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1984 by George Orwell, 1949
PART ONE
Chapter 1
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the
vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions,
though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering
along with him.
The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a
coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall.
It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a
man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome
features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even
at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric
current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive
in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston,
who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went
slowly, resting several times on the way. 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.
Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had
something to do with the production of pig-iron. The voice came from an
oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface
of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank
somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument
(the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of
shutting it off completely. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail
figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls
which were the uniform of the party. His hair was very fair, his face
naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor
blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.
Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold. Down in
the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into
spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there
seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered
everywhere. The black-moustachio'd face gazed down from every commanding
corner. There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER
IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into
Winston's own. Down at street level another poster, torn at one corner,
flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the
single word INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between
the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again
with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people's
windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police
mattered.
Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away
about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The
telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston
made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it,
moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal
plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course
no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How
often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual
wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all
the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted
to. You had to live--did live, from habit that became instinct--in the
assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in
darkness, every movement scrutinized.
Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer; though, as he
well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometre away the Ministry of
Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape.
This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste--this was London, chief
city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of
Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him
whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always these
vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with
baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs
with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions?
And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the
willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the
bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies
of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses? But it was no use, he could not
remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit
tableaux occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.
The Ministry of Truth--Minitrue, in Newspeak [Newspeak was the official
language of Oceania. For an account of its structure and etymology see
Appendix.]--was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It
was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring
up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. From where Winston
stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in
elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above
ground level, and corresponding ramifications below. Scattered about London
there were just three other buildings of similar appearance and size. So
completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that from the roof
of Victory Mansions you could see all four of them simultaneously. They
were the homes of the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus
of government was divided. The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself
with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts. The Ministry of
Peace, which concerned itself with war. The Ministry of Love, which
maintained law and order. And the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible
for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv,
and Miniplenty.
The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There were no windows
in it at all. Winston had never been inside the Ministry of Love, nor
within half a kilometre of it. It was a place impossible to enter except
on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of
barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests. Even
the streets leading up to its outer barriers were roamed by gorilla-faced
guards in black uniforms, armed with jointed truncheons.
Winston turned round abruptly. He had set his features into the
expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing
the telescreen. He crossed the room into the tiny kitchen. By leaving
the Ministry at this time of day he had sacrificed his lunch in the
canteen, and he was aware that there was no food in the kitchen except
a hunk of dark-coloured bread which had got to be saved for tomorrow's
breakfast. He took down from the shelf a bottle of colourless liquid
with a plain white label marked VICTORY GIN. It gave off a sickly, oily
smell, as of Chinese rice-spirit. Winston poured out nearly a teacupful,
nerved himself for a shock, and gulped it down like a dose of medicine.
Instantly his face turned scarlet and the water ran out of his eyes. The
stuff was like nitric acid, and moreover, in swallowing it one had the
sensation of being hit on the back of the head with a rubber club. The
next moment, however, the burning in his belly died down and the world
began to look more cheerful. He took a cigarette from a crumpled packet
marked VICTORY CIGARETTES and incautiously held it upright, whereupon the
tobacco fell out on to the floor. With the next he was more successful.
He went back to the living-room and sat down at a small table that stood
to the left of the telescreen. From the table drawer he took out a
penholder, a bottle of ink, and a thick, quarto-sized blank book with a
red back and a marbled cover.
For some reason the telescreen in the living-room was in an unusual
position. Instead of being placed, as was normal, in the end wall, where
it could command the whole room, it was in the longer wall, opposite the
window. To one side of it there was a shallow alcove in which Winston
was now sitting, and which, when the flats were built, had probably been
intended to hold bookshelves. By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well
back, Winston was able to remain outside the range of the telescreen, so
far as sight went. He could be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed
in his present position he could not be seen. It was partly the unusual
geography of the room that had suggested to him the thing that he was now
about to do.
But it had also been suggested by the book that he had just taken out of
the drawer. It was a peculiarly beautiful book. Its smooth creamy paper,
a little yellowed by age, was of a kind that had not been manufactured for
at least forty years past. He could guess, however, that the book was much
older than that. He had seen it lying in the window of a frowsy little
junk-shop in a slummy quarter of the town (just what quarter he did not
now remember) and had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire
to possess it. Party members were supposed not to go into ordinary shops
('dealing on the free market', it was called), but the rule was not
strictly kept, because there were various things, such as shoelaces and
razor blades, which it was impossible to get hold of in any other way. He
had given a quick glance up and down the street and then had slipped inside
and bought the book for two dollars fifty. At the time he was not conscious
of wanting it for any particular purpose. He had carried it guiltily home
in his briefcase. Even with nothing written in it, it was a compromising
possession.
The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal
(nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected
it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least
by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp. Winston fitted a nib into
the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. The pen was an archaic
instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one,
furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the
beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead
of being scratched with an ink-pencil. Actually he was not used to writing
by hand. Apart from very short notes, it was usual to dictate everything
into the speak-write which was of course impossible for his present
purpose. He dipped the pen into the ink and then faltered for just a
second. A tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the
decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote:
April 4th, 1984.
He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To
begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It
must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was
thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but
it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.
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.
For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper. The telescreen had
changed over to strident military music. It was curious that he seemed
not merely to have lost the power of expressing himself, but even to have
forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say. For weeks
past he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed
his mind that anything would be needed except courage. The actual writing
would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable
restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for
years. At this moment, however, even the monologue had dried up. Moreover
his varicose ulcer had begun itching unbearably. He dared not scratch it,
because if he did so it always became inflamed. The seconds were ticking
by. He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front
of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music,
and a slight booziness caused by the gin.
Suddenly he began writing in sheer panic, only imperfectly aware of what
he was setting down. His small but childish handwriting straggled up and
down the page, shedding first its capital letters and finally even its
full stops:
April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films. One very good
one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean.
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and the sea round him turned pink and he sank as
suddenly as though the holes had let in the water, audience shouting with
laughter when he sank. then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a
helicopter hovering over it. there was a middle-aged woman might have been
a jewess sitting up in the bow with a little boy about three years old in
her arms. little boy screaming with fright and hiding his head between her
breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting
her arms round him and comforting him although she was blue with fright
herself, all the time covering him up as much as possible as if she thought
her arms could keep the bullets off him. then the helicopter planted a 20
kilo bomb in among them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood.
then there was a wonderful shot of a child's arm going up up up right up
into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose must have followed it
up and there was a lot of applause from the party seats but a woman down in
the prole part of the house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting
they didnt oughter of showed it not in front of kids they didnt it aint
right not in front of kids it aint until the police turned her turned her
out i dont suppose anything happened to her nobody cares what the proles
say typical prole reaction they never----
Winston stopped writing, partly because he was suffering from cramp. He did
not know what had made him pour out this stream of rubbish. But the curious
thing was that while he was doing so a totally different memory had
clarified itself in his mind, to the point where he almost felt equal to
writing it down. It was, he now realized, because of this other incident
that he had suddenly decided to come home and begin the diary today.
It had happened that morning at the Ministry, if anything so nebulous could
be said to happen.
It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where Winston
worked, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them
in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for
the Two Minutes Hate. Winston was just taking his place in one of the
middle rows when two people whom he knew by sight, but had never spoken
to, came unexpectedly into the room. One of them was a girl whom he often
passed in the corridors. He did not know her name, but he knew that she
worked in the Fiction Department. Presumably--since he had sometimes seen
her with oily hands and carrying a spanner--she had some mechanical job
on one of the novel-writing machines. She was a bold-looking girl, of
about twenty-seven, with thick hair, a freckled face, and swift, athletic
movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was
wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to
bring out the shapeliness of her hips. Winston had disliked her from the
very first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was because of the
atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes and general
clean-mindedness which she managed to carry about with her. He disliked
nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always
the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted
adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and
nosers-out of unorthodoxy. But this particular girl gave him the impression
of being more dangerous than most. Once when they passed in the corridor
she gave him a quick sidelong glance which seemed to pierce right into
him and for a moment had filled him with black terror. The idea had even
crossed his mind that she might be an agent of the Thought Police. That,
it was true, was very unlikely. Still, he continued to feel a peculiar
uneasiness, which had fear mixed up in it as well as hostility, whenever
she was anywhere near him.
The other person was a man named O'Brien, a member of the Inner Party and
holder of some post so important and remote that Winston had only a dim
idea of its nature. A momentary hush passed over the group of people
round the chairs as they saw the black overalls of an Inner Party member
approaching. O'Brien was a large, burly man with a thick neck and a coarse,
humorous, brutal face. In spite of his formidable appearance he had a
certain charm of manner. He had a trick of resettling his spectacles on
his nose which was curiously disarming--in some indefinable way, curiously
civilized. It was a gesture which, if anyone had still thought in such
terms, might have recalled an eighteenth-century nobleman offering his
snuffbox. Winston had seen O'Brien perhaps a dozen times in almost as many
years. He felt deeply drawn to him, and not solely because he was intrigued
by the contrast between O'Brien's urbane manner and his prize-fighter's
physique. Much more it was because of a secretly held belief--or perhaps
not even a belief, merely a hope--that O'Brien's political orthodoxy was
not perfect. Something in his face suggested it irresistibly. And again,
perhaps it was not even unorthodoxy that was written in his face, but
simply intelligence. But at any rate he had the appearance of being a
person that you could talk to if somehow you could cheat the telescreen and
get him alone. Winston had never made the smallest effort to verify this
guess: indeed, there was no way of doing so. At this moment O'Brien glanced
at his wrist-watch, saw that it was nearly eleven hundred, and evidently
decided to stay in the Records Department until the Two Minutes Hate was
over. He took a chair in the same row as Winston, a couple of places away.
A small, sandy-haired woman who worked in the next cubicle to Winston was
between them. The girl with dark hair was sitting immediately behind.
The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine
running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room.
It was a noise that set one's teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the
back of one's neck. The Hate had started.
As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had
flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the
audience. The little sandy-haired woman gave a squeak of mingled fear and
disgust. Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago
(how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading
figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and
then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned
to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared. The programmes
of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in
which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor,
the earliest defiler of the Party's purity. All subsequent crimes against
the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations,
sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still
alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea,
under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even--so it was
occasionally rumoured--in some hiding-place in Oceania itself.
Winston's diaphragm was constricted. He could never see the face of
Goldstein without a painful mixture of emotions. It was a lean Jewish face,
with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard--a
clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile
silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair of spectacles
was perched. It resembled the face of a sheep, and the voice, too, had a
sheep-like quality. Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack
upon the doctrines of the Party--an attack so exaggerated and perverse that
a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible
enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less
level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it. He was abusing Big
Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding
the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom
of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought,
he was crying hysterically that the revolution had been betrayed--and all
this in rapid polysyllabic speech which was a sort of parody of the
habitual style of the orators of the Party, and even contained Newspeak
words: more Newspeak words, indeed, than any Party member would normally
use in real life. And all the while, lest one should be in any doubt as to
the reality which Goldstein's specious claptrap covered, behind his head on
the telescreen there marched the endless columns of the Eurasian army--row
after row of solid-looking men with expressionless Asiatic faces, who swam
up to the surface of the screen and vanished, to be replaced by others
exactly similar. The dull rhythmic tramp of the soldiers' boots formed the
background to Goldstein's bleating voice.
Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable
exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room.
The self-satisfied sheep-like face on the screen, and the terrifying power
of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides,
the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger
automatically. He was an object of hatred more constant than either Eurasia
or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at war with one of these Powers it was
generally at peace with the other. But what was strange was that although
Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a
thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers,
in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the
general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were--in spite of all this,
his influence never seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes
waiting to be seduced by him. A day never passed when spies and saboteurs
acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police.
He was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of
conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State. The Brotherhood, its
name was supposed to be. There were also whispered stories of a terrible
book, a compendium of all the heresies, of which Goldstein was the author
and which circulated clandestinely here and there. It was a book without a
title. People referred to it, if at all, simply as THE BOOK. But one knew
of such things only through vague rumours. Neither the Brotherhood nor
THE BOOK was a subject that any ordinary Party member would mention if
there was a way of avoiding it.
In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and
down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort
to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen. The little
sandy-haired woman had turned bright pink, and her mouth was opening and
shutting like that of a landed fish. Even O'Brien's heavy face was flushed.
