would
be war. Such is the reasoning of Big Brother, and to make language say the opposite is the Party's goal. Orwell is
thus the unintended creator of “political correctness.” The current usage of terms like “negative growth” instead of
“loss of profit” indicates that the power of language control is one of the many areas that Orwell saw with such clarity.
The control of actions is also part of this methodology. The redefinition of sex as solely for procreation, not to be
enjoyed, is a control of emotional energy away from the individual to the glorification of the state. The elimination of
emotion is not as desirable as the destruction of language. Thought can be more effectively control than emotion.
Therefore the state has chosen to merely reassign emotion for the good of the state. The devolution of sexual
passion and enjoyment to the mere animal instinct of reproduction takes away the humanness of the individual as
much as the destruction of thought and language.
It is for this reason that Julia chooses sex as her means of rebellion. Winston, on the other hand, chooses thought
for his means of attack. Julia, symbolizing the body, cannot effectively fight against the state. Animals have bodies,
and use them for attack and reproduction. But it is only humans who think, who reason, who reflect. In this is the
greatest danger, as Big Brother knows full well.
The most effective weapon against totalitarianism is thought, expressed in language. For this reason, to Winston,
the destruction of language is the most obvious sign of the point where the Party gains total victory.

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Theme: Free Will
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential
command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with
which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not
be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was
right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The
solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall toward
the earth’s center. With the feeling that he was speaking to O’Brien, and also that he was setting forth
an important axiom, he wrote:
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
Summary
Winston’s diary becomes the repository of all his “rebellious” thoughts. Though he thinks that O’Brien might be a
compatriot of his feelings, he does not yet have an opportunity or the nerve to approach him. In the relative seclusion
of his apartment, at his desk in the alcove that is not visible from the telescreen, Winston writes his reflections of
freedom and revolution.
He writes, “If there is hope, it lies with the proles.” The proles are not directly regulated as much as Party members
are. They have the freedom to think, read, and live according to their own desires, within the limits of their poverty.
Making up eighty-five percent of the population, the proles are seen by Winston as the possible force for change.
Yet, on the other hand, he realizes that this is unlikely, since the Party controls everything. Thus revolution is unlikely
to come from within.
Winston remembers one time walking down a street when he heard what he thought was a riot. Hoping that the
people were rising up at last, he hurried to the spot, only to find them arguing over pots and pans being sold at a
stall. Winston realizes that until the people become conscious, thinking human beings, they will not rebel. Sadly, he
realizes, they will not become conscious until after they rebel. They live like animals, which is exactly what the Party
wants them to do.
After reading a children’s history book, which he knew was a collection of Party lies, Winston tries to remember an
incident from his past. In his work he had come across a photograph of three men. These men were accused of
being traitors to the Party and Oceania, and had confessed to their crimes. The three men were then pardoned and
released. Winston saw them once in the Chestnut Tree Café, their dejected faces showing that they knew they were
doomed. Indeed, they were eventually arrested again and executed. The photograph Winston had found was proof
that the confessions had been lies.
In frustration, Winston writes in his diary, “I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY.” He thinks that perhaps he
is a lunatic, the only one to think the way he does. He worries, however, not so much that he is a lunatic, but that he
is wrong.
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The Party tells the people to reject what they see and hear. But Winston knows that he is right and that Big Brother is
wrong. No matter what lies they tell, Winston has the power to disbelieve. Winston writes in his diary, “Freedom is
the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
Analysis
The concept of free will, an individual’s liberty to make his or her own choices, is a threat to the totalitarian state. This
is presented throughout 1984 as free will in one’s actions, thoughts, and information. Free will encompasses not only
a choice, but also a choice made on the access to true information.
Winston, as a Party employee involved in the rewriting of history, is well aware of the Party’s manipulation of the
past. “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” By denying the
individual access to accurate information of current events and history, the Party is taking away his or her power to
make decisions based on what is happening in the world around him, as well as what has happened in the past. To
learn from the mistakes of the past, as well as benefit from its wisdom, the average citizen is thus able to effectively
evaluate the state. As the saying goes, “History is bound to repeat itself.” By rewriting history into that which has
never happened, Big Brother is preventing history from thus repeating itself. By controlling the past, he thus controls
the future.
Democracy cannot exist without an accurate presentation of history. By depriving the people of the knowledge of the
past, the Party thus effectively cuts off any budding democracy at its roots. The free will of the people is denied
them.
By controlling the language, the state also controls the expression of thought. Though it cannot effectively prevent a
person from thinking, the state can take away the words necessary to express those concepts, either in thought or in
words. No words, no thoughts. No thoughts, no choice. Free will is thus destroyed.
Winston places his hopes in the proles, the common people who live outside the strict dictates of the Party but not
totally out of the control of Big Brother. Making up eighty-five percent of the population, Winston feels that they could
easily overthrow the state if they chose. The problem is, he realizes, is that they have lost not only the right to
choose but the power to choose. With the control of Big Brother of all information, the proles have been living almost
hand-to-mouth, struggling for some means of existence beyond mere survival. They have become content with the
way things are. They do not hope for more, because they have no concept of “more.”
Julia has a different view of free will than does Winston. To her, free will is simply the right to do what she wants.
She wants to control her own body, and she exhibits this by what would be called by the state promiscuity. This is
her power of resistance. However, it is limited only to herself. Her free will is only for Julia, with no thought of
whether or not others have free will. To Julia, others are inconsequential, except when they are involved in her
desire to exercise her own choices.
Winston, however, does have a higher view of free will. The individual will not have free will until the masses have
free will. It is for this reason that he is writing this diary. Hopefully, if he does not survive, this diary will be a message
of hope to future generations—a message of making one’s own choices and also participating in the choices made
by the government and the country as a whole.
Winston thus states that the whole concept of free will lies not in the right to do what one wants to do but to do what
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one ought to do. It is in making the choice for right. It is standing against that which is wrong, whatever its source.
Quotes: Important Quotations