He was sitting very straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling and
quivering as though he were standing up to the assault of a wave. The
dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out 'Swine! Swine! Swine!'
and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the
screen. It struck Goldstein's nose and bounced off; the voice continued
inexorably. 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 pretence 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. And yet the rage that one felt was an
abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to
another like the flame of a blowlamp. Thus, at one moment Winston's hatred
was not turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against
Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at such moments his
heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen, sole guardian
of truth and sanity in a world of lies. And yet the very next instant he
was at one with the people about him, and all that was said of Goldstein
seemed to him to be true. At those moments his secret loathing of Big
Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed to tower up, an
invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against the hordes
of Asia, and Goldstein, in spite of his isolation, his helplessness, and
the doubt that hung about his very existence, seemed like some sinister
enchanter, capable by the mere power of his voice of wrecking the structure
of civilization.
It was even possible, at moments, to switch one's hatred this way or that
by a voluntary act. Suddenly, by the sort of violent effort with which one
wrenches one's head away from the pillow in a nightmare, Winston succeeded
in transferring his hatred from the face on the screen to the dark-haired
girl behind him. 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.
The Hate rose to its climax. The voice of Goldstein had become an actual
sheep's bleat, and for an instant the face changed into that of a sheep.
Then the sheep-face melted into the figure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed
to be advancing, huge and terrible, his sub-machine gun roaring, and
seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen, so that some of the
people in the front row actually flinched backwards in their seats. But
in the same moment, drawing a deep sigh of relief from everybody, the
hostile figure melted into the face of Big Brother, black-haired,
black-moustachio'd, full of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that
it almost filled up the screen. Nobody heard what Big Brother was saying.
It was merely a few words of encouragement, the sort of words that are
uttered in the din of battle, not distinguishable individually but
restoring confidence by the fact of being spoken. Then the face of Big
Brother faded away again, and instead the three slogans of the Party stood
out in bold capitals:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
But the face of Big Brother seemed to persist for several seconds on the
screen, as though the impact that it had made on everyone's eyeballs was
too vivid to wear off immediately. The little sandy-haired woman had flung
herself forward over the back of the chair in front of her. With a
tremulous murmur that sounded like 'My Saviour!' she extended her arms
towards the screen. Then she buried her face in her hands. It was apparent
that she was uttering a prayer.
At this moment the entire group of people broke into a deep, slow,
rhythmical chant of 'B-B!...B-B!'--over and over again, very slowly, with a
long pause between the first 'B' and the second--a heavy, murmurous sound,
somehow curiously savage, in the background of which one seemed to hear the
stamp of naked feet and the throbbing of tom-toms. For perhaps as much as
thirty seconds they kept it up. It was a refrain that was often heard in
moments of overwhelming emotion. Partly it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom
and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis,
a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise.
Winston's entrails seemed to grow cold. In the Two Minutes Hate he could
not help sharing in the general delirium, but this sub-human chanting of
'B-B!...B-B!' always filled him with horror. Of course he chanted with the
rest: it was impossible to do otherwise. To dissemble your feelings, to
control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive
reaction. But there was a space of a couple of seconds during which the
expression of his eyes might conceivably have betrayed him. And it was
exactly at this moment that the significant thing happened--if, indeed,
it did happen.
Momentarily he caught O'Brien's eye. O'Brien had stood up. He had taken
off his spectacles and was in the act of resettling them on his nose with
his characteristic gesture. But there was a fraction of a second when
their eyes met, and for as long as it took to happen Winston knew--yes, he
KNEW!--that O'Brien was thinking the same thing as himself. An unmistakable
message had passed. It was as though their two minds had opened and the
thoughts were flowing from one into the other through their eyes. 'I am
with you,' O'Brien seemed to be saying to him. 'I know precisely what you
are feeling. I know all about your contempt, your hatred, your disgust.
But don't worry, I am on your side!' And then the flash of intelligence
was gone, and O'Brien's face was as inscrutable as everybody else's.
That was all, and he was already uncertain whether it had happened. Such
incidents never had any sequel. All that they did was to keep alive in him
the belief, or hope, that others besides himself were the enemies of the
Party. Perhaps the rumours of vast underground conspiracies were true after
all--perhaps the Brotherhood really existed! It was impossible, in spite
of the endless arrests and confessions and executions, to be sure that the
Brotherhood was not simply a myth. Some days he believed in it, some days
not. There was no evidence, only fleeting glimpses that might mean anything
or nothing: snatches of overheard conversation, faint scribbles on lavatory
walls--once, even, when two strangers met, a small movement of the hand
which had looked as though it might be a signal of recognition. It was all
guesswork: very likely he had imagined everything. He had gone back to his
cubicle without looking at O'Brien again. The idea of following up their
momentary contact hardly crossed his mind. It would have been inconceivably
dangerous even if he had known how to set about doing it. For a second, two
seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of
the story. But even that was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in
which one had to live.
Winston roused himself and sat up straighter. He let out a belch. The gin
was rising from his stomach.
His eyes re-focused on the page. He discovered that while he sat helplessly
musing he had also been writing, as though by automatic action. And it was
no longer the same cramped, awkward handwriting as before. His pen had slid
voluptuously over the smooth paper, printing in large neat capitals--
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
over and over again, filling half a page.
He could not help feeling a twinge of panic. It was absurd, since the
writing of those particular words was not more dangerous than the initial
act of opening the diary, but for a moment he was tempted to tear out the
spoiled pages and abandon the enterprise altogether.
He did not do so, however, because he knew that it was useless. Whether he
wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made
no difference. Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go
on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the
same. He had committed--would still have committed, even if he had never
set pen to paper--the essential crime that contained all others in itself.
Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be
concealed for ever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for
years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.
It was always at night--the arrests invariably happened at night. The
sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your shoulder, the lights
glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces round the bed. In the vast
majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People
simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the
registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your
one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished,
annihilated: VAPORIZED was the usual word.
For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria. He began writing in a
hurried untidy scrawl:
theyll shoot me i don't care theyll shoot me in the back of the neck i
dont care down with big brother they always shoot you in the back of the
neck i dont care down with big brother----
He sat back in his chair, slightly ashamed of himself, and laid down
the pen. The next moment he started violently. There was a knocking at
the door.
Already! He sat as still as a mouse, in the futile hope that whoever it was
might go away after a single attempt. But no, the knocking was repeated.
The worst thing of all would be to delay. His heart was thumping like a
drum, but his face, from long habit, was probably expressionless. He got
up and moved heavily towards the door.
Gloser:
- nuzzled trykket mod
- vile modbydelig
- rag laset
- varicose ulcer åreknudesår
- contrived udspekuleret
- caption overskrift
- fruity blød
- pig-iron råjern
- oblong aflang
- distinguishable forståelige
- sanguine rødmosset
- eddies hvirvler
- snooping spionere
- scrutinized gransket
- sites grunde/tomter
- willow-herb gederams (blomst)
- ramifications forgreninger
- dwarf ragede højt op over
- entanglements spærringer
- truncheons politistave
- features ansigtstræk
- nitric salpeter
- club kølle
- incautiously uforsigtigt
- shallow lav
- frowsy snavset
- nib pen
- procured tilvejebragt
- furtively hemmelighedsfuldt
magnitude vigtighed/størrelse
- strident skinger
- interminable endeløs
- flicks biograf
- porpoise marsvin
- hovering svæve
- nebulous uklart
- cubicles aflukker
- spanner skruenøgle
- bold kæk
- sash bælte
- bigoted fanatisk/snævertsynet
- adherents tilhængere
- nosers-out nysgerrige
- unorthodoxy forkert tro
- burly kraftig
- irresistibly uimodståeligt
- grinding kværnende
- bristled rejste
- renegade overløber (desertør)
- backslider frafalden
- defiler tilsviner
- purity renhed
- treacheries forræderi
- heresies kætterier
- hatching i gang med at udklække
- diaphragm mellemgulv
- constricted snøret sammen
- aureole glorie
- venomous giftig
- doctrines læresætninger
- polysyllabic flerstavelses-
- habitual vanlige
- specious besnærende
- claptrap tom snak
- bleating brægende/brølende
- refuted modbevist
- dupes godtroende fjolser
- frenzy vildskab
- inexorably ubønhørligt
- lucid klart
- obliged være nødt til
- hideous hæslig
- vindictiveness hævngerrighed
- derided hånlige
- loathing afsky
26.
- flog piske
- truncheon knippel
- supple smidig
- chastity kyskhed
- encouragement opmuntring
- ignorance uvidenhed
- tremulous sitrende
- Saviour Frelser
- throbbing pulserende/bankende
- entrails indvolde
- contempt foragt
- inscrutable uransageligt
- musing tankefuld
- voluptuously vellystigt
- annihilated tilintetgjort
- vaporized fordampet Kilde: skolekom, eng-konference
Chapter 2
As he put his hand to the door-knob Winston saw that he had left the
diary open on the table. DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER was written all over it,
in letters almost big enough to be legible across the room. It was an
inconceivably stupid thing to have done. But, he realized, even in his
panic he had not wanted to smudge the creamy paper by shutting the book
while the ink was wet.
He drew in his breath and opened the door. Instantly a warm wave of relief
flowed through him. A colourless, crushed-looking woman, with wispy hair
and a lined face, was standing outside.
'Oh, comrade,' she began in a dreary, whining sort of voice, 'I thought I
heard you come in. Do you think you could come across and have a look at
our kitchen sink? It's got blocked up and----'
It was Mrs Parsons, the wife of a neighbour on the same floor. ('Mrs' was
a word somewhat discountenanced by the Party--you were supposed to call
everyone 'comrade'--but with some women one used it instinctively.) She was
a woman of about thirty, but looking much older. One had the impression
that there was dust in the creases of her face. Winston followed her down
the passage. These amateur repair jobs were an almost daily irritation.
Victory Mansions were old flats, built in 1930 or thereabouts, and were
falling to pieces. The plaster flaked constantly from ceilings and walls,
the pipes burst in every hard frost, the roof leaked whenever there was
snow, the heating system was usually running at half steam when it was not
closed down altogether from motives of economy. Repairs, except what you
could do for yourself, had to be sanctioned by remote committees which
were liable to hold up even the mending of a window-pane for two years.
'Of course it's only because Tom isn't home,' said Mrs Parsons vaguely.
The Parsons' flat was bigger than Winston's, and dingy in a different
way. Everything had a battered, trampled-on look, as though the
place had just been visited by some large violent animal. Games
impedimenta--hockey-sticks, boxing-gloves, a burst football, a pair of
sweaty shorts turned inside out--lay all over the floor, and on the
table there was a litter of dirty dishes and dog-eared exercise-books.
On the walls were scarlet banners of the Youth League and the Spies, and
a full-sized poster of Big Brother. There was the usual boiled-cabbage
smell, common to the whole building, but it was shot through by a sharper
reek of sweat, which--one knew this at the first sniff, though it was
hard to say how--was the sweat of some person not present at the moment.
In another room someone with a comb and a piece of toilet paper was
trying to keep tune with the military music which was still issuing
from the telescreen.
'It's the children,' said Mrs Parsons, casting a half-apprehensive glance
at the door. 'They haven't been out today. And of course----'
She had a habit of breaking off her sentences in the middle. The kitchen
sink was full nearly to the brim with filthy greenish water which smelt
worse than ever of cabbage. Winston knelt down and examined the angle-joint
of the pipe. He hated using his hands, and he hated bending down, which was
always liable to start him coughing. Mrs Parsons looked on helplessly.
'Of course if Tom was home he'd put it right in a moment,' she said.
'He loves anything like that. He's ever so good with his hands, Tom is.'
Parsons was Winston's fellow-employee at the Ministry of Truth. He was
a fattish but active man of paralysing 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. At thirty-five he had just been unwillingly evicted from the
Youth League, and before graduating into the Youth League he had managed to
stay on in the Spies for a year beyond the statutory age. At the Ministry
he was employed in some subordinate post for which intelligence was not
required, but on the other hand he was a leading figure on the Sports
Committee and all the other committees engaged in organizing community
hikes, spontaneous demonstrations, savings campaigns, and voluntary
activities generally. He would inform you with quiet pride, between whiffs
of his pipe, that he had put in an appearance at the Community Centre every
evening for the past four years. An overpowering smell of sweat, a sort of
unconscious testimony to the strenuousness of his life, followed him about
wherever he went, and even remained behind him after he had gone.
'Have you got a spanner?' said Winston, fiddling with the nut on the
angle-joint.
'A spanner,' said Mrs Parsons, immediately becoming invertebrate. 'I don't
know, I'm sure. Perhaps the children----'
There was a trampling of boots and another blast on the comb as the
children charged into the living-room. Mrs Parsons brought the spanner.
Winston let out the water and disgustedly removed the clot of human hair
that had blocked up the pipe. He cleaned his fingers as best he could in
the cold water from the tap and went back into the other room.