The Power of Big Brother and the Party
“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.” (Part 1, Chapter 1)
“In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently against the rung
of his chair. The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the
contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. 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.” (Part 1, Chapter 1)
“It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one's own
body. Even now, in spite of the gin, the dull ache in his belly made consecutive thought impossible. And it is the
same, he perceived, in all seemingly heroic or tragic situations. On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a
sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the
universe, and even when you are not paralyzed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment
struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth.” (Part 1, Chapter 8)
“For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by
poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they
would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long
run, a hierarchical society was only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance.” (The Theory and Practice of
Oligarchical Collectivism; Part 2, Chapter 9)
“Reality only exerts its pressure through the needs of everyday life—the need to eat and drink, to get shelter and
clothing, to avoid swallowing poison or stepping out of top-story windows, and the like. Between life and death, and
between physical pleasure and physical pain, there is still a distinction, but that is all. Cut off from contact with the
outer world, and with the past, the citizen of Oceania is like a man in interstellar space, who has no way of knowing
which direction is up and which is down. The rulers of such a state are absolute, as the Pharaohs or the Caesars
could not be. They are obliged to prevent their followers from starving to death in numbers large enough to be
inconvenient, and they are obliged to remain at the same low level of military technique as their rivals; but once that
minimum is achieved, they can twist reality into whatever shape they choose.” (The Theory and Practice of
“The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so
long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are
oppressed.” (The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism; Part 2, Chapter 9)
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“At the apex of the pyramid comes Big Brother. Big Brother is infallible and all-powerful. Every success, every
achievement, every victory, every scientific discovery, all knowledge, all wisdom, all happiness, all virtue, are held to
issue directly from his leadership and inspiration. Nobody has ever seen Big Brother. He is a face on the hoardings,
a voice on the telescreen. We may be reasonably sure that he will never die, and there is already considerable
uncertainty as to when he was born. Big Brother is the guise in which the Party chooses to exhibit itself to the world.
His function is to act as a focusing point for love, fear, and reverence, emotions which are more easily felt towards
an individual than towards an organization. Below Big Brother comes the Inner Party. Its numbers limited to six
millions, or something less than 2 per cent of the population of Oceania. Below the Inner Party comes the Outer
Party, which, if the Inner Party is described as the brain of the State, may be justly likened to the hands. Below that
come the dumb masses whom we habitually refer to as 'the proles', numbering perhaps 85 per cent of the
population. In the terms of our earlier classification, the proles are the Low: for the slave population of the equatorial
lands who pass constantly from conqueror to conqueror, are not a permanent or necessary part of the structure.”
(The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism; Part 2, Chapter 9)
“Winston did not look at him again, but the tormented, skull-like face was as vivid in his mind as though it had been
straight in front of his eyes. Suddenly he realized what was the matter. The man was dying of starvation. The same
thought seemed to occur almost simultaneously to everyone in the cell. There was a very faint stirring all the way
round the bench. The eyes of the chinless man kept flitting towards the skull-faced man, then turning guiltily away,
then being dragged back by an irresistible attraction. Presently he began to fidget on his seat. At last he stood up,
waddled clumsily across the cell, dug down into the pocket of his overalls, and, with an abashed air, held out a grimy
piece of bread to the skull-faced man. There was a furious, deafening roar from the telescreen. The chinless man
jumped in his tracks. The skull-faced man had quickly thrust his hands behind his back, as though demonstrating to
all the world that he refused the gift.” (Part 3, Chapter 1)
“If he could have moved he would have stretched out a hand and laid it on O’Brien’s arm. He had never loved him so
deeply as at this moment, and not merely because he had stopped the pain. The old feeling, that at bottom it did not
matter whether O’Brien was a friend or an enemy, had come back. O’Brien was a person who could be talked to.
Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.” (Part 3, Chapter 2)
“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.
Even those three miserable traitors in whose innocence you once believed—Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford—in
the end we broke them down. I took part in their interrogation myself. I saw them gradually worn down, whimpering,
groveling, weeping—and in the end it was not with pain or fear, only with penitence. By the time we had finished with
them they were only the shells of men. There was nothing left in them except sorrow for what they had done, and
love of Big Brother. It was touching to see how they loved him. They begged to be shot quickly, so that they could
die while their minds were still clean.” (Part 3, Chapter 2)
“The Party seeks power for its own sake. 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. What pure power means you will
understand presently. 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
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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.
Now do you begin to understand me?” (Part 3, Chapter 3)
Loyalty and Betrayal
The Family
“Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the
Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency
whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything
connected with it. … 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.” (Part 1, Chapter 2)
"'Who denounced you?' said Winston. 'It was my little daughter,' said Parsons with a sort of doleful pride. 'She
listened at the keyhole. Heard what I was saying, and nipped off to the patrols the very next day. Pretty smart for a
nipper of seven, eh? I don't bear her any grudge for it. In fact I'm proud of her. It shows I brought her up in the right
spirit, anyway.'" (Part 3, Chapter 1)
The Ideal Party Member
"A Party member is required to have not only the right opinions, but the right instincts. Many of the beliefs and
attitudes demanded of him are never plainly stated, and could not be stated without laying bare the contradictions
inherent in Ingsoc. If he is a person naturally orthodox (in Newspeak, a goodthinker), he will in all circumstances
know, without taking thought, what is the true belief or the desirable emotion. But in any case an elaborate mental
training, undergone in childhood and grouping itself round the Newspeak words crimestop, blackwhite, and
doublethink, makes him unwilling and unable to think too deeply on any subject whatever.” (The Theory and Practice
of Oligarchical Collectivism; Part 2, Chapter 9)
Winston Betrays Julia
"The mask was closing on his face. The wire brushed his cheek. And then—no, it was not relief, only hope, a tiny
fragment of hope. Too late, perhaps too late. But he had suddenly understood that in the whole world there was just
one person to whom he could transfer his punishment—one body that he could thrust between himself and the rats.
And he was shouting frantically, over and over: 'Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don't care what you do to
her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!'" (Part 3, Chapter 5)
The Degradation of Language
"'We're geting the language into its final shape—the shape it's going to have when nobody speaks anything else.
When we've finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job
is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words—scores of them, every day. We're cutting the
language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won't contain a single word that will become obsolete before the
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year 2050.'" (Part 1, Chapter 5)
"As he watched the eyeless face with the jaw moving rapidly up and down, Winston had a curious feeling that this
was not a real human being but some kind of dummy. It was not the man's brain that was speaking; it was his larynx.
The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise
uttered in unconsciousness, like the quaking of a duck." (Part 1, Chapter 5)
"In Newspeak, euphony outweighed every consideration other than exactitude of meaning. Regularity of grammar
was always sacrificed to it when it seemed necessary. And rightly so, since what was required, above all for political
purposes, were short clipped words of unmistakable meaning which could be uttered rapidly and which roused the
minimum of echoes in the speaker's mind." (Appendix: The Principles of Newspeak)
Complicity
The quotations collected below are all examples of the complicity of individuals in the Party's oppressive practices.
Perhaps the most interesting decision on Orwell's part, as can be seen above, is to make each individual complicit in
the destruction of that which makes him unique, that which he loves. Syme, the philologist, destroys language;
Winston, who pines for truth, falsifies records day-in and day-out in the Ministry of Truth; Julia, who is consistently
characterized by her sexuality, volunteers for the Junior Anti-Sex League. Nearly every character encountered in the
novel is complicit in the destruction of the thing he/she loves or identifies with most. (Note: This is closely tied to the
concept of seriality, found below.)
"Parsons was Winston's fellow employee at the Ministry of Truth. He 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 knew that in the cubicle next to him the
little woman with sandy hair toiled day in, day out, simply at tracking down and deleting from the press the names of
people who had been vaporized and were therefore considered never to have existed. There was a certain fitness in
this, since her own husband had been vaporized a couple of years earlier. And a few cubicles away a mild,
ineffectual dreamy creature named Ampleforth, with very hairy ears and a surprising talend for juggling with rhymes
and meters, was engaged in producing garbled versions—definitive texts, they were called—of poems which had
become ideologically offensive but which for one reason or another were to be retained in the anthologies." (Part 1,
Chapter 4)
"Syme was a philologist, a specialist in Newspeak. Indeed, he was one of the enormous team of experts now
engaged in compiling the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak dictionary." (Part 1, Chapter 5) "'Actually I am that sort of
girl, to look at. I'm good at games. I was a troop leader in the Spies. I do voluntary work three evenings a week for
the Junior Anti-Sex League. Hours and hours I've spent pasting their bloody rot all over London. I always carry one
end of a banner in the processions. I always look cheerful and I never shirk anything. Always yell with the crowd,
that's what I say. It's the only way to be safe.'" (Part 2, Chapter 2)
"In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They
could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of
what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening."
(Part 2, Chapter 5)
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"In so far as he had time to remember it, he was not troubled by the fact that every word he murmured into the
speakwrite, every stroke of his ink pencil, was a deliberate lie. He was as anxious as anyone else in the Department
that the forgery should be perfect." (Part 2, Chapter 9)
"In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that
item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening
or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones; but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the
technique of doublethink. Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that the war
is real, and that it is bound to end victoriously, with Oceania the undisputed master of the entire world." (The Theory
and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism; Part 2, Chapter 9)
"In our society, those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from
seeing the world as it is. In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion: the more intelligent, the
less sane." (The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism; Part 2, Chapter 9)
Seriality
Seriality is a concept explored by Jean-Paul Sartre in his Critique de la raison dialectique or Critique of Dialectical
Reason, in which he describes seriality as a state of existence in which a collection of people are unified by
circumstance but fail to identify with each other. His classically cited example of a series is a collection of individuals
waiting for a bus. Though they are all waiting for the bus together, none of the individuals identifies with the
collection. This kind of collection is called a series, whereas Sartre calls a collection that does identify with itself
a group. Series are everywhere in 1984, and Orwell uses them to demonstrate the importance of communication in
collective action. Through the themes of seriality and complicity, Orwell urges his audiences to understand that no
social system can function without the tacit consent of its constituents. Many authors have explored this topic, but
French-Algerian writer Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth is an excellent starting point for anyone interested
in this topic. Other examples of seriality in 1984:
The lunch line in the cafeteria
The telescreen-guided exercise routines
"And this hall, with its fifty workers or thereabouts, was only one subsection, a single cell, as it were, in the huge
complexity of the Records Department. Beyond, above, below, were other swarms of workers engaged in an
unimaginable multitude of jobs." (Part 1, Chapter 4)
"In the cubicle across the way Comrade Tillotson was still crouching secretively over his speakwrite. He raised his
head for a moment: again the hostile spectacle-flash. Winston wondered whether Comrade Tillotson was engaged
on the same job as himself. It was perfectly possible. So tricky a piece of work would never be entrusted to a single
person; on the other hand, to turn it over to a committee would be to admit openly that an at of fabrication was taking
place. Very likely as may as a dozen people were now working away on rival versions of what Big Brother had
actually said." (Part 1, Chapter 4)
"He looked round the canteen. A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of innumerable
bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close together that you sat with elbows touching; bent spoons,
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dented trays, coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy, grime in every crack; and a sourish, composite smell of bad
gin and bad coffee and metallic stew and dirty clothes." (Part 1, Chapter 5)
"His heart had leapt. It's started! he had thought. A riot! The proles are breaking loose at last! When he had reached
the spot it was to see a mob of two or three hundred women crowding around the stalls of a street market, with faces
as tragic as though they had been the doomed passengers on a sinking ship. But at this moment the general despair
broke down into a multitude of individual quarrels. ... And yet, just for a moment, what almost frightening power had
sounded in that cry from only a few hundred throats! Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything
that mattered? Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot
become conscious." "The ideal set up by the Party was 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." (Part 1, Chapter 7)
"...But before death (nobody spoke of such things, yet everybody knew of them) there was the routine of
confession..." (Part 1, Chapter 8)
"You will have three or four contacts, who will be renewed from time to time as they disappear. As this was your first
contact, it will be preserved. When you receive orders, they will come from me. If we find it necessary to
communicate with you, it will be through Martin. When you are finally caught, you will confess. That is unavoidable.
But you will have very little to confess, other than your own actions. You will not be able to betray more than a
handful of unimportant people." (Part 2, Chapter 8)
"The Brotherhood cannot be wiped out because it is not an organization in the ordinary sense. Nothing holds it
together except an idea which is indestructible." (Part 2, Chapter 8)
"A deep and as it were secret sigh went through the Department. A mighty deed, which could never be mentioned,
had been achieved." (Part 2, Chapter 9)
"It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the
people under the sky were also very much the same—everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of
millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and
yet almost exactly the same—people who had never learned to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies
and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world." (Part 2, Chapter 9)
"The instant that the demonstration was over he went straight to the Ministry of Truth, though the time was now
nearly twenty-three hours. The entire staff of the Ministry had done likewise. The orders already issuing from the
telescreens, recalling them to their posts, were hardly necessary." (Part 2, Chapter 9) Note: This is particularly
important because it shows that the workers of the Ministry of Truth individually recognize the falsification of facts,
even if they do not recognize this collectively (by stating it outwardly).
Information Control, Memory, and Identity
"He wondered again for whom he was writing the diary. For the future, for the past—for an age that might be
imaginary. And in front of him there lay not death but annihilation. The diary would be reduced to ashes and himself
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to vapor. Only the Thought Police would read what he had written, before they wiped it out of existence and out of
memory. How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled
on a piece of paper, could physically survive? ... He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear.
But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard
but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage." (Part 1, Chapter 2)
"If the party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened—that, surely, was
more terrifying than mere torture or death. ... And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all
records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party
slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' ... The past, he reflected, had not merely
been altered, it had been actually destroyed. For how could you establish even the most obvious fact when there
existed no record outside your own memory?" (Part 1, Chapter 3)
"Sometimes, indeed, you could put your finger on a definite lie. It was not true, for example, as was claimed in the
Party history books, that the Party had invented airplanes. He remembered airplanes since his earliest childhood.
But you could prove nothing. There was never any evidence." (Part 1, Chapter 3)
"As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of the Times had been
assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed
on the files in its stead. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books,
periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound tracks, cartoons, photographs—to every kind of literature or
documentation which might conceivable hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute
by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by
documentary evidence to have been correct" (Part 1, Chapter 4)
"It was true that there was no such person as Comrade Ogilvy, but a few lines of print and a couple of faked
photographs would soon bring him into existence." (Part 1, Chapter 4)
"Was he, then, alone in the possession of a memory? ... He meditated resentfully on the physical texture of life. ...
Why should one feel it to be so intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been
different?" (Part 1, Chapter 5)
"In the end the Party would announce that two and two make five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable
that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of
experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies
was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they
might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that
the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is
controllable—what then?" (Part 1, Chapter 7)
"And when memory failed and written records were falsified—when that happened, the claim of the party to have
improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could
exist, any standard against which it could be tested." (Part 1, Chapter 8) "He fell asleep murmuring "Sanity is not
statistical," with the feeling that this remark contained in it a profound wisdom." (Part 2, Chapter 9)
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"The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but
survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree
upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records, and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it
follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it. It also follows that though the past is alterable, it
never has been altered in any specific instance. For when it has been re-created in whatever shape is needed at the
moment, then this new version is the past, and no different past can ever have existed." (The Theory and Practice of
"'Comrade! Officer!' he cried. 'You don't have to take me to that place! Haven't I told you everything already? What
else is it you want to know? There's nothing I wouldn't confess, nothing! Just tell me what it is and I'll confess it
straight off. Write it down and I'll sign it—anything! Not Room 101!'" (Part 3, Chapter 1)
"It was easier to confess everything and implicate everybody. Besides, in a sense it was all true. It was true that he
had been the enemy of the Party, and in the eyes of the Party there was no distinction between the thought and the
deed." (Part 3, Chapter 2)
"When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same
thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.
Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party,
which is collective and immortal." (Part 3, Chapter 4)
Identity
"It was assumed that when he was not working, eating, or sleeping he would be taking part in some kind of
communal recreations; to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was
always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife, it was called, meaning individualism and
eccentricity." (Part 1, Chapter 8)
"'Do you understand that even if he survives, it may be as a different person? We may be obliged to give him a new
identity. His face, his movements, the shape of his hands, the color of his hair—even his voice would be different.
And you yourself might have become a different person. Our surgeons can alter people beyond recognition.
Sometimes it is necessary. Sometimes we even amputate a limb." (Part 2, Chapter 8)
"'I think I exist,' he said wearily. 'I am conscious of my own identity. I was born, and I shall die. I have arms and legs.
I occupy a particular point in space.'" (Part 3, Chapter 2) Note: This relates very closely to the ideas of Descartes. In
fact, "I think I exist" translates into the Latin cogito sum, a version of Descartes' cogito ergo sum(I think, therefore I
am) with implied correlation.
Doublethink
"All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control,' they called it; in
Newspeak, 'doublethink.' ...that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once
again to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word
'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink." (Part 1, Chapter 3)
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"In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that
item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening
or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones; but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the
technique of doublethink. Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that the war
is real, and that it is bound to end victoriously, with Oceania the undisputed master of the entire world." (The Theory
and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism; Part 2, Chapter 9)
"Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both
of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is
playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The
process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be
unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. Doublethink lies at the very heart of
Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that
goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has
become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it
is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies
—all this is indispensably necessary." (The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism; Part 2, Chapter 9)
"He pushed the picture out of his mind. It was a false memory. He was troubled by false memories occasionally."
(Part 3, Chapter 6)
Sex
"Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind. He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon. He
would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would ravish her and cut her
throat at the moment of climax. Better than before, moreover, he realized why it was that he hated 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." (Part 1, Chapter 1)
"What overwhelmed him in that instant was admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown her clothes aside.
With its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as thought Big
Brother and the Party and the Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of
the arm." (Part 1, Chapter 3)
"There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and
entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers, containing almost nothing except sport, crime,
and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed
entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator. There was even a whole
sub-section - Pornosec, it was called in Newspeak—engaged in producing the lowest kind of pornography, which
was sent out in sealed packets and which no Party member, other than those who worked on it, was permitted to
look at." (Part 1, Chapter 4)
"The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and women from forming loyalties which it might not be able to
control. Its real, undeclared purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act. Not love so much as eroticism
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was the enemy, inside marriage as well as outside it. all marriages between Party members had to be approved by a
committee appointed for the purpose, and—though the principle was never clearly stated—permission was always
refused if the couple concerned gave the impression of being physically attracted to one another. The only
recognized purpose of marriage was to beget children for the service of the Party. Sexual intercourse was to be
looked on as a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema." (Part 1, Chapter 6)
"The sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion." (Part 1, Chapter 6)
"Not merely the love of one person, but the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire: that was the force that
would tear the party to pieces. ... Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against
the party. It was a political act." (Part 2, Chapter 2)
"Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner meaning of the Party's sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex
instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control and which therefore had to be destroyed if
possible. What was ore important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could
be transformed into war fever and leader worship." (Part 2, Chapter 3)
"But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one
takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an anual formality like the renewal of a
ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon in now. There will be no loyalty, except
loyalty toward the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother." (Part 3, Chapter 3)
Sexual Language and Imagery
"On the sixth day of Hate Week, after the processions, the speeches, the shouting, the singing, the banners, the
posters, the films, the waxworks, the rolling of drums and squealing of trumpets, the tramp of marching feet, the
grinding of the caterpillars of tanks, the roar of massed planes, the booming of guns—after six days of this, when the
great orgasm was quivering to its climax and the general hatred of Eurasia had boiled up into such delirium that if the
crowd could have got their hands on the two thousand Eurasian war criminals who were to be publicly hanged on the
last day of the proceedings, they would unquestionably have torn them to pieces—at just this moment it had been
announced that Oceania was not after all at war with Eurasia. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Eurasia was an
ally." (Part 2, Chapter 9)
Short-Answer Quizzes
Short-Answer Quizzes: Part 1, Chapter 1