'Up with your hands!' yelled a savage voice.
A handsome, tough-looking boy of nine had popped up from behind the table
and was menacing him with a toy automatic pistol, while his small sister,
about two years younger, made the same gesture with a fragment of wood.
Both of them were dressed in the blue shorts, grey shirts, and red
neckerchiefs which were the uniform of the Spies. Winston raised his hands
above his head, but with an uneasy feeling, so vicious was the boy's
demeanour, that it was not altogether a game.
'You're a traitor!' yelled the boy. 'You're a thought-criminal! You're a
Eurasian spy! I'll shoot you, I'll vaporize you, I'll send you to the salt
mines!'
Suddenly they were both leaping round him, shouting 'Traitor!' and
'Thought-criminal!' the little girl imitating her brother in every
movement. It was somehow slightly frightening, like the gambolling of
tiger cubs which will soon grow up into man-eaters. There was a sort of
calculating ferocity in the boy's eye, a quite evident desire to hit or
kick Winston and a consciousness of being very nearly big enough to do so.
It was a good job it was not a real pistol he was holding, Winston thought.
Mrs Parsons' eyes flitted nervously from Winston to the children, and back
again. In the better light of the living-room he noticed with interest
that there actually was dust in the creases of her face.
'They do get so noisy,' she said. 'They're disappointed because they
couldn't go to see the hanging, that's what it is. I'm too busy to take
them. and Tom won't be back from work in time.'
'Why can't we go and see the hanging?' roared the boy in his huge voice.
'Want to see the hanging! Want to see the hanging!' chanted the little
girl, still capering round.
Some Eurasian prisoners, guilty of war crimes, were to be hanged in the
Park that evening, Winston remembered. This happened about once a month,
and was a popular spectacle. Children always clamoured to be taken to see
it. He took his leave of Mrs Parsons and made for the door. But he had not
gone six steps down the passage when something hit the back of his neck an
agonizingly painful blow. It was as though a red-hot wire had been jabbed
into him. He spun round just in time to see Mrs Parsons dragging her son
back into the doorway while the boy pocketed a catapult.
'Goldstein!' bellowed the boy as the door closed on him. But what most
struck Winston was the look of helpless fright on the woman's greyish face.
Back in the flat he stepped quickly past the telescreen and sat down at the
table again, still rubbing his neck. The music from the telescreen had
stopped. Instead, a clipped military voice was reading out, with a sort of
brutal relish, a description of the armaments of the new Floating Fortress
which had just been anchored between Iceland and the Faroe Islands.
With those children, he thought, that wretched woman must lead a life of
terror. Another year, two years, and they would be watching her night
and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy. 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. The songs, the processions, the banners, the
hiking, the drilling with dummy rifles, the yelling of slogans, the worship
of Big Brother--it was all a sort of glorious game to them. All their
ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against
foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal
for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children. And with
good reason, for hardly a week passed in which 'The Times' did not carry
a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak--'child hero'
was the phrase generally used--had overheard some compromising remark
and denounced its parents to the Thought Police.
The sting of the catapult bullet had worn off. He picked up his pen
half-heartedly, wondering whether he could find something more to write
in the diary. Suddenly he began thinking of O'Brien again.
Years ago--how long was it? Seven years it must be--he had dreamed that he
was walking through a pitch-dark room. And someone sitting to one side of
him had said as he passed: 'We shall meet in the place where there is no
darkness.' It was said very quietly, almost casually--a statement, not a
command. He had walked on without pausing. What was curious was that at the
time, in the dream, the words had not made much impression on him. It was
only later and by degrees that they had seemed to take on significance. He
could not now remember whether it was before or after having the dream that
he had seen O'Brien for the first time, nor could he remember when he had
first identified the voice as O'Brien's. But at any rate the identification
existed. It was O'Brien who had spoken to him out of the dark.
Winston had never been able to feel sure--even after this morning's flash
of the eyes it was still impossible to be sure whether O'Brien was a friend
or an enemy. Nor did it even seem to matter greatly. There was a link of
understanding between them, more important than affection or partisanship.
'We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,' he had said.
Winston did not know what it meant, only that in some way or another it
would come true.
The voice from the telescreen paused. A trumpet call, clear and beautiful,
floated into the stagnant air. The voice continued raspingly:
'Attention! Your attention, please! A newsflash has this moment arrived
from the Malabar front. Our forces in South India have won a glorious
victory. I am authorized to say that the action we are now reporting may
well bring the war within measurable distance of its end. Here is the
newsflash----'
Bad news coming, thought Winston. And sure enough, following on a gory
description of the annihilation of a Eurasian army, with stupendous figures
of killed and prisoners, came the announcement that, as from next week,
the chocolate ration would be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty.
Winston belched again. The gin was wearing off, leaving a deflated feeling.
The telescreen--perhaps to celebrate the victory, perhaps to drown the
memory of the lost chocolate--crashed into 'Oceania, 'tis for thee'. You
were supposed to stand to attention. However, in his present position he
was invisible.
'Oceania, 'tis for thee' gave way to lighter music. Winston walked over to
the window, keeping his back to the telescreen. The day was still cold and
clear. Somewhere far away a rocket bomb exploded with a dull, reverberating
roar. About twenty or thirty of them a week were falling on London at
present.
Down in the street the wind flapped the torn poster to and fro, and the
word INGSOC fitfully appeared and vanished. Ingsoc. The sacred principles
of Ingsoc. Newspeak, doublethink, the mutability of the past. He felt as
though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a
monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past
was dead, the future was unimaginable. What certainty had he that a single
human creature now living was on his side? And what way of knowing that the
dominion of the Party would not endure FOR EVER? Like an answer, the three
slogans on the white face of the Ministry of Truth came back to him:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
He took a twenty-five cent piece out of his pocket. There, too, in tiny
clear lettering, the same slogans were inscribed, and on the other face of
the coin the head of Big Brother. Even from the coin the eyes pursued you.
On coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters, and on
the wrappings of a cigarette packet--everywhere. Always the eyes watching
you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating,
indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed--no escape. Nothing was your
own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.
The sun had shifted round, and the myriad windows of the Ministry of Truth,
with the light no longer shining on them, looked grim as the loopholes of a
fortress. His heart quailed before the enormous pyramidal shape. It was too
strong, it could not be stormed. A thousand rocket bombs would not batter
it down. 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 to vapour. 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?
The telescreen struck fourteen. He must leave in ten minutes. He had to be
back at work by fourteen-thirty.
Curiously, the chiming of the hour seemed to have put new heart into him.
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. He went back to the table, dipped his pen, and wrote:
To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men
are different from one another and do not live alone--to a time when truth
exists and what is done cannot be undone:
From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of
Big Brother, from the age of doublethink--greetings!
He was already dead, he reflected. It seemed to him that it was only now,
when he had begun to be able to formulate his thoughts, that he had taken
the decisive step. The consequences of every act are included in the act
itself. He wrote:
Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.
Now he had recognized himself as a dead man it became important to stay
alive as long as possible. Two fingers of his right hand were inkstained.
It was exactly the kind of detail that might betray you. Some nosing zealot
in the Ministry (a woman, probably: someone like the little sandy-haired
woman or the dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department) might start
wondering why he had been writing during the lunch interval, why he had
used an old-fashioned pen, WHAT he had been writing--and then drop a hint
in the appropriate quarter. He went to the bathroom and carefully scrubbed
the ink away with the gritty dark-brown soap which rasped your skin like
sandpaper and was therefore well adapted for this purpose.
He put the diary away in the drawer. It was quite useless to think of
hiding it, but he could at least make sure whether or not its existence had
been discovered. A hair laid across the page-ends was too obvious. With the
tip of his finger he picked up an identifiable grain of whitish dust and
deposited it on the corner of the cover, where it was bound to be shaken
off if the book was moved.
PART II
Chapter 7
Winston had woken up with his eyes full of tears. Julia rolled sleepily
against him, murmuring something that might have been 'What's the matter?'
'I dreamt--' he began, and stopped short. It was too complex to be put
into words. There was the dream itself, and there was a memory connected
with it that had swum into his mind in the few seconds after waking.
He lay back with his eyes shut, still sodden in the atmosphere of the
dream. It was a vast, luminous dream in which his whole life seemed to
stretch out before him like a landscape on a summer evening after rain.
It had all occurred inside the glass paperweight, but the surface of the
glass was the dome of the sky, and inside the dome everything was flooded
with clear soft light in which one could see into interminable distances.
The dream had also been comprehended by--indeed, in some sense it had
consisted in--a gesture of the arm made by his mother, and made again
thirty years later by the Jewish woman he had seen on the news film,
trying to shelter the small boy from the bullets, before the helicopter
blew them both to pieces.
'Do you know,' he said, 'that until this moment I believed I had murdered
my mother?'
'Why did you murder her?' said Julia, almost asleep.
'I didn't murder her. Not physically.'
In the dream he had remembered his last glimpse of his mother, and within
a few moments of waking the cluster of small events surrounding it had all
come back. It was a memory that he must have deliberately pushed out of
his consciousness over many years. He was not certain of the date, but he
could not have been less than ten years old, possibly twelve, when it had
happened.
His father had disappeared some time earlier, how much earlier he could
not remember. He remembered better the rackety, uneasy circumstances of
the time: the periodical panics about air-raids and the sheltering in Tube
stations, the piles of rubble everywhere, the unintelligible proclamations
posted at street corners, the gangs of youths in shirts all the same
colour, the enormous queues outside the bakeries, the intermittent
machine-gun fire in the distance--above all, the fact that there was
never enough to eat. He remembered long afternoons spent with other boys
in scrounging round dustbins and rubbish heaps, picking out the ribs of
cabbage leaves, potato peelings, sometimes even scraps of stale breadcrust
from which they carefully scraped away the cinders; and also in waiting
for the passing of trucks which travelled over a certain route and were
known to carry cattle feed, and which, when they jolted over the bad
patches in the road, sometimes spilt a few fragments of oil-cake.
When his father disappeared, his mother did not show any surprise or any
violent grief, but a sudden change came over her. She seemed to have
become completely spiritless. It was evident even to Winston that she was
waiting for something that she knew must happen. She did everything that
was needed--cooked, washed, mended, made the bed, swept the floor, dusted
the mantelpiece--always very slowly and with a curious lack of superfluous
motion, like an artist's lay-figure moving of its own accord. Her large
shapely body seemed to relapse naturally into stillness. For hours at a
time she would sit almost immobile on the bed, nursing his young sister,
a tiny, ailing, very silent child of two or three, with a face made simian
by thinness. Very occasionally she would take Winston in her arms and
press him against her for a long time without saying anything. He was
aware, in spite of his youthfulness and selfishness, that this was somehow
connected with the never-mentioned thing that was about to happen.
He remembered the room where they lived, a dark, close-smelling room that
seemed half filled by a bed with a white counterpane. There was a gas ring
in the fender, and a shelf where food was kept, and on the landing outside
there was a brown earthenware sink, common to several rooms. He remembered
his mother's statuesque body bending over the gas ring to stir at something
in a saucepan. Above all he remembered his continuous hunger, and the
fierce sordid battles at mealtimes. He would ask his mother naggingly,
over and over again, why there was not more food, he would shout and storm
at her (he even remembered the tones of his voice, which was beginning to
break prematurely and sometimes boomed in a peculiar way), or he would
attempt a snivelling note of pathos in his efforts to get more than his
share. His mother was quite ready to give him more than his share. She
took it for granted that he, 'the boy', should have the biggest portion;
but however much she gave him he invariably demanded more. At every meal
she would beseech him not to be selfish and to remember that his little
sister was sick and also needed food, but it was no use. He would cry out
with rage when she stopped ladling, he would try to wrench the saucepan
and spoon out of her hands, he would grab bits from his sister's plate.
He knew that he was starving the other two, but he could not help it; he
even felt that he had a right to do it. The clamorous hunger in his belly
seemed to justify him. Between meals, if his mother did not stand guard,
he was constantly pilfering at the wretched store of food on the shelf.
One day a chocolate ration was issued. There had been no such issue for
weeks or months past. He remembered quite clearly that precious little
morsel of chocolate. It was a two-ounce slab (they still talked about
ounces in those days) between the three of them. It was obvious that it
ought to be divided into three equal parts. Suddenly, as though he were
listening to somebody else, Winston heard himself demanding in a loud
booming voice that he should be given the whole piece. His mother told him
not to be greedy. There was a long, nagging argument that went round and
round, with shouts, whines, tears, remonstrances, bargainings. His tiny
sister, clinging to her mother with both hands, exactly like a baby monkey,
sat looking over her shoulder at him with large, mournful eyes. In the
end his mother broke off three-quarters of the chocolate and gave it to
Winston, giving the other quarter to his sister. The little girl took hold
of it and looked at it dully, perhaps not knowing what it was. Winston
stood watching her for a moment. Then with a sudden swift spring he had
snatched the piece of chocolate out of his sister's hand and was fleeing
for the door.