Questions and Answers
QUIZ QUESTIONS
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1. What phrase appears on the posters in Winston Smith’s building?
2. Through what instrument do the Thought Police watch people?
3. Of what province of Oceania is London the “chief city”?
4. What is the official language of Oceania?
5. What are the three slogans of the Party?
6. What are the four Ministries of the Party?
7. Who is featured in every Two Minutes Hate?
8. With what two countries is Oceania intermittently at war?
9. What phrase does Winston write over and over in his diary?
10. What is “the essential crime that contained all others in itself”?
QUIZ ANSWERS
1. The phrase that appears on the posters is “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.”
2. The Thought Police watch people through the telescreen.
3. London is the chief city of Airstrip One.
4. The official language of Oceania is Newspeak.
5. The three slogans of the Party are “WAR IS PEACE,” “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY,” and “IGNORANCE IS
FREEDOM.”
6. The four Ministries are the Ministry of Truth (Minitrue), the Ministry of Peace (Minipax), the Ministry of Love
(Miniluv), and the Ministry of Plenty (Miniplenty).
7. Emmanuel Goldstein is featured in every Two Minutes Hate.
8. Oceania is intermittently at war with Eurasia and Eastasia.
9. Winston writes “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER.”
10. The “essential crime” is thoughtcrime.
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QUIZ QUESTIONS
1. What are citizens of Oceania supposed to call one another?
2. Of what organization are the Parsons children wearing uniforms?
3. On what committee is Tom Parsons a leading member?
4. What name does Mrs. Parsons’s son call Winston after shooting him with the catapult?
5. What does O’Brien say in Winston’s dream?
6. Where does the voice on the telescreen say Oceania’s forces have just won a victory?
7. What ration is being reduced?
8. What song plays after the reduced ration is announced?
9. What word appears behind the torn poster Winston sees from his window?
10. Why does Winston place a grain of dust on his diary?
QUIZ ANSWERS
1. Citizens of Oceania are supposed to call one another “comrade.”
2. The Parsons children are wearing the uniforms of the Spies.
3. Tom Parsons is a leading member of the Sports Committee.
4. Mrs. Parsons’s son calls Winston “Goldstein.”
5. O’Brien says, “We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.”
6. The voice on the telescreen says Oceania’s forces have just won a victory in South India.
7. The chocolate ration is being reduced.
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8. The song that plays after the reduced ration announcement is “Oceania, ’Tis for Thee.”
9. The word that appears behind the poster is INGSOC.
10. Winston places the grain of dust on his diary so that he will know if someone moves the diary.