'Winston, Winston!' his mother called after him. 'Come back! Give your
sister back her chocolate!'
He stopped, but did not come back. His mother's anxious eyes were fixed on
his face. Even now he was thinking about the thing, he did not know what
it was that was on the point of happening. His sister, conscious of having
been robbed of something, had set up a feeble wail. His mother drew her
arm round the child and pressed its face against her breast. Something in
the gesture told him that his sister was dying. He turned and fled down
the stairs, with the chocolate growing sticky in his hand.
He never saw his mother again. After he had devoured the chocolate he felt
somewhat ashamed of himself and hung about in the streets for several
hours, until hunger drove him home. When he came back his mother had
disappeared. This was already becoming normal at that time. Nothing was
gone from the room except his mother and his sister. They had not taken
any clothes, not even his mother's overcoat. To this day he did not know
with any certainty that his mother was dead. It was perfectly possible
that she had merely been sent to a forced-labour camp. As for his sister,
she might have been removed, like Winston himself, to one of the colonies
for homeless children (Reclamation Centres, they were called) which had
grown up as a result of the civil war, or she might have been sent to the
labour camp along with his mother, or simply left somewhere or other
to die.
The dream was still vivid in his mind, especially the enveloping protecting
gesture of the arm in which its whole meaning seemed to be contained. His
mind went back to another dream of two months ago. Exactly as his mother
had sat on the dingy white-quilted bed, with the child clinging to her, so
she had sat in the sunken ship, far underneath him, and drowning deeper
every minute, but still looking up at him through the darkening water.
He told Julia the story of his mother's disappearance. Without opening her
eyes she rolled over and settled herself into a more comfortable position.
'I expect you were a beastly little swine in those days,' she said
indistinctly. 'All children are swine.'
'Yes. But the real point of the story----'
From her breathing it was evident that she was going off to sleep again.
He would have liked to continue talking about his mother. He did not
suppose, from what he could remember of her, that she had been an unusual
woman, still less an intelligent one; and yet she had possessed a kind of
nobility, a kind of purity, simply because the standards that she obeyed
were private ones. Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered
from outside. It would not have occurred to her that an action which is
ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved
him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love. When
the last of the chocolate was gone, his mother had clasped the child in
her arms. It was no use, it changed nothing, it did not produce more
chocolate, it did not avert the child's death or her own; but it seemed
natural to her to do it. The refugee woman in the boat had also covered
the little boy with her arm, which was no more use against the bullets
than a sheet of paper. The terrible thing that the Party had done was to
persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while
at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world. When
once you were in the grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel,
what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference.
Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever
heard of again. You were lifted clean out of the stream of history. And
yet to the people of only two generations ago this would not have seemed
all-important, because they were not attempting to alter history. They
were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What
mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture,
an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in
itself. The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this
condition. They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they
were loyal to one another. For the first time in his life he did not
despise the proles or think of them merely as an inert force which would
one day spring to life and regenerate the world. The proles had stayed
human. They had not become hardened inside. They had held on to the
primitive emotions which he himself had to re-learn by conscious effort.
And in thinking this he remembered, without apparent relevance, how a few
weeks ago he had seen a severed hand lying on the pavement and had kicked
it into the gutter as though it had been a cabbage-stalk.
'The proles are human beings,' he said aloud. 'We are not human.'
'Why not?' said Julia, who had woken up again.
He thought for a little while. 'Has it ever occurred to you,' he said,
'that the best thing for us to do would be simply to walk out of here
before it's too late, and never see each other again?'
'Yes, dear, it has occurred to me, several times. But I'm not going to do
it, all the same.'
'We've been lucky,' he said 'but it can't last much longer. You're young.
You look normal and innocent. If you keep clear of people like me, you
might stay alive for another fifty years.'
'No. I've thought it all out. What you do, I'm going to do. And don't be
too downhearted. I'm rather good at staying alive.'
'We may be together for another six months--a year--there's no knowing.
At the end we're certain to be apart. Do you realize how utterly alone we
shall be? When once they get hold of us there will be nothing, literally
nothing, that either of us can do for the other. If I confess, they'll
shoot you, and if I refuse to confess, they'll shoot you just the same.
Nothing that I can do or say, or stop myself from saying, will put off
your death for as much as five minutes. Neither of us will even know
whether the other is alive or dead. We shall be utterly without power of
any kind. The one thing that matters is that we shouldn't betray one
another, although even that can't make the slightest difference.'
'If you mean confessing,' she said, 'we shall do that, right enough.
Everybody always confesses. You can't help it. They torture you.'
'I don't mean confessing. Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do
doesn't matter: only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving
you--that would be the real betrayal.'
She thought it over. 'They can't do that,' she said finally. 'It's the one
thing they can't do. They can make you say anything--ANYTHING--but they
can't make you believe it. They can't get inside you.'
'No,' he said a little more hopefully, 'no; that's quite true. They can't
get inside you. If you can FEEL that staying human is worth while, even
when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them.'
He thought of the telescreen with its never-sleeping ear. They could spy
upon you night and day, but if you kept your head you could still outwit
them. With all their cleverness they had never mastered the secret of
finding out what another human being was thinking. Perhaps that was less
true when you were actually in their hands. One did not know what happened
inside the Ministry of Love, but it was possible to guess: tortures, drugs,
delicate instruments that registered your nervous reactions, gradual
wearing-down by sleeplessness and solitude and persistent questioning.
Facts, at any rate, could not be kept hidden. They could be tracked down
by enquiry, they could be squeezed out of you by torture. 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.
PART III
Chapter 3
'There are three stages in your reintegration,' said O'Brien. 'There is
learning, there is understanding, and there is acceptance. It is time for
you to enter upon the second stage.'
As always, Winston was lying flat on his back. But of late his bonds were
looser. They still held him to the bed, but he could move his knees a
little and could turn his head from side to side and raise his arms from
the elbow. The dial, also, had grown to be less of a terror. He could
evade its pangs if he was quick-witted enough: it was chiefly when he
showed stupidity that O'Brien pulled the lever. Sometimes they got through
a whole session without use of the dial. He could not remember how many
sessions there had been. The whole process seemed to stretch out over a
long, indefinite time--weeks, possibly--and the intervals between the
sessions might sometimes have been days, sometimes only an hour or two.
'As you lie there,' said O'Brien, 'you have often wondered--you have even
asked me--why the Ministry of Love should expend so much time and trouble
on you. And when you were free you were puzzled by what was essentially
the same question. You could grasp the mechanics of the Society you lived
in, but not its underlying motives. Do you remember writing in your diary,
"I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY"? It was when you thought about
"why" that you doubted your own sanity. You have read THE BOOK,
Goldstein's book, or parts of it, at least. Did it tell you anything that
you did not know already?'
'You have read it?' said Winston.
'I wrote it. That is to say, I collaborated in writing it. No book is
produced individually, as you know.'
'Is it true, what it says?'
'As description, yes. The programme it sets forth is nonsense. The secret
accumulation of knowledge--a gradual spread of enlightenment--ultimately
a proletarian rebellion--the overthrow of the Party. You foresaw yourself
that that was what it would say. It is all nonsense. The proletarians will
never revolt, not in a thousand years or a million. They cannot. I do
not have to tell you the reason: you know it already. If you have ever
cherished any dreams of violent insurrection, you must abandon them. There
is no way in which the Party can be overthrown. The rule of the Party is
for ever. Make that the starting-point of your thoughts.'
He came closer to the bed. 'For ever!' he repeated. 'And now let us get
back to the question of "how" and "why". You understand well enough HOW
the Party maintains itself in power. Now tell me WHY we cling to power.
What is our motive? Why should we want power? Go on, speak,' he added as
Winston remained silent.
Nevertheless Winston did not speak for another moment or two. A feeling of
weariness had overwhelmed him. The faint, mad gleam of enthusiasm had come
back into O'Brien's face. He knew in advance what O'Brien would say. That
the Party did not seek power for its own ends, but only for the good of
the majority. That it sought power because men in the mass were frail,
cowardly creatures who could not endure liberty or face the truth, and
must be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who were stronger
than themselves. That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and
happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better.
That the party was the eternal guardian of the weak, a dedicated sect
doing evil that good might come, sacrificing its own happiness to that of
others. The terrible thing, thought Winston, the terrible thing was that
when O'Brien said this he would believe it. You could see it in his face.
O'Brien knew everything. A thousand times better than Winston he knew what
the world was really like, in what degradation the mass of human beings
lived and by what lies and barbarities the Party kept them there. He had
understood it all, weighed it all, and it made no difference: all was
justified by the ultimate purpose. What can you do, thought Winston,
against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your
arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
'You are ruling over us for our own good,' he said feebly. 'You believe
that human beings are not fit to govern themselves, and therefore----'
He started and almost cried out. A pang of pain had shot through his body.
O'Brien had pushed the lever of the dial up to thirty-five.
'That was stupid, Winston, stupid!' he said. 'You should know better than
to say a thing like that.'
He pulled the lever back and continued:
'Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party
seeks power entirely 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 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?'
Winston was struck, as he had been struck before, by the tiredness of
O'Brien's face. It was strong and fleshy and brutal, it was full of
intelligence and a sort of controlled passion before which he felt himself
helpless; but it was tired. There were pouches under the eyes, the skin
sagged from the cheekbones. O'Brien leaned over him, deliberately bringing
the worn face nearer.
'You are thinking,' he said, 'that my face is old and tired. You are
thinking that I talk of power, and yet I am not even able to prevent the
decay of my own body. Can you not understand, Winston, that the individual
is only a cell? The weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism.
Do you die when you cut your fingernails?'
He turned away from the bed and began strolling up and down again, one hand
in his pocket.
'We are the priests of power,' he said. 'God is power. But at present
power is only a word so far as you are concerned. It is time for you to
gather some idea of what power means. The first thing you must realize
is that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as
he ceases to be an individual. You know the Party slogan: "Freedom is
Slavery". Has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible? Slavery is
freedom. Alone--free--the human being is always defeated. It must be so,
because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all
failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape
from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he IS the
Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal. The second thing for you to
realize is that power is power over human beings. Over the body--but, above
all, over the mind. Power over matter--external reality, as you would call
it--is not important. Already our control over matter is absolute.'
For a moment Winston ignored the dial. He made a violent effort to raise
himself into a sitting position, and merely succeeded in wrenching his
body painfully.
'But how can you control matter?' he burst out. 'You don't even control
the climate or the law of gravity. And there are disease, pain, death----'
O'Brien silenced him by a movement of his hand. 'We control matter because
we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by
degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility,
levitation--anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if
I wish to. I do not wish to, because the Party does not wish it. You must
get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of Nature. We
make the laws of Nature.'
'But you do not! You are not even masters of this planet. What about
Eurasia and Eastasia? You have not conquered them yet.'
'Unimportant. We shall conquer them when it suits us. And if we did not,
what difference would it make? We can shut them out of existence. Oceania
is the world.'
'But the world itself is only a speck of dust. And man is tiny--helpless!
How long has he been in existence? For millions of years the earth was
uninhabited.'
'Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older?
Nothing exists except through human consciousness.'
'But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals--mammoths and
mastodons and enormous reptiles which lived here long before man was ever
heard of.'
'Have you ever seen those bones, Winston? Of course not. Nineteenth-century
biologists invented them. Before man there was nothing. After man, if he
could come to an end, there would be nothing. Outside man there is
nothing.'
'But the whole universe is outside us. Look at the stars! Some of them are
a million light-years away. They are out of our reach for ever.'
'What are the stars?' said O'Brien indifferently. 'They are bits of fire
a few kilometres away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could
blot them out. The earth is the centre of the universe. The sun and the
stars go round it.'
Winston made another convulsive movement. This time he did not say
anything. O'Brien continued as though answering a spoken objection:
'For certain purposes, of course, that is not true. When we navigate the
ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient to
assume that the earth goes round the sun and that the stars are millions
upon millions of kilometres away. But what of it? Do you suppose it is
beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near
or distant, according as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians
are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink?'
Winston shrank back upon the bed. Whatever he said, the swift answer
crushed him like a bludgeon. And yet he knew, he KNEW, that he was in the
right. The belief that nothing exists outside your own mind--surely there
must be some way of demonstrating that it was false? Had it not been
exposed long ago as a fallacy? There was even a name for it, which he
had forgotten. A faint smile twitched the corners of O'Brien's mouth as
he looked down at him.
'I told you, Winston,' he said, 'that metaphysics is not your strong
point. The word you are trying to think of is solipsism. But you are
mistaken. This is not solipsism. Collective solipsism, if you like. But
that is a different thing: in fact, the opposite thing. All this is a
digression,' he added in a different tone. 'The real power, the power we
have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men.'
He paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster
questioning a promising pupil: 'How does one man assert his power over
another, Winston?'
Winston thought. 'By making him suffer,' he said.
'Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is
suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his
own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing
human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of
your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are
creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that
the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a
world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not
less but MORE merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will
be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they
were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world
there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement.
Everything else we shall destroy--everything. Already we are breaking down
the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We
have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and
between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend
any longer. 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 annual
formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm.
Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except
loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of
Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over
a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When
we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be
no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity,
no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be
destroyed. But always--do not forget this, Winston--always there will be
the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing
subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory,
the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a
picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--for ever.'
He paused as though he expected Winston to speak. Winston had tried to
shrink back into the surface of the bed again. He could not say anything.
His heart seemed to be frozen. O'Brien went on:
'And remember that it is for ever. The face will always be there to be
stamped upon. The heretic, the enemy of society, will always be there, so
that he can be defeated and humiliated over again. Everything that you
have undergone since you have been in our hands--all that will continue,
and worse. The espionage, the betrayals, the arrests, the tortures, the
executions, the disappearances will never cease. It will be a world of
terror as much as a world of triumph. The more the Party is powerful, the
less it will be tolerant: the weaker the opposition, the tighter the
despotism. Goldstein and his heresies will live for ever. Every day, at
every moment, they will be defeated, discredited, ridiculed, spat upon and
yet they will always survive. This drama that I have played out with you
during seven years will be played out over and over again generation after
generation, always in subtler forms. Always we shall have the heretic here
at our mercy, screaming with pain, broken up, contemptible--and in the end
utterly penitent, saved from himself, crawling to our feet of his own
accord. That is the world that we are preparing, Winston. A world of
victory after victory, triumph after triumph after triumph: an endless
pressing, pressing, pressing upon the nerve of power. You are beginning,
I can see, to realize what that world will be like. But in the end you
will do more than understand it. You will accept it, welcome it, become
part of it.'
Winston had recovered himself sufficiently to speak. 'You can't!' he said
weakly.
'What do you mean by that remark, Winston?'
'You could not create such a world as you have just described. It is a
dream. It is impossible.'
'Why?'
'It is impossible to found a civilization on fear and hatred and cruelty.
It would never endure.'
'Why not?'
'It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit
suicide.'
'Nonsense. You are under the impression that hatred is more exhausting
than love. Why should it be? And if it were, what difference would that
make? Suppose that we choose to wear ourselves out faster. Suppose that we
quicken the tempo of human life till men are senile at thirty. Still what
difference would it make? Can you not understand that the death of the
individual is not death? The party is immortal.'
As usual, the voice had battered Winston into helplessness. Moreover he
was in dread that if he persisted in his disagreement O'Brien would twist
the dial again. And yet he could not keep silent. Feebly, without
arguments, with nothing to support him except his inarticulate horror of
what O'Brien had said, he returned to the attack.
'I don't know--I don't care. Somehow you will fail. Something will defeat
you. Life will defeat you.'
'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.'
'I don't care. In the end they will beat you. Sooner or later they will
see you for what you are, and then they will tear you to pieces.'
'Do you see any evidence that that is happening? Or any reason why it
should?'
'No. I believe it. I KNOW that you will fail. There is something in the
universe--I don't know, some spirit, some principle--that you will never
overcome.'
'Do you believe in God, Winston?'
'No.'
'Then what is it, this principle that will defeat us?'
'I don't know. The spirit of Man.'
'And do you consider yourself a man?'
'Yes.'
'If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct; we
are the inheritors. Do you understand that you are ALONE? You are outside
history, you are non-existent.' His manner changed and he said more
harshly: 'And you consider yourself morally superior to us, with our lies
and our cruelty?'
'Yes, I consider myself superior.'
O'Brien did not speak. Two other voices were speaking. After a moment
Winston recognized one of them as his own. It was a sound-track of the
conversation he had had with O'Brien, on the night when he had enrolled
himself in the Brotherhood. He heard himself promising to lie, to steal,
to forge, to murder, to encourage drug-taking and prostitution, to
disseminate venereal diseases, to throw vitriol in a child's face. O'Brien
made a small impatient gesture, as though to say that the demonstration
was hardly worth making. Then he turned a switch and the voices stopped.
'Get up from that bed,' he said.
The bonds had loosened themselves. Winston lowered himself to the floor
and stood up unsteadily.
'You are the last man,' said O'Brien. 'You are the guardian of the human
spirit. You shall see yourself as you are. Take off your clothes.'
Winston undid the bit of string that held his overalls together. The zip
fastener had long since been wrenched out of them. He could not remember
whether at any time since his arrest he had taken off all his clothes at
one time. Beneath the overalls his body was looped with filthy yellowish
rags, just recognizable as the remnants of underclothes. As he slid
them to the ground he saw that there was a three-sided mirror at the far
end of the room. He approached it, then stopped short. An involuntary cry
had broken out of him.
'Go on,' said O'Brien. 'Stand between the wings of the mirror. You shall
see the side view as well.'
He had stopped because he was frightened. A bowed, grey-coloured,
skeleton-like thing was coming towards him. Its actual appearance was
frightening, and not merely the fact that he knew it to be himself. He
moved closer to the glass. The creature's face seemed to be protruded,
because of its bent carriage. A forlorn, jailbird's face with a nobby
forehead running back into a bald scalp, a crooked nose, and
battered-looking cheekbones above which his eyes were fierce and watchful.
The cheeks were seamed, the mouth had a drawn-in look. Certainly it was
his own face, but it seemed to him that it had changed more than he had
changed inside. The emotions it registered would be different from the
ones he felt. He had gone partially bald. For the first moment he had
thought that he had gone grey as well, but it was only the scalp that was
grey. Except for his hands and a circle of his face, his body was grey all
over with ancient, ingrained dirt. Here and there under the dirt there
were the red scars of wounds, and near the ankle the varicose ulcer was an
inflamed mass with flakes of skin peeling off it. But the truly frightening
thing was the emaciation of his body. The barrel of the ribs was as narrow
as that of a skeleton: the legs had shrunk so that the knees were thicker
than the thighs. He saw now what O'Brien had meant about seeing the side
view. The curvature of the spine was astonishing. The thin shoulders were
hunched forward so as to make a cavity of the chest, the scraggy neck
seemed to be bending double under the weight of the skull. At a guess he
would have said that it was the body of a man of sixty, suffering from
some malignant disease.
'You have thought sometimes,' said O'Brien, 'that my face--the face of a
member of the Inner Party--looks old and worn. What do you think of your
own face?'
He seized Winston's shoulder and spun him round so that he was facing him.
'Look at the condition you are in!' he said. 'Look at this filthy grime
all over your body. Look at the dirt between your toes. Look at that
disgusting running sore on your leg. Do you know that you stink like a
goat? Probably you have ceased to notice it. Look at your emaciation. Do
you see? I can make my thumb and forefinger meet round your bicep. I could
snap your neck like a carrot. Do you know that you have lost twenty-five
kilograms since you have been in our hands? Even your hair is coming out
in handfuls. Look!' He plucked at Winston's head and brought away a tuft
of hair. 'Open your mouth. Nine, ten, eleven teeth left. How many had you
when you came to us? And the few you have left are dropping out of your
head. Look here!'
He seized one of Winston's remaining front teeth between his powerful
thumb and forefinger. A twinge of pain shot through Winston's jaw. O'Brien
had wrenched the loose tooth out by the roots. He tossed it across the
cell.
'You are rotting away,' he said; 'you are falling to pieces. What are you?
A bag of filth. Now turn around and look into that mirror again. Do you
see that thing facing you? That is the last man. If you are human, that is
humanity. Now put your clothes on again.'
Winston began to dress himself with slow stiff movements. Until now he had
not seemed to notice how thin and weak he was. Only one thought stirred in
his mind: that he must have been in this place longer than he had imagined.
Then suddenly as he fixed the miserable rags round himself a feeling of
pity for his ruined body overcame him. Before he knew what he was doing
he had collapsed on to a small stool that stood beside the bed and burst
into tears. He was aware of his ugliness, his gracelessness, a bundle of
bones in filthy underclothes sitting weeping in the harsh white light: but
he could not stop himself. O'Brien laid a hand on his shoulder, almost
kindly.
'It will not last for ever,' he said. 'You can escape from it whenever you
choose. Everything depends on yourself.'
'You did it!' sobbed Winston. 'You reduced me to this state.'
'No, Winston, you reduced yourself to it. This is what you accepted when
you set yourself up against the Party. It was all contained in that first
act. Nothing has happened that you did not foresee.'
He paused, and then went on:
'We have beaten you, Winston. We have broken you up. You have seen what
your body is like. Your mind is in the same state. I do not think there
can be much pride left in you. You have been kicked and flogged and
insulted, you have screamed with pain, you have rolled on the floor in
your own blood and vomit. You have whimpered for mercy, you have betrayed
everybody and everything. Can you think of a single degradation that has
not happened to you?'
Winston had stopped weeping, though the tears were still oozing out of his
eyes. He looked up at O'Brien.
'I have not betrayed Julia,' he said.
O'Brien looked down at him thoughtfully. 'No,' he said; 'no; that is
perfectly true. You have not betrayed Julia.'
The peculiar reverence for O'Brien, which nothing seemed able to destroy,
flooded Winston's heart again. How intelligent, he thought, how
intelligent! Never did O'Brien fail to understand what was said to him.
Anyone else on earth would have answered promptly that he HAD betrayed
Julia. For what was there that they had not screwed out of him under the
torture? He had told them everything he knew about her, her habits, her
character, her past life; he had confessed in the most trivial detail
everything that had happened at their meetings, all that he had said to
her and she to him, their black-market meals, their adulteries, their
vague plottings against the Party--everything. And yet, in the sense in
which he intended the word, he had not betrayed her. He had not stopped
loving her; his feelings towards her had remained the same. O'Brien had
seen what he meant without the need for explanation.
'Tell me,' he said, 'how soon will they shoot me?'
'It might be a long time,' said O'Brien. 'You are a difficult case. But
don't give up hope. Everyone is cured sooner or later. In the end we shall
shoot you.'
Chapter 4
He was much better. He was growing fatter and stronger every day, if it
was proper to speak of days.
The white light and the humming sound were the same as ever, but the cell
was a little more comfortable than the others he had been in. There was a
pillow and a mattress on the plank bed, and a stool to sit on. They had
given him a bath, and they allowed him to wash himself fairly frequently
in a tin basin. They even gave him warm water to wash with. They had given
him new underclothes and a clean suit of overalls. They had dressed his
varicose ulcer with soothing ointment. They had pulled out the remnants
of his teeth and given him a new set of dentures.
Weeks or months must have passed. It would have been possible now to keep
count of the passage of time, if he had felt any interest in doing so,
since he was being fed at what appeared to be regular intervals. He was
getting, he judged, three meals in the twenty-four hours; sometimes he
wondered dimly whether he was getting them by night or by day. The food
was surprisingly good, with meat at every third meal. Once there was even
a packet of cigarettes. He had no matches, but the never-speaking guard
who brought his food would give him a light. The first time he tried to
smoke it made him sick, but he persevered, and spun the packet out for
a long time, smoking half a cigarette after each meal.
They had given him a white slate with a stump of pencil tied to the
corner. At first he made no use of it. Even when he was awake he was
completely torpid. Often he would lie from one meal to the next almost
without stirring, sometimes asleep, sometimes waking into vague reveries
in which it was too much trouble to open his eyes. He had long grown
used to sleeping with a strong light on his face. It seemed to make no
difference, except that one's dreams were more coherent. He dreamed a
great deal all through this time, and they were always happy dreams. He
was in the Golden Country, or he was sitting among enormous glorious,
sunlit ruins, with his mother, with Julia, with O'Brien--not doing
anything, merely sitting in the sun, talking of peaceful things. Such
thoughts as he had when he was awake were mostly about his dreams. He
seemed to have lost the power of intellectual effort, now that the
stimulus of pain had been removed. He was not bored, he had no desire
for conversation or distraction. Merely to be alone, not to be beaten
or questioned, to have enough to eat, and to be clean all over, was
completely satisfying.