QUIZ QUESTIONS
1. Which three people does Winston see in his dream?
2. About how old was Winston when his parents disappeared?
3. What does Winston call the pasture in his recurring dreams?
4. What word does Winston wake up with on his lips?
5. On what city does Winston remember an atomic bomb having fallen?
6. What Party slogan begins “Who controls the past…”?
7. What is the Newspeak word for “reality control”?
8. In what decade does Winston think he remembers first hearing of Big Brother?
9. What is the Oldspeak term for Ingsoc?
10. What does the Party falsely claim to have invented?
QUIZ ANSWERS
1. Winston sees his mother, his sister, and the dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department.
2. Winston was ten or eleven when his parents disappeared.
3. Winston calls the pasture in his dreams “the Golden Country.”
4. Winston wakes up with the word “Shakespeare” on his lips.
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5. Winston remembers an atomic bomb falling on Colchester.
6. The slogan is “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
7. The Newspeak word for “reality control” is doublethink.
8. Winston thinks he remembers first hearing of Big Brother in the 1960s.
9. The Oldspeak term for Ingsoc is “English Socialism.”
10. The Party falsely claims to have invented airplanes.
Short-Answer Quizzes: Part 1, Chapters 4

and 5 Questions and Answers
QUIZ QUESTIONS
1. What are memory holes?
2. Who is Ampleforth?
3. Who is Comrade Ogilvy?
4. What work does Syme do in the Research Department?
5. What does Syme say about the proles?
6. What is duckspeak?
7. Who used to frequent the Chestnut Tree Café?
8. What do both Syme and Parsons ask Winston?
9. Who does Winston believe might be spying on him?
10. What is facecrime?
QUIZ ANSWERS
1. Memory holes are the slits in the walls of the Ministry of Truth through which employees send documents and
waste paper to the furnaces.
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2. Ampleforth is a coworker of Winston’s whose job is to produce “definitive texts” of poems—that is, to rectify
poems to reflect the Party’s ideology.
3. Comrade Ogilvy is a loyal soldier of the Party who Winston invents for the Order of the Day he has been given
to rectify.
4. Syme is a philologist with a specialty in Newspeak who is helping to compile the Eleventh Edition of the
Newspeak dictionary.
5. Syme says the proles are not human beings.
6. Duckspeak is a Newspeak word that means “to quack like a duck”; it can be used as either insult or praise.
7. Discredited former Party leaders used to gather at the Chestnut Tree Café before they were purged.
8. Both Syme and Parsons ask Winston if he has any razor blades.
9. Winston believes the girl with dark hair might be spying on him.
10. Facecrime is Newspeak for the punishable offense of having an improper expression on one’s face.