By degrees he came to spend less time in sleep, but he still felt no
impulse to get off the bed. All he cared for was to lie quiet and feel the
strength gathering in his body. He would finger himself here and there,
trying to make sure that it was not an illusion that his muscles were
growing rounder and his skin tauter. Finally it was established beyond a
doubt that he was growing fatter; his thighs were now definitely thicker
than his knees. After that, reluctantly at first, he began exercising
himself regularly. In a little while he could walk three kilometres,
measured by pacing the cell, and his bowed shoulders were growing
straighter. He attempted more elaborate exercises, and was astonished and
humiliated to find what things he could not do. He could not move out of a
walk, he could not hold his stool out at arm's length, he could not stand
on one leg without falling over. He squatted down on his heels, and found
that with agonizing pains in thigh and calf he could just lift himself to
a standing position. He lay flat on his belly and tried to lift his weight
by his hands. It was hopeless, he could not raise himself a centimetre.
But after a few more days--a few more mealtimes--even that feat was
accomplished. A time came when he could do it six times running. He began
to grow actually proud of his body, and to cherish an intermittent belief
that his face also was growing back to normal. Only when he chanced to put
his hand on his bald scalp did he remember the seamed, ruined face that
had looked back at him out of the mirror.
His mind grew more active. He sat down on the plank bed, his back against
the wall and the slate on his knees, and set to work deliberately at the
task of re-educating himself.
He had capitulated, that was agreed. In reality, as he saw now, he had
been ready to capitulate long before he had taken the decision. From the
moment when he was inside the Ministry of Love--and yes, even during those
minutes when he and Julia had stood helpless while the iron voice from the
telescreen told them what to do--he had grasped the frivolity, the
shallowness of his attempt to set himself up against the power of the
Party. He knew now that for seven years the Thought Police had watched him
like a beetle under a magnifying glass. There was no physical act, no word
spoken aloud, that they had not noticed, no train of thought that they had
not been able to infer. Even the speck of whitish dust on the cover of his
diary they had carefully replaced. They had played sound-tracks to him,
shown him photographs. Some of them were photographs of Julia and himself.
Yes, even... He could not fight against the Party any longer. Besides,
the Party was in the right. It must be so; how could the immortal,
collective brain be mistaken? By what external standard could you check
its judgements? Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of
learning to think as they thought. Only----!
The pencil felt thick and awkward in his fingers. He began to write down
the thoughts that came into his head. He wrote first in large clumsy
capitals:
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
Then almost without a pause he wrote beneath it:
TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE
But then there came a sort of check. His mind, as though shying away from
something, seemed unable to concentrate. He knew that he knew what came
next, but for the moment he could not recall it. When he did recall it,
it was only by consciously reasoning out what it must be: it did not come
of its own accord. He wrote:
GOD IS POWER
He accepted everything. The past was alterable. The past never had been
altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war
with Eastasia. Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford were guilty of the crimes
they were charged with. He had never seen the photograph that disproved
their guilt. It had never existed, he had invented it. He remembered
remembering contrary things, but those were false memories, products of
self-deception. How easy it all was! Only surrender, and everything else
followed. It was like swimming against a current that swept you backwards
however hard you struggled, and then suddenly deciding to turn round and
go with the current instead of opposing it. Nothing had changed except
your own attitude: the predestined thing happened in any case. He hardly
knew why he had ever rebelled. Everything was easy, except----!
Anything could be true. The so-called laws of Nature were nonsense. The
law of gravity was nonsense. 'If I wished,' O'Brien had said, 'I could
float off this floor like a soap bubble.' Winston worked it out. 'If he
THINKS he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously THINK I see him
do it, then the thing happens.' Suddenly, like a lump of submerged wreckage
breaking the surface of water, the thought burst into his mind: 'It doesn't
really happen. We imagine it. It is hallucination.' He pushed the thought
under instantly. The fallacy was obvious. It presupposed that somewhere
or other, outside oneself, there was a 'real' world where 'real' things
happened. But how could there be such a world? What knowledge have we of
anything, save through our own minds? All happenings are in the mind.
Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens.
He had no difficulty in disposing of the fallacy, and he was in no danger
of succumbing to it. He realized, nevertheless, that it ought never to
have occurred to him. The mind should develop a blind spot whenever a
dangerous thought presented itself. The process should be automatic,
instinctive. CRIMESTOP, they called it in Newspeak.
He set to work to exercise himself in crimestop. He presented himself with
propositions--'the Party says the earth is flat', 'the party says that
ice is heavier than water'--and trained himself in not seeing or not
understanding the arguments that contradicted them. It was not easy.
It needed great powers of reasoning and improvisation. The arithmetical
problems raised, for instance, by such a statement as 'two and two make
five' were beyond his intellectual grasp. It needed also a sort of
athleticism of mind, an ability at one moment to make the most delicate
use of logic and at the next to be unconscious of the crudest logical
errors. Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to
attain.
All the while, with one part of his mind, he wondered how soon they would
shoot him. 'Everything depends on yourself,' O'Brien had said; but he knew
that there was no conscious act by which he could bring it nearer. It
might be ten minutes hence, or ten years. They might keep him for years in
solitary confinement, they might send him to a labour-camp, they might
release him for a while, as they sometimes did. It was perfectly possible
that before he was shot the whole drama of his arrest and interrogation
would be enacted all over again. The one certain thing was that death
never came at an expected moment. The tradition--the unspoken tradition:
somehow you knew it, though you never heard it said--was that they shot
you from behind; always in the back of the head, without warning, as you
walked down a corridor from cell to cell.
One day--but 'one day' was not the right expression; just as probably it
was in the middle of the night: once--he fell into a strange, blissful
reverie. He was walking down the corridor, waiting for the bullet. He knew
that it was coming in another moment. Everything was settled, smoothed
out, reconciled. There were no more doubts, no more arguments, no more
pain, no more fear. His body was healthy and strong. He walked easily,
with a joy of movement and with a feeling of walking in sunlight. He was
not any longer in the narrow white corridors in the Ministry of Love, he
was in the enormous sunlit passage, a kilometre wide, down which he had
seemed to walk in the delirium induced by drugs. He was in the Golden
Country, following the foot-track across the old rabbit-cropped pasture.
He could feel the short springy turf under his feet and the gentle sunshine
on his face. At the edge of the field were the elm trees, faintly stirring,
and somewhere beyond that was the stream where the dace lay in the green
pools under the willows.
Suddenly he started up with a shock of horror. The sweat broke out on his
backbone. He had heard himself cry aloud:
'Julia! Julia! Julia, my love! Julia!'
For a moment he had had an overwhelming hallucination of her presence. She
had seemed to be not merely with him, but inside him. It was as though she
had got into the texture of his skin. In that moment he had loved her far
more than he had ever done when they were together and free. Also he knew
that somewhere or other she was still alive and needed his help.
He lay back on the bed and tried to compose himself. What had he done? How
many years had he added to his servitude by that moment of weakness?
In another moment he would hear the tramp of boots outside. They could not
let such an outburst go unpunished. They would know now, if they had not
known before, that he was breaking the agreement he had made with them.
He obeyed the Party, but he still hated the Party. In the old days he had
hidden a heretical mind beneath an appearance of conformity. Now he had
retreated a step further: in the mind he had surrendered, but he had hoped
to keep the inner heart inviolate. He knew that he was in the wrong, but
he preferred to be in the wrong. They would understand that--O'Brien would
understand it. It was all confessed in that single foolish cry.
He would have to start all over again. It might take years. He ran a hand
over his face, trying to familiarize himself with the new shape. There
were deep furrows in the cheeks, the cheekbones felt sharp, the nose
flattened. Besides, since last seeing himself in the glass he had been
given a complete new set of teeth. It was not easy to preserve
inscrutability when you did not know what your face looked like. In any
case, mere control of the features was not enough. For the first time he
perceived that if you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from
yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is
needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape
that could be given a name. From now onwards he must not only think right;
he must feel right, dream right. And all the while he must keep his hatred
locked up inside him like a ball of matter which was part of himself and
yet unconnected with the rest of him, a kind of cyst.
One day they would decide to shoot him. You could not tell when it would
happen, but a few seconds beforehand it should be possible to guess. It
was always from behind, walking down a corridor. Ten seconds would be
enough. In that time the world inside him could turn over. And then
suddenly, without a word uttered, without a check in his step, without the
changing of a line in his face--suddenly the camouflage would be down and
bang! would go the batteries of his hatred. Hatred would fill him like an
enormous roaring flame. And almost in the same instant bang! would go the
bullet, too late, or too early. They would have blown his brain to pieces
before they could reclaim it. The heretical thought would be unpunished,
unrepented, out of their reach for ever. They would have blown a hole in
their own perfection. To die hating them, that was freedom.
He shut his eyes. It was more difficult than accepting an intellectual
discipline. It was a question of degrading himself, mutilating himself. He
had got to plunge into the filthiest of filth. What was the most horrible,
sickening thing of all? He thought of Big Brother. The enormous face
(because of constantly seeing it on posters he always thought of it as
being a metre wide), with its heavy black moustache and the eyes that
followed you to and fro, seemed to float into his mind of its own accord.
What were his true feelings towards Big Brother?
There was a heavy tramp of boots in the passage. The steel door swung open
with a clang. O'Brien walked into the cell. Behind him were the waxen-faced
officer and the black-uniformed guards.
'Get up,' said O'Brien. 'Come here.'
Winston stood opposite him. O'Brien took Winston's shoulders between his
strong hands and looked at him closely.
'You have had thoughts of deceiving me,' he said. 'That was stupid.
Stand up straighter. Look me in the face.'
He paused, and went on in a gentler tone:
'You are improving. Intellectually there is very little wrong with you.
It is only emotionally that you have failed to make progress. Tell me,
Winston--and remember, no lies: you know that I am always able to detect
a lie--tell me, what are your true feelings towards Big Brother?'
'I hate him.'
'You hate him. Good. Then the time has come for you to take the last step.
You must love Big Brother. It is not enough to obey him: you must love
him.'
He released Winston with a little push towards the guards.
'Room 101,' he said.
Chapter 5
At each stage of his imprisonment he had known, or seemed to know,
whereabouts he was in the windowless building. Possibly there were slight
differences in the air pressure. The cells where the guards had beaten him
were below ground level. The room where he had been interrogated by
O'Brien was high up near the roof. This place was many metres underground,
as deep down as it was possible to go.
It was bigger than most of the cells he had been in. But he hardly noticed
his surroundings. All he noticed was that there were two small tables
straight in front of him, each covered with green baize. One was only a
metre or two from him, the other was further away, near the door. He was
strapped upright in a chair, so tightly that he could move nothing, not
even his head. A sort of pad gripped his head from behind, forcing him to
look straight in front of him.
For a moment he was alone, then the door opened and O'Brien came in.
'You asked me once,' said O'Brien, 'what was in Room 101. I told you that
you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in
Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.'
The door opened again. A guard came in, carrying something made of wire,
a box or basket of some kind. He set it down on the further table. Because
of the position in which O'Brien was standing. Winston could not see what
the thing was.
'The worst thing in the world,' said O'Brien, 'varies from individual to
individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or
by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some
quite trivial thing, not even fatal.'
He had moved a little to one side, so that Winston had a better view of
the thing on the table. It was an oblong wire cage with a handle on top
for carrying it by. Fixed to the front of it was something that looked
like a fencing mask, with the concave side outwards. Although it was three
or four metres away from him, he could see that the cage was divided
lengthways into two compartments, and that there was some kind of creature
in each. They were rats.
'In your case,' said O'Brien, 'the worst thing in the world happens to be
rats.'
A sort of premonitory tremor, a fear of he was not certain what, had
passed through Winston as soon as he caught his first glimpse of the cage.
But at this moment the meaning of the mask-like attachment in front of it
suddenly sank into him. His bowels seemed to turn to water.
'You can't do that!' he cried out in a high cracked voice. 'You couldn't,
you couldn't! It's impossible.'
'Do you remember,' said O'Brien, 'the moment of panic that used to occur
in your dreams? There was a wall of blackness in front of you, and a
roaring sound in your ears. There was something terrible on the other side
of the wall. You knew that you knew what it was, but you dared not drag it
into the open. It was the rats that were on the other side of the wall.'
'O'Brien!' said Winston, making an effort to control his voice. 'You know
this is not necessary. What is it that you want me to do?'
O'Brien made no direct answer. When he spoke it was in the schoolmasterish
manner that he sometimes affected. He looked thoughtfully into the
distance, as though he were addressing an audience somewhere behind
Winston's back.