QUIZ QUESTIONS
1. What does Winston believe is a person’s own worst enemy?
2. What is artsem?
3. What was the one thing Winston found unendurable about being married to Katharine?
4. What memory torments Winston even after he writes it in his diary?
5. Where does Winston believe hope lies?
6. What is the Party’s slogan regarding proles?
7. Who were Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford?
8. What is proved by the photograph Winston came across in 1973?
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9. Who does Winston realize he is writing his diary for?
10. What does Winston write that freedom is?
QUIZ ANSWERS
1. Winston believes a person’s own worst enemy is his or her nervous system, which could betray inner feelings
or thoughts at any time.
2. Artsem is Newspeak for artificial insemination, which is the only method by which the Junior Anti-Sex League
believes children should be conceived.
3. The one thing Winston found unendurable about being married to Katharine was sex.
4. Winston is tormented by the memory of having slept with an elderly prostitute.
5. Winston believes that hope lies with the proles.
6. The slogan is “Proles and animals are free.”
7. Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford were the only surviving original members of the Revolution (apart from Big
Brother); Rutherford was a caricaturist. The three men were pardoned of the crimes to which they confessed
and reinstated in the Party, but they were later rearrested and executed after confessing again.
8. The photograph proves that the confessions of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford were false.
9. Winston realizes he is writing his diary for O’Brien.
10. Winston writes that “freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.”

QUIZ QUESTIONS
1. What is ownlife?
2. What is a “steamer”?
3. What is the “one public event to which the proles paid serious attention”?
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4. Why is the old man in the pub angry with the young bartender?
5. What is the main thing Winston wants to find out from the old man in the pub?
6. To what does Winston compare the proles because of their ability to “see small objects but not large ones”?
7. What appeals to Winston about the glass paperweight he buys at the junk shop?
8. What surprises Winston most about the room above Mr. Charrington’s shop?
9. Which church is depicted in the print Mr. Charrington shows Winston?
10. What does Winston think “the place where there is no darkness” refers to?
QUIZ ANSWERS
1. Ownlife is Newspeak for the “individualism and eccentricity” suggested by a person’s choice to spend time
alone instead of engaging in communal recreations.
2. A “steamer” is what the proles call a rocket bomb.
3. This event is the lottery.
4. The old man is angry because he wants a pint of beer, but the bartender will only serve liters and half liters, as
is now standard practice.
5. Winston wants to find out if the old man thinks life was better or worse before the Revolution.
6. Winston compares the proles to ants.
7. The paperweight appeals to Winston because of its “apparent uselessness” and because it comes from an
era entirely unlike his own.
8. The room has no telescreen.
9. The print depicts St. Clement’s Dane.
10. Winston thinks this phrase refers to “the imagined future, which one would never see, but which, by
foreknowledge, one could mystically share in.”

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QUIZ QUESTIONS
1. How does Winston think the girl with dark hair probably got her injury?
2. What two possibilities does Winston consider before opening the note given to him by the girl with dark hair?
3. What does the note actually say?
4. Why doesn’t Winston shirk his evening at the Community Center even though he desperately wants to be
alone?
5. Why does Winston no longer believe the girl might be laying a trap for him?
6. What does Winston feel is the “worst and likeliest” of all the possible explanations for why he doesn’t see the
girl for three days?
7. Where does the girl tell Winston to meet her?
8. What church does Winston recognize while waiting for the girl?
9. What event do Winston and the girl watch unfold along with the rest of the crowd?
10. What station does the girl tell Winston to go to on Sunday afternoon?
QUIZ ANSWERS
1. Winston thinks she probably crushed her hand while turning one of the kaleidoscopes used to produce novels
in the Fiction Department.
2. Winston thinks the note must be a message either from the Thought Police or from an underground
organization like the Brotherhood.
3. The note says “I love you.”
4. Winston’s will to live has been revived by the girl’s note, and he decides not to take any unnecessary risks
now that he has something to live for.
5. Winston no longer believes the girl might be laying a trap for him because of how frightened she seemed
when she gave him the note.
6. Winston feels the worst and likeliest possibility is that the girl has changed her mind and decided to avoid him.
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7. The girl tells Winston to meet her near the monument in Victory Square.
8. Winston recognizes St. Martin’s Church.
9. Winston and the girl watch a convoy of trucks transporting Eurasian prisoners pass.
10. The girl tells Winston to go to Paddington Station.

QUIZ QUESTIONS
1. Why is the countryside dangerous even though there are no telescreens?
2. How did Julia first discover her hideout?
3. What does the red sash Julia wears around her waist signify?
4. What does Julia take out of the pocket of her overalls?
5. What does Julia say attracted her to Winston?
6. What does the field at the edge of the wood remind Winston of?
7. What does Winston wonder about the thrush he and Julia stop to listen to?
8. What does Winston tell Julia he hates?
9. What force does Winston believe has the power to destroy the Party?
10. What type of act does Winston feel sleeping with Julia was?
QUIZ ANSWERS
1. The countryside is dangerous because of the presence of hidden microphones and patrols who question Party
members and examine their papers.
2. Julia first discovered her hideout when she got lost on a community hike.
3. Julia’s sash is the emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League.

85
4. Julia takes a bar of black-market chocolate out of the pocket of her overalls.
5. Julia was attracted by something in Winston’s face that told her he was against the Party.
6. The field reminds Winston of the Golden Country he sees in his dreams.
7. Winston wonders why the bird sings and who it sings for.
8. Winston tells Julia he hates purity and goodness.
9. Winston believes that sexual desire has the power to destroy the Party.
10. Winston feels that it was a political act.

QUIZ QUESTIONS
1. Where do Winston and Julia meet for their second tryst?
2. What does Julia call the type of conversation she and Winston have while walking down the street together?
3. What does Julia convince Winston to spend one evening a week doing?
4. Where does Julia live?
5. What subsection of the Fiction Department was Julia chosen to work in because of her good character?
6. Why don’t Winston and Julia consider getting married?
7. What does the Newspeak word goodthinkful mean?
8. Why does the Party want to repress people’s sexual desires?
9. What does Winston tell Julia he almost did on a summer afternoon eleven years ago?
10. At the end of the chapter, what does Winston feel Julia is too young to understand?
QUIZ ANSWERS
86
1. Winston and Julia meet in the ruins of a church in an abandoned part of the countryside where an atomic
bomb fell thirty years before.
2. Julia calls this type of conversation “talking by installments.”
3. Julia convinces Winston to do part-time munition work, screwing bomb fuse parts together in a workshop.
4. Julia lives in a hostel with thirty other women.
5. Julia was chosen to work in Pornosec, a subsection nicknamed “Muck House,” producing cheap pornographic
booklets to sell to proles.
6. Winston and Julia don’t consider getting married for two reasons: Winston is still technically married, and a
committee would never approve his marriage to Julia because the two are obviously attracted to one another.
7. Goodthinkful means that someone is “naturally orthodox, incapable of thinking a bad thought.”
8. The Party wants to repress people’s sexual desires so that they can channel that repressed energy into
enthusiasm for their own ideology.
9. Winston tells Julia that he almost pushed his wife Katharine over the edge of a cliff when the two got lost on a
community hike.
10. Winston feels Julia is too young to understand that happiness is impossible under the Party, that the only
possible victory against the Party lies far in the future, and that the two of them should think of themselves as
already dead because they have defied the party.

QUIZ QUESTIONS
1. Who is singing the song Winston hears through the window of the rented room above Mr. Charrington’s shop?
2. What does the Music Department use to produce songs for the proles?
3. Where is Winston certain he and Julia will end up before their executions?
4. What does Julia bring to the rented room in her tool bag?
5. What country does Julia say Oceania has recently captured?
87
6. What does Julia say she will be instead of a Party comrade in the rented room?
7. What frightens Winston in the room and reminds him of a recurring nightmare?
8. What church is mentioned in the line of the old rhyme that Julia sings?
9. How does Julia say she learned the rhyme?
10. What does Winston imagine the paperweight represents as he gazes at it?
QUIZ ANSWERS
1. The song is being sung by a prole woman hanging washing on a line in a courtyard below the window of the
rented room.
2. The Music Department produces songs using a machine called a versifactor.
3. Winston is certain he and Julia will end up being tortured into confessing in the cellars of the Ministry of Love.
4. Julia brings real coffee, tea, sugar, bread, and jam to share. She also brings makeup for herself.
5. Julia says Oceania has recently captured India.
6. Julia says she will be a woman instead of a Party comrade.
7. Winston is frightened by a rat.
8. The line of the rhyme Julia sings mentions Old Bailey.
9. Julia says she learned the rhyme from her grandfather, who was vaporized when she was eight.
10. Winston imagines the paperweight represents the rented room and that the coral in the center represents his
life with Julia.

QUIZ QUESTIONS
1. What detail is enough to tell Winston that Syme has “ceased to exist”—or rather, has “never existed”?
88
2. For what event are the Ministries preparing?
3. What is depicted on the new posters that suddenly appear all over London?
4. Why do the proles burn down an old couple’s house?
5. What is the only practicable plan Winston and Julia discuss for their future (but do not actually intend to carry
out)?
6. What does Julia believe is the only way to rebel against the Party?
7. What does Julia believe about the rocket bombs that has never occurred to Winston before?
8. What does Winston argue about with Julia and eventually convince her of?
9. What does Winston tell Julia that she thinks is “brilliantly witty”?
10. On whom does Winston think the Party is most successful in imposing its worldview?
QUIZ ANSWERS
1. Winston sees that Syme’s name has disappeared from a printed list of the members of the Chess Committee
on the notice board in the vestibule of the Records Department.
2. The Ministries are preparing for Hate Week.
3. The new posters depict a Eurasian soldier marching forward while pointing a submachine gun.
4. The proles burn down the house of an old couple they suspect are foreign spies directing rocket bombs
through wireless (radio) waves.
5. The only practicable plan Winston and Julia discuss is committing suicide together.
6. Julia believes the only way to rebel against the Party is by “secret disobedience” or “isolated acts of violence.”
7. Julia believes the rocket bombs are deployed by the government of Oceania against its own citizens.
8. Winston argues with Julia and eventually convinces her of the fact that Oceania was at war with Eastasia, not
Eurasia, until four years ago.
9. Winston tells Julia that she is “only a rebel from the waist downwards.”
10. Winston thinks the Party is most successful in imposing its worldview on people who are unable to actually
understand that worldview.
89
QUIZ QUESTIONS
1. Where does O’Brien approach Winston?
2. What about O’Brien’s speech differentiates him from most Inner Party members?
3. What compliment does O’Brien give Winston?
4. Through what “small act of thoughtcrime” does O’Brien make Winston and himself accomplices?
5. What does O’Brien say he noticed about Winston’s article?
6. What does O’Brien invite Winston to come to his house to look at?
7. What does Winston do with the piece of paper O’Brien gives him?
8. Why is it impossible to find out where anyone lives except by asking them directly?
9. What is the “one possible meaning” Winston believes the episode with O’Brien could have?
10. What is the last step in the process Winston feels started years ago?
QUIZ ANSWERS
1. O’Brien approaches Winston in a corridor at the Ministry of Truth near where Julia gave Winston her note.
2. O’Brien speaks with a “peculiar grave courtesy.”
3. O’Brien compliments Winston on his elegant use of Newspeak in his articles for the Times.
4. O’Brien makes a reference to Syme, who has become an unperson and therefore should not be mentioned or
even remembered.
5. O’Brien says he noticed Winston used two words that have recently become obsolete.
6. O’Brien invites Winston to come to his house to look at the tenth edition of the Newspeak dictionary.
7. Winston drops the piece of paper into a memory hole.

90
8. It is impossible to find out where anyone lives except by asking them directly because there are no directories.
9. Winston believes the episode with O’Brien means that he has finally reached the edges of the conspiracy he
always believed existed against the Party.
10. The last step in the process is “something that would happen in the Ministry of Love.”

QUIZ QUESTIONS
1. How did Winston spend long afternoons as a child?
2. What sudden change came over Winston’s mother after his father’s disappearance?
3. What is the “never-mentioned thing that was about to happen”?
4. What did Winston take from his younger sister?
5. What are Reclamation Centers?
6. Why does Winston believe his mother possessed “a kind of nobility, a kind of purity”?
7. What is important to Winston about the arm gestures made by his mother in his dreams and by the Jewish
woman on the news film?
8. Why does Winston believe the proles have “stayed human” while Party members like himself and Julia have
not?
9. What does Winston say would be the “real betrayal”?
10. What is the one thing Winston and Julia decide the Party cannot do?
QUIZ ANSWERS
1. Winston spent long afternoons scrounging for scraps of food from garbage bins, rubbish heaps, and a road
where trucks sometimes dropped bits of cattle feed.
2. Winston’s mother suddenly became “completely spiritless,” going about her work very slowly and apparently
waiting for something to happen.
91
3. The “never-mentioned thing that was about to happen” was Winston’s mother’s arrest.
4. Winston took his younger sister’s portion of chocolate.
5. Reclamation Centers are colonies for homeless children. They were established after the civil war.
6. Winston believes his mother possessed nobility and purity because she lived by her own private standards
and feelings and did not believe that her actions were meaningless just because they were ultimately
ineffective.
7. Both Winston’s mother and the Jewish woman on the news film were holding and protecting their children with
their arms even though they were powerless to actually keep their children safe.
8. Winston believes the proles have stayed human because they still value individual relationships, private
loyalties, and the kind of personal feelings that Winston is having to relearn how to feel. The proles are not
trying to alter the course of history and therefore are able to find value and meaning in gestures that might
seem futile.
9. Winston says the “real betrayal” would not be if he confessed but rather if the Party could make him stop
loving Julia.
10. Winston and Julia decide the one thing the Party cannot do is alter an individual’s private feelings; they cannot
“get inside you.”