'By itself,' he said, 'pain is not always enough. There are occasions when
a human being will stand out against pain, even to the point of death.
But for everyone there is something unendurable--something that cannot be
contemplated. Courage and cowardice are not involved. If you are falling
from a height it is not cowardly to clutch at a rope. If you have come up
from deep water it is not cowardly to fill your lungs with air. It is
merely an instinct which cannot be destroyed. It is the same with the
rats. For you, they are unendurable. They are a form of pressure that you
cannot withstand, even if you wished to. You will do what is required of
you.'
'But what is it, what is it? How can I do it if I don't know what it is?'
O'Brien picked up the cage and brought it across to the nearer table.
He set it down carefully on the baize cloth. Winston could hear the blood
singing in his ears. He had the feeling of sitting in utter loneliness.
He was in the middle of a great empty plain, a flat desert drenched with
sunlight, across which all sounds came to him out of immense distances.
Yet the cage with the rats was not two metres away from him. They were
enormous rats. They were at the age when a rat's muzzle grows blunt and
fierce and his fur brown instead of grey.
'The rat,' said O'Brien, still addressing his invisible audience,
'although a rodent, is carnivorous. You are aware of that. You will have
heard of the things that happen in the poor quarters of this town. In some
streets a woman dare not leave her baby alone in the house, even for five
minutes. The rats are certain to attack it. Within quite a small time they
will strip it to the bones. They also attack sick or dying people. They
show astonishing intelligence in knowing when a human being is helpless.'
There was an outburst of squeals from the cage. It seemed to reach Winston
from far away. The rats were fighting; they were trying to get at each
other through the partition. He heard also a deep groan of despair.
That, too, seemed to come from outside himself.
O'Brien picked up the cage, and, as he did so, pressed something in it.
There was a sharp click. Winston made a frantic effort to tear himself
loose from the chair. It was hopeless; every part of him, even his head,
was held immovably. O'Brien moved the cage nearer. It was less than a
metre from Winston's face.
'I have pressed the first lever,' said O'Brien. 'You understand the
construction of this cage. The mask will fit over your head, leaving no
exit. When I press this other lever, the door of the cage will slide up.
These starving brutes will shoot out of it like bullets. Have you ever
seen a rat leap through the air? They will leap on to your face and bore
straight into it. Sometimes they attack the eyes first. Sometimes they
burrow through the cheeks and devour the tongue.'
The cage was nearer; it was closing in. Winston heard a succession of
shrill cries which appeared to be occurring in the air above his head. But
he fought furiously against his panic. To think, to think, even with a
split second left--to think was the only hope. Suddenly the foul musty
odour of the brutes struck his nostrils. There was a violent convulsion of
nausea inside him, and he almost lost consciousness. Everything had gone
black. For an instant he was insane, a screaming animal. Yet he came out
of the blackness clutching an idea. There was one and only one way to save
himself. He must interpose another human being, the BODY of another human
being, between himself and the rats.
The circle of the mask was large enough now to shut out the vision of
anything else. The wire door was a couple of hand-spans from his face. The
rats knew what was coming now. One of them was leaping up and down, the
other, an old scaly grandfather of the sewers, stood up, with his pink
hands against the bars, and fiercely sniffed the air. Winston could see
the whiskers and the yellow teeth. Again the black panic took hold of him.
He was blind, helpless, mindless.
'It was a common punishment in Imperial China,' said O'Brien as
didactically as ever.
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!'
He was falling backwards, into enormous depths, away from the rats. He was
still strapped in the chair, but he had fallen through the floor, through
the walls of the building, through the earth, through the oceans, through
the atmosphere, into outer space, into the gulfs between the stars--always
away, away, away from the rats. He was light years distant, but O'Brien
was still standing at his side. There was still the cold touch of wire
against his cheek. But through the darkness that enveloped him he heard
another metallic click, and knew that the cage door had clicked shut and
not open.
Chapter 6
The Chestnut Tree was almost empty. A ray of sunlight slanting through a
window fell on dusty table-tops. It was the lonely hour of fifteen. A
tinny music trickled from the telescreens.
Winston sat in his usual corner, gazing into an empty glass. Now and again
he glanced up at a vast face which eyed him from the opposite wall.
BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said. Unbidden, a waiter came and
filled his glass up with Victory Gin, shaking into it a few drops from
another bottle with a quill through the cork. It was saccharine flavoured
with cloves, the speciality of the cafe.
Winston was listening to the telescreen. At present only music was coming
out of it, but there was a possibility that at any moment there might be
a special bulletin from the Ministry of Peace. The news from the African
front was disquieting in the extreme. On and off he had been worrying
about it all day. A Eurasian army (Oceania was at war with Eurasia:
Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia) was moving southward at
terrifying speed. The mid-day bulletin had not mentioned any definite
area, but it was probable that already the mouth of the Congo was a
battlefield. Brazzaville and Leopoldville were in danger. One did not have
to look at the map to see what it meant. It was not merely a question of
losing Central Africa: for the first time in the whole war, the territory
of Oceania itself was menaced.
A violent emotion, not fear exactly but a sort of undifferentiated
excitement, flared up in him, then faded again. He stopped thinking about
the war. In these days he could never fix his mind on any one subject for
more than a few moments at a time. He picked up his glass and drained it
at a gulp. As always, the gin made him shudder and even retch slightly.
The stuff was horrible. The cloves and saccharine, themselves disgusting
enough in their sickly way, could not disguise the flat oily smell; and
what was worst of all was that the smell of gin, which dwelt with him
night and day, was inextricably mixed up in his mind with the smell of
those----
He never named them, even in his thoughts, and so far as it was possible
he never visualized them. They were something that he was half-aware of,
hovering close to his face, a smell that clung to his nostrils. As the gin
rose in him he belched through purple lips. He had grown fatter since they
released him, and had regained his old colour--indeed, more than regained
it. His features had thickened, the skin on nose and cheekbones was
coarsely red, even the bald scalp was too deep a pink. A waiter, again
unbidden, brought the chessboard and the current issue of 'The Times',
with the page turned down at the chess problem. Then, seeing that Winston's
glass was empty, he brought the gin bottle and filled it. There was no
need to give orders. They knew his habits. The chessboard was always
waiting for him, his corner table was always reserved; even when the place
was full he had it to himself, since nobody cared to be seen sitting too
close to him. He never even bothered to count his drinks. At irregular
intervals they presented him with a dirty slip of paper which they said
was the bill, but he had the impression that they always undercharged him.
It would have made no difference if it had been the other way about. He
had always plenty of money nowadays. He even had a job, a sinecure, more
highly-paid than his old job had been.
The music from the telescreen stopped and a voice took over. Winston raised
his head to listen. No bulletins from the front, however. It was merely a
brief announcement from the Ministry of Plenty. In the preceding quarter,
it appeared, the Tenth Three-Year Plan's quota for bootlaces had been
overfulfilled by 98 per cent.
He examined the chess problem and set out the pieces. It was a tricky
ending, involving a couple of knights. 'White to play and mate in two
moves.' Winston looked up at the portrait of Big Brother. White always
mates, he thought with a sort of cloudy mysticism. Always, without
exception, it is so arranged. In no chess problem since the beginning of
the world has black ever won. Did it not symbolize the eternal, unvarying
triumph of Good over Evil? The huge face gazed back at him, full of calm
power. White always mates.
The voice from the telescreen paused and added in a different and much
graver tone: 'You are warned to stand by for an important announcement at
fifteen-thirty. Fifteen-thirty! This is news of the highest importance.
Take care not to miss it. Fifteen-thirty!' The tinkling music struck up
again.
Winston's heart stirred. That was the bulletin from the front; instinct
told him that it was bad news that was coming. All day, with little spurts
of excitement, the thought of a smashing defeat in Africa had been in and
out of his mind. He seemed actually to see the Eurasian army swarming
across the never-broken frontier and pouring down into the tip of Africa
like a column of ants. Why had it not been possible to outflank them in
some way? The outline of the West African coast stood out vividly in his
mind. He picked up the white knight and moved it across the board. THERE
was the proper spot. Even while he saw the black horde racing southward he
saw another force, mysteriously assembled, suddenly planted in their rear,
cutting their communications by land and sea. He felt that by willing it he
was bringing that other force into existence. But it was necessary to act
quickly. If they could get control of the whole of Africa, if they had
airfields and submarine bases at the Cape, it would cut Oceania in two. It
might mean anything: defeat, breakdown, the redivision of the world, the
destruction of the Party! He drew a deep breath. An extraordinary medley
of feeling--but it was not a medley, exactly; rather it was successive
layers of feeling, in which one could not say which layer was
undermost--struggled inside him.
The spasm passed. He put the white knight back in its place, but for the
moment he could not settle down to serious study of the chess problem.
His thoughts wandered again. Almost unconsciously he traced with his
finger in the dust on the table:
2+2=5
'They can't get inside you,' she had said. But they could get inside you.
'What happens to you here is FOR EVER,' O'Brien had said. That was a true
word. There were things, your own acts, from which you could never recover.
Something was killed in your breast: burnt out, cauterized out.
He had seen her; he had even spoken to her. There was no danger in it. He
knew as though instinctively that they now took almost no interest in his
doings. He could have arranged to meet her a second time if either of them
had wanted to. Actually it was by chance that they had met. It was in the
Park, on a vile, biting day in March, when the earth was like iron and
all the grass seemed dead and there was not a bud anywhere except a few
crocuses which had pushed themselves up to be dismembered by the wind. He
was hurrying along with frozen hands and watering eyes when he saw her not
ten metres away from him. It struck him at once that she had changed in
some ill-defined way. They almost passed one another without a sign, then
he turned and followed her, not very eagerly. He knew that there was no
danger, nobody would take any interest in him. She did not speak. She
walked obliquely away across the grass as though trying to get rid of him,
then seemed to resign herself to having him at her side. Presently they
were in among a clump of ragged leafless shrubs, useless either for
concealment or as protection from the wind. They halted. It was vilely
cold. The wind whistled through the twigs and fretted the occasional,
dirty-looking crocuses. He put his arm round her waist.
There was no telescreen, but there must be hidden microphones: besides,
they could be seen. It did not matter, nothing mattered. They could have
lain down on the ground and done THAT if they had wanted to. His flesh
froze with horror at the thought of it. She made no response whatever to
the clasp of his arm; she did not even try to disengage herself. He knew
now what had changed in her. Her face was sallower, and there was a long
scar, partly hidden by the hair, across her forehead and temple; but that
was not the change. It was that her waist had grown thicker, and, in a
surprising way, had stiffened. He remembered how once, after the explosion
of a rocket bomb, he had helped to drag a corpse out of some ruins, and
had been astonished not only by the incredible weight of the thing, but by
its rigidity and awkwardness to handle, which made it seem more like stone
than flesh. Her body felt like that. It occurred to him that the texture
of her skin would be quite different from what it had once been.
He did not attempt to kiss her, nor did they speak. As they walked back
across the grass, she looked directly at him for the first time. It
was only a momentary glance, full of contempt and dislike. He wondered
whether it was a dislike that came purely out of the past or whether it
was inspired also by his bloated face and the water that the wind kept
squeezing from his eyes. They sat down on two iron chairs, side by side
but not too close together. He saw that she was about to speak. She moved
her clumsy shoe a few centimetres and deliberately crushed a twig. Her
feet seemed to have grown broader, he noticed.
'I betrayed you,' she said baldly.
'I betrayed you,' he said.
She gave him another quick look of dislike.
'Sometimes,' she said, 'they threaten you with something something you
can't stand up to, can't even think about. And then you say, "Don't do it
to me, do it to somebody else, do it to so-and-so." And perhaps you might
pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to
make them stop and didn't really mean it. But that isn't true. At the time
when it happens you do mean it. You think there's no other way of saving
yourself, and you're quite ready to save yourself that way. You WANT it to
happen to the other person. You don't give a damn what they suffer. All
you care about is yourself.'
'All you care about is yourself,' he echoed.
'And after that, you don't feel the same towards the other person any
longer.'
'No,' he said, 'you don't feel the same.'
There did not seem to be anything more to say. The wind plastered their
thin overalls against their bodies. Almost at once it became embarrassing
to sit there in silence: besides, it was too cold to keep still. She said
something about catching her Tube and stood up to go.
'We must meet again,' he said.
'Yes,' she said, 'we must meet again.'
He followed irresolutely for a little distance, half a pace behind her.
They did not speak again. She did not actually try to shake him off, but
walked at just such a speed as to prevent his keeping abreast of her.
He had made up his mind that he would accompany her as far as the Tube
station, but suddenly this process of trailing along in the cold seemed
pointless and unbearable. He was overwhelmed by a desire not so much to
get away from Julia as to get back to the Chestnut Tree Cafe, which had
never seemed so attractive as at this moment. He had a nostalgic vision
of his corner table, with the newspaper and the chessboard and the
ever-flowing gin. Above all, it would be warm in there. The next moment,
not altogether by accident, he allowed himself to become separated from
her by a small knot of people. He made a half-hearted attempt to catch up,
then slowed down, turned, and made off in the opposite direction. When he
had gone fifty metres he looked back. The street was not crowded, but
already he could not distinguish her. Any one of a dozen hurrying figures
might have been hers. Perhaps her thickened, stiffened body was no longer
recognizable from behind.
'At the time when it happens,' she had said, 'you do mean it.' He had
meant it. He had not merely said it, he had wished it. He had wished that
she and not he should be delivered over to the----
Something changed in the music that trickled from the telescreen. A
cracked and jeering note, a yellow note, came into it. And then--perhaps
it was not happening, perhaps it was only a memory taking on the semblance
of sound--a voice was singing:
'Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me----'
The tears welled up in his eyes. A passing waiter noticed that his glass
was empty and came back with the gin bottle.
He took up his glass and sniffed at it. The stuff grew not less but more
horrible with every mouthful he drank. But it had become the element he
swam in. It was his life, his death, and his resurrection. It was gin that
sank him into stupor every night, and gin that revived him every morning.
When he woke, seldom before eleven hundred, with gummed-up eyelids and
fiery mouth and a back that seemed to be broken, it would have been
impossible even to rise from the horizontal if it had not been for the
bottle and teacup placed beside the bed overnight. Through the midday
hours he sat with glazed face, the bottle handy, listening to the
telescreen. From fifteen to closing-time he was a fixture in the Chestnut
Tree. No one cared what he did any longer, no whistle woke him, no
telescreen admonished him. Occasionally, perhaps twice a week, he went
to a dusty, forgotten-looking office in the Ministry of Truth and did
a little work, or what was called work. He had been appointed to a
sub-committee of a sub-committee which had sprouted from one of the
innumerable committees dealing with minor difficulties that arose in the
compilation of the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary. They were
engaged in producing something called an Interim Report, but what it was
that they were reporting on he had never definitely found out. It was
something to do with the question of whether commas should be placed
inside brackets, or outside. There were four others on the committee, all
of them persons similar to himself. There were days when they assembled
and then promptly dispersed again, frankly admitting to one another that
there was not really anything to be done. But there were other days when
they settled down to their work almost eagerly, making a tremendous show
of entering up their minutes and drafting long memoranda which were never
finished--when the argument as to what they were supposedly arguing about
grew extraordinarily involved and abstruse, with subtle haggling over
definitions, enormous digressions, quarrels--threats, even, to appeal to
higher authority. And then suddenly the life would go out of them and
they would sit round the table looking at one another with extinct eyes,
like ghosts fading at cock-crow.
The telescreen was silent for a moment. Winston raised his head again. The
bulletin! But no, they were merely changing the music. He had the map of
Africa behind his eyelids. The movement of the armies was a diagram: a
black arrow tearing vertically southward, and a white arrow horizontally
eastward, across the tail of the first. As though for reassurance he
looked up at the imperturbable face in the portrait. Was it conceivable
that the second arrow did not even exist?
His interest flagged again. He drank another mouthful of gin, picked up
the white knight and made a tentative move. Check. But it was evidently
not the right move, because----
Uncalled, a memory floated into his mind. He saw a candle-lit room with a
vast white-counterpaned bed, and himself, a boy of nine or ten, sitting on
the floor, shaking a dice-box, and laughing excitedly. His mother was
sitting opposite him and also laughing.
It must have been about a month before she disappeared. It was a moment of
reconciliation, when the nagging hunger in his belly was forgotten and his
earlier affection for her had temporarily revived. He remembered the day
well, a pelting, drenching day when the water streamed down the window-pane
and the light indoors was too dull to read by. The boredom of the two
children in the dark, cramped bedroom became unbearable. Winston whined
and grizzled, made futile demands for food, fretted about the room pulling
everything out of place and kicking the wainscoting until the neighbours
banged on the wall, while the younger child wailed intermittently. In the
end his mother said, 'Now be good, and I'll buy you a toy. A lovely
toy--you'll love it'; and then she had gone out in the rain, to a little
general shop which was still sporadically open nearby, and came back with
a cardboard box containing an outfit of Snakes and Ladders. He could still
remember the smell of the damp cardboard. It was a miserable outfit. The
board was cracked and the tiny wooden dice were so ill-cut that they
would hardly lie on their sides. Winston looked at the thing sulkily and
without interest. But then his mother lit a piece of candle and they sat
down on the floor to play. Soon he was wildly excited and shouting with
laughter as the tiddly-winks climbed hopefully up the ladders and then
came slithering down the snakes again, almost to the starting-point. They
played eight games, winning four each. His tiny sister, too young to
understand what the game was about, had sat propped up against a bolster,
laughing because the others were laughing. For a whole afternoon they had
all been happy together, as in his earlier childhood.
He pushed the picture out of his mind. It was a false memory. He was
troubled by false memories occasionally. They did not matter so long as
one knew them for what they were. Some things had happened, others had not
happened. He turned back to the chessboard and picked up the white knight
again. Almost in the same instant it dropped on to the board with a
clatter. He had started as though a pin had run into him.
A shrill trumpet-call had pierced the air. It was the bulletin! Victory!
It always meant victory when a trumpet-call preceded the news. A sort of
electric drill ran through the cafe. Even the waiters had started and
pricked up their ears.
The trumpet-call had let loose an enormous volume of noise. Already an
excited voice was gabbling from the telescreen, but even as it started
it was almost drowned by a roar of cheering from outside. The news had
run round the streets like magic. He could hear just enough of what was
issuing from the telescreen to realize that it had all happened, as he had
foreseen; a vast seaborne armada had secretly assembled a sudden blow in
the enemy's rear, the white arrow tearing across the tail of the black.
Fragments of triumphant phrases pushed themselves through the din: 'Vast
strategic manoeuvre--perfect co-ordination--utter rout--half a million
prisoners--complete demoralization--control of the whole of Africa--bring
the war within measurable distance of its end--victory--greatest victory
in human history--victory, victory, victory!'
Under the table Winston's feet made convulsive movements. He had not
stirred from his seat, but in his mind he was running, swiftly running,
he was with the crowds outside, cheering himself deaf. He looked up again
at the portrait of Big Brother. The colossus that bestrode the world!
The rock against which the hordes of Asia dashed themselves in vain! He
thought how ten minutes ago--yes, only ten minutes--there had still been
equivocation in his heart as he wondered whether the news from the front
would be of victory or defeat. Ah, it was more than a Eurasian army that
had perished! Much had changed in him since that first day in the Ministry
of Love, but the final, indispensable, healing change had never happened,
until this moment.
The voice from the telescreen was still pouring forth its tale of prisoners
and booty and slaughter, but the shouting outside had died down a little.
The waiters were turning back to their work. One of them approached with
the gin bottle. Winston, sitting in a blissful dream, paid no attention
as his glass was filled up. He was not running or cheering any longer. He
was back in the Ministry of Love, with everything forgiven, his soul white
as snow. He was in the public dock, confessing everything, implicating
everybody. He was walking down the white-tiled corridor, with the feeling
of walking in sunlight, and an armed guard at his back. The long-hoped-for
bullet was entering his brain.
He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn
what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless
misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast!
Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all
right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won
the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
THE END
OVERVIEW
Nineteen Eighty-Four occurs in Oceania, one of three intercontinental super-states who divided the world among themselves after a global war. In London, the "chief city of Airstrip One", the Oceanic province that "had once been called England or Britain". Posters of the Party leader, Big Brother, bearing the caption BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU dominate the landscape, while the telescreen (transceiving television) ubiquitously monitors the private and public lives of the populace. The social class system is threefold: (I) the upper-class Inner Party, (II) the middle-class Outer Party, and (III) the lower-class Proles (from Proletariat), who make up 85% of the population and represent the working classes. As the government, the Party controls the population via four government ministries: the Ministry of Peace, Ministry of Plenty, Ministry of Love, and the Ministry of Truth, where protagonist Winston Smith (a member of the Outer Party), works as an editor revising historical records to concord the past to the contemporary party line orthodoxy—that changes daily—and deletes the official existence of people identified as unpersons.
Winston Smith's story begins on 4 April 1984: "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen"; yet the date is dubitable, because it is what he perceives, given the continual historical revisionism; he later concludes it is irrelevant. Winston's memories and his reading of the proscribed book, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, by Emmanuel Goldstein, reveal that after the Second World War, the United Kingdom fell to civil war and then was integrated into Oceania. Simultaneously, the USSR's annexation of continental Europe established the second superstate of Eurasia. The third superstate, Eastasia, represents East and Southeast Asian region. The three superstates fight a perpetual war for the remaining unconquered lands of the world; they form and break alliances as convenient.
From his childhood (1949–53), Winston remembers the Atomic Wars fought in Europe, western Russia, and North America. It is unclear to him what occurred first—either the Party's civil war ascendance, or the US's British Empire annexation, or the war wherein Colchester was bombed—however, the increasing clarity of his memory and the story of his family's dissolution suggest that the atomic bombings occurred first (the Smiths took refuge in a tube station) followed by civil war featuring "confused street fighting in London itself", and the societal postwar reorganisation, which the Party retrospectively call "the Revolution".
Plot
[pic]
Oceanian society: Big Brother atop, The Party in middle, the Proles at bottom, in 1984.
The story of Winston Smith presents the world in the year 1984, after a global atomic war, via his perception of life in Airstrip One (England or Britain), a province of Oceania, one of the world's three superstates; his intellectual rebellion against the Party and illicit romance with Julia; and his consequent imprisonment, interrogation, torture, and re-education by the Thinkpol in the Miniluv.
Winston Smith
Winston Smith is an intellectual, a member of the Outer Party, who lives in the ruins of London, and who grew up in the post–Second World War UK, during the revolution and the civil war after which the Party assumed power. During the civil war, the Ingsoc movement placed him in an orphanage for training and subsequent employment as a civil servant. Yet, his squalid existence is living in a one-room apartment, a subsistence diet of black bread and synthetic meals washed down with Victory-brand gin. His intellectual discontent leads to keeping a journal of negative thoughts and opinions about the Party and Big Brother, which, if discovered by the Thought Police, would warrant death. Moreover, he is fortunate, because the apartment has an alcove, beside the telescreen, where it cannot see him, where he believes his thoughts remain private, whilst writing in his journal: "Thoughtcrime does not entail death. Thoughtcrime IS death". The telescreens (in every public area, and the quarters of the Party's members), hidden microphones, and informers permit the Thought Police to spy upon everyone and so identify anyone who might endanger the Party's régime; children most of all, are indoctrinated to spy and inform on suspected thought-criminals—especially their parents.
At the Minitrue, Winston is an editor responsible for the historical revisionism concording the past to the Party's contemporary official version of the past; thus making the government of Oceania seem omniscient. As such, he perpetually rewrites records and alters photographs, rendering the deleted people as unpersons; the original document is incinerated in a memory hole. Despite enjoying the intellectual challenge of historical revisionism, he is fascinated by the true past, and eagerly tries to learn more about it.
Julia
One day, at the Minitrue, whilst Winston is assisting a woman who had fallen, she surreptitiously hands him a note reading "I LOVE YOU"; she is "Julia", a dark-haired mechanic who repairs the ministry's novel-writing machines. Before then, he had loathed her, presuming she was a fanatical member of the Junior Anti-Sex League, given she wears the league's red sash, symbolising puritanical renouncement of sexual intercourse, yet his hostility vanishes upon reading her note. Afterwards, they begin a love affair, meeting first in the country, then in a rented room atop an antiques shop in a proletarian London neighbourhood, where they think themselves safe and alone; unbeknownst to Winston, the Thought Police have discovered their rebellion and had been spying on them for some time.
Later, when Inner Party member O'Brien approaches him, he believes the Brotherhood have communicated with him. Under the pretext of giving him a copy of the latest edition of the Newspeak dictionary, O'Brien gives him "the book", The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, said to have been written by Emmanuel Goldstein, leader of the Brotherhood, which explains the perpetual war and the slogans, WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
Capture
The Thought Police captures Winston and Julia in their bedroom, to be delivered to the Ministry of Love for interrogation, and Charrington, the shop keeper who rented the room to them, reveals himself as an officer in the Thought Police. After a prolonged regimen of systematic beatings and psychologically draining interrogation by Party ideologues