QUIZ QUESTIONS
1. What privilege does O’Brien say Inner Party members have that surprises Winston and Julia?
2. What is O’Brien’s “characteristic gesture”?
3. Who is Martin?
4. To whose health do O’Brien, Martin, Winston, and Julia drink?
5. What is the one thing Winston and Julia say they are not prepared to do on behalf of the Brotherhood?
6. How does the Brotherhood alter its members’ identities?
92
7. Why does O’Brien say the Brotherhood can never be wiped out?
8. To what idea does Winston suggest he, Julia, and O’Brien drink the last of the wine?
9. What does O’Brien tell Winston he will have delivered to him by a man with a briefcase?
10. What does Winston ask O’Brien before he leaves, and how does O’Brien answer?
QUIZ ANSWERS
1. O’Brien says Inner Party members have the privilege of occasionally turning off their telescreens.
2. O’Brien’s characteristic gesture is resettling his glasses on his nose.
3. Martin is O’Brien’s servant who is also a member of the Brotherhood; Winston thinks he may be Chinese.
4. O’Brien, Martin, Winston, and Julia drink to the health of Emmanuel Goldstein, the leader of the Brotherhood.
5. Winston and Julia say the one thing they are not prepared to do is part and never see each other again.
6. The Brotherhood alters its members’ identities by surgically changing their appearances beyond recognition.
7. O’Brien says the Brotherhood can never be wiped out because its individual members have very little
knowledge of its workings, size, or activities. Rather, they know only their own actions, the names of a few
other members, and the ideas on which the Brotherhood is founded.
8. Winston suggests they drink to the past.
9. O’Brien tells Winston he will deliver him a copy of the book written by Emmanuel Goldstein that explains the
Brotherhood’s principles.
10. Winston asks O’Brien if he knows the rhyme he learned from Mr. Charrington, and O’Brien answers by
supplying the last line of the rhyme’s first stanza.

QUIZ QUESTIONS
1. What announcement is made during the Hate Week demonstration in the square?
93
2. What has Winston been doing that has kept him from reading the book for six days?
3. What three groups of people have existed throughout human history according to Goldstein’s book?
4. What are the two aims of the Party?
5. What are the two great problems that the Party wants to solve?
6. What, according to Goldstein, is the primary aim of modern warfare?
7. What is crimestop?
8. What is blackwhite?
9. What does Goldstein say lies at the very heart of Ingsoc?
10. For what two reasons does the Party find it necessary to alter the past?
QUIZ ANSWERS
1. The announcement is made that Oceania is at war with Eastasia and allied with Eurasia.
2. Winston has been working eighteen hours a day altering records to reflect that Oceania has always been at
war with Eastasia.
3. The three groups are the Low, the Middle, and the High.
4. The two aims of the Party are “conquering the entire surface of the earth and extinguishing once and for all the
possibility of independent thought.”
5. The two great problems the Party wants to solve are “how to discover what another person is thinking and
how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without them having any warning.”
6. The primary aim of modern warfare is to keep the masses powerless by continually using up the wealth and
resources that could be used to raise their standard of living.
7. Crimestop is a Newspeak term for the ability to stop oneself from thinking a heretical thought.
8. Blackwhite is a Newspeak term that, when applied to a Party member, is meant as praise for the willingness to
believe, if the Party demands it, that black is white and always has been. When applied to an enemy, the term
means the opposite: to claim that black is white against Party doctrine.
9. Goldstein says that what lies at the very heart of Ingsoc is doublethink.
94
10. The Party alters the past in order to convince people that they are better off than their ancestors. It also alters
the past in order to present an image of itself as infallible, as changes in doctrine, policy, or alliance are seen
as signs of weakness.

QUIZ QUESTIONS
1. What strikes Winston for the first time about the prole woman singing and hanging laundry in the courtyard?
2. What is the one thing Winston and Julia can never do?
3. What occurs to Winston about the sky and people all over the world?
4. What does Winston believe must be the final message of Goldstein’s book?
5. Why does Winston think the future world created by the proles will be alien to him?
6. How does Winston think he and Julia can share in the future?
7. Where does the “iron voice” that addresses Winston and Julia come from?
8. What does the “quite different voice” that follows the iron voice say?
9. What does Winston think when he sees the fragment of coral from the broken paperweight?
10. What does Winston realize about Mr. Charrington?
QUIZ ANSWERS
1. Winston is struck by the thought that the prole woman is beautiful.
2. The one thing Winston and Julia can never do is have a child together.
3. It occurs to Winston that the sky is the same all over the world, and so are people all over the world.
4. Winston believes the final message of Goldstein’s book must be that the future belongs to the proles.
5. Winston thinks the future will be alien to him because it will be a world of sanity and equality.
95
6. Winston thinks he and Julia can share in the future by keeping their minds alive and passing on the “secret
doctrine that two and two made four.”
7. The iron voice comes from the telescreen hidden behind the picture of St. Clement’s Dane.
8. The different voice recites the last line of the rhyme Winston learned from Mr. Charrington: “Here comes a
candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head!”
9. Winston thinks “how small it always was.”
10. Winston realizes that Mr. Charrington is actually a member of the Thought Police.

QUIZ QUESTIONS
1. What difference does Winston observe between the Party prisoners and the “common criminals” in the prison
where he is first taken after his arrest?
2. Where do most of the prole prisoners expect to be sent?
3. Why does Winston think the woman prisoner the guards drop on his lap could conceivably be his mother?
4. What does Winston hope O’Brien and the Brotherhood might send him while he is imprisoned at the Ministry
of Love?
5. Why does Ampleforth believe he has been arrested?
6. What are Winston’s only six thoughts while he waits in the cell?
7. Who denounced Parsons for thoughtcrime?
8. Where does the starving man try to prevent the guards from taking him?
9. What does Winston realize he has always known?
10. Which question is answered for Winston when the guard strikes his elbow with the truncheon?
QUIZ ANSWERS
96
1. While the Party prisoners are “silent and terrified,” the common criminals seem not to care about their fate;
they fight back, eat smuggled food, and yell at or try to get cigarettes from the guards.
2. Most of the prole prisoners expect to be sent to forced-labor camps.
3. Winston thinks the woman prisoner, whose last name is also Smith, could conceivably be his mother because
of her age and physique and because of how much people might change after twenty years in a forced-labor
camp.
4. Winston hopes O’Brien and the Brotherhood will send him a razor blade.
5. Ampleforth believes he was arrested for leaving the word “God” at the end of a line in a poem by Kipling.
6. Winston’s only six thoughts are about the pain in his stomach, the piece of bread he is craving, the torture he
expects to suffer, O’Brien, Julia, and the razor blade.
7. Parsons was denounced by his seven-year-old daughter.
8. The starving man tries to prevent the guards from taking him to Room 101.
9. Winston realizes he has always known that O’Brien was loyal to the Party.
10. Winston had questioned whether it was ever possible to wish for one’s own physical pain to increase for any
reason; the answer he receives is that it is not.

QUIZ QUESTIONS
1. What happens to Winston during the preliminary phase of his interrogation?
2. What happens during the next phase?
3. How does Winston think of O’Brien during his interrogation?
4. What does O’Brien show to Winston before dropping it down a memory hole?
5. What fact does O’Brien say Winston must relearn?
6. What is O’Brien trying to get Winston to see by turning the dial?
97
7. Why does the Party bring people to the Ministry of Love?
8. How does O’Brien say the Party differs from the Inquisition of the Middle Ages or the Russian Communists?
9. Why does O’Brien say Winston’s mind appeals to him?
10. To what question does O’Brien tell Winston he will never know the answer?
QUIZ ANSWERS
1. Winston is repeatedly beaten by groups of guards.
2. Winston is mercilessly interrogated by Party intellectuals until he confesses to all kinds of crimes.
3. Winston thinks of O’Brien as the director of his interrogation and a combination of tormentor, protector,
inquisitor, and friend.
4. O’Brien shows Winston the photograph of Jones, Rutherford, and Aaronson that Winston saw years ago.
5. O’Brien says that Winston must relearn the fact that “it is impossible to see reality except by looking through
the eyes of the Party.”
6. O’Brien is trying to get Winston to see that he is holding up five fingers instead of four.
7. The Party brings people to the Ministry of Love to “cure” them of insanity.
8. O’Brien says the Party is different because rather than allowing heretics to be made into martyrs, the Party
converts heretical thinkers into loyal believers in Party ideology before erasing them from history.
9. O’Brien says Winston’s mind appeals to him because it resembles his own—except Winston’s happens to be
insane.
10. O’Brien tells Winston that Winston will never know if the Brotherhood exists.

QUIZ QUESTIONS
1. What are the three stages of Winston’s reintegration?
98
2. What does Winston initially believe to be the Party’s motive for seeking power?
3. Why does the Party really seek power?
4. How does O’Brien say an individual can become immortal and all-powerful?
5. What does O’Brien say about the nature of reality?
6. How, according to O’Brien, does one person assert power over another?
7. What does O’Brien tell Winston to imagine if he wants “a picture of the future”?
8. What is Oceanic civilization founded on?
9. What principle does Winston believe will one day defeat the Party?
10. What is the one degradation Winston says has not happened to him?
QUIZ ANSWERS
1. The three stages of reintegration are learning, understanding, and acceptance.
2. Winston initially believes the Party seeks power for the good of the majority.
3. The Party seeks power for power’s sake.
4. An individual can become immortal and all-powerful by escaping his or her identity and merging with the
Party.
5. O’Brien says reality exists entirely within the human mind.
6. One person asserts power over another by making him or her suffer.
7. O’Brien tells Winston to imagine “a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”
8. Oceanic civilization is founded on hatred.
9. Winston believes the “spirit of Man,” or human nature, will one day defeat the Party.
10. Winston has not betrayed Julia—he still loves her.
99
QUIZ QUESTIONS
1. What three phrases does Winston write on the slate?
2. What dangerous thought occurs to Winston that prompts him to train himself in crimestop?
3. What is the “unspoken tradition” about how the Party executes people?
4. What happens that causes Winston to cry out?
5. What does Winston inadvertently confess with his cry?
6. What does Winston believe is freedom?
7. What last change does O’Brien say must take place in Winston?
8. What is the worst thing in the world in Winston’s case?
9. What explanation does O’Brien give for what is done to people in Room 101?
10. What does Winston realize is the one way he can save himself?
QUIZ ANSWERS
1. Winston writes “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY,” “TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE,” and “GOD IS POWER.”
2. The dangerous thought that occurs to Winston is that O’Brien couldn’t really float off the floor like a bubble;
this would only be a shared hallucination, not a real event.
3. The unspoken tradition is that the Party executes a person by shooting him or her in the back of the head
without warning as the prisoner walks down a corridor between cells.
4. Winston suddenly feels that Julia is “not merely with him, but inside him.” He thinks she is alive and needs his
help, and he loves her more than ever.
5. When Winston calls Julia’s name, he inadvertently confesses that although he has surrendered in his mind, in
his heart he still hates the Party and prefers it that way.
100
6. Winston believes freedom is to die hating the Party.
7. O’Brien tells Winston that he must come to love Big Brother rather than merely obeying him.
8. The worst thing in the world in Winston’s case is rats.
9. O’Brien explains that pain is not always enough to get prisoners to do “what is required” of them. In Room
101, prisoners are forced to face things they cannot endure, leading them to do “what is required” by instinct.
10. Winston realizes he can only save himself by transferring his punishment to Julia.

QUIZ QUESTIONS
1. Where and how does Winston now spend most of his time?
2. What has Winston been worrying about off and on all day?
3. What does Winston think is symbolized by the idea that in chess “white always mates”?
4. What does Winston write in the dust on the table?
5. To what does Winston compare the way Julia’s body feels now?
6. What reason do Winston and Julia give for no longer feeling the way they once did about each other?
7. What is Winston’s new job?
8. What does Winston think of his memory of playing snakes and ladders with his mother and sister?
9. What does the voice on the telescreen announce after the trumpet call?
10. What “final, indispensable, healing change” occurs in Winston after the announcement?
QUIZ ANSWERS
1. Winston now spends most of his time at a corner table in the Chestnut Tree Café, doing the chess problems in
the newspaper and drinking Victory Gin.
101
2. Winston has been worrying about the news of the war in Central Africa, where the Eurasian army is advancing
and threatening Oceania’s territory.
3. Winston thinks this symbolizes the “eternal, unvarying triumph of Good over Evil.”
4. Winston writes “2 + 2 = 5.”
5. Winston compares the new stiffness of Julia’s body to that of a corpse he once helped to drag out of the
rubble after a rocket bomb fell.
6. Winston and Julia no longer feel what they once did for each other because they betrayed each other in
Room 101.
7. Winston’s new job is working on a sub-committee of a sub-committee of a committee that deals with minor
difficulties involved in the production of the eleventh edition of the Newspeak dictionary.
8. Winston thinks of this as a false memory.
9. The voice on the telescreen announces that Oceania has defeated Eurasia and won control of Africa, making
this the “greatest victory in human history.”
10. Winston finally loves Big Brother.
102

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1984 Study Guide

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1984 STUDY GUIDE 1

Chapter Summaries: Part 1, Chapter 1

Chapter Summaries: Part 1, Chapter 2

Chapter Summaries: Part 1, Chapters 4 and

Chapter Summaries: Part 1, Chapters 6 and

Chapter Summaries: Part 1, Chapter 8

Chapter Summaries: Part 2, Chapter 1

Chapter Summaries: Part 2, Chapter 3

Chapter Summaries: Part 2, Chapter 4

Chapter Summaries: Part 2, Chapter 5

Chapter Summaries: Part 2, Chapter 6

Chapter Summaries: Part 2, Chapter 7

Chapter Summaries: Part 2, Chapter 8

Chapter Summaries: Part 2, Chapter 9

Chapter Summaries: Part 3, Chapter 1

Chapter Summaries: Part 3, Chapter 2

Chapter Summaries: Part 3, Chapter 3

Chapter Summaries: Part 3, Chapters 4 and

Chapter Summaries: Part 3, Chapter 6

CONFORMITY VS. INDIVIDUALITY

HUMANITY AS A DESTRUCTIVE FORCE

KNOWLEDGE VS. IGNORANCE

Characters: List of Characters

JONES, AARONSON, AND RUTHERFORD

ELDERLY PROLE MAN

RED-ARMED PROLE WOMAN

THE SKULL-FACED MAN

Characters: Winston Smith

WINSTON AND THE NOTEBOOK

WINSTON'S PAPERWEIGHT AND ULCER

WINSTON'S ATTITUDE TOWARDS WOMEN

Key Ideas and Commentary: Commentary

Key Ideas and Commentary: The Principles

3. “C” – supplementary; scientific and technical terms.

2. What is the purpose of Newspeak?

4. Which dictionary will contain the perfected version of Newspeak?

6. Give the composition of the “A” vocabulary.

7. What is the purpose of the “A” vocabulary?

8. What words make up the “B” vocabulary?

9. What kind of words make up the “C” vocabulary?

2. Newspeak aims to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism.

3. Newspeak will probably supersede Oldspeak (Standard English) by 2050.

4. Perfected Newspeak will be found in the eleventh edition of the dictionary.

5. Cutting down the choice of words diminishes the range of thought.

8. The “B” vocabulary is comprised of words made up for political purposes.

9. The “C” vocabulary contains scientific and technical terms.

SUGGESTED ESSAY TOPICS

Style, Form, and Literary Elements: Places

CHESTNUT TREE CAFÉ

Style, Form, and Literary Elements: The

Style, Form, and Literary Elements: Literary

LANGUAGE AND MEANING

Style, Form, and Literary Elements: Literary

Historical and Social Context: Background

Historical and Social Context: Historical

SOCIALISM AND COMMUNISM

Historical and Social Context: Compare and

Historical and Social Context: Literary

Bibliography: Bibliography and Further

For Further Reading

Connections and Further Reading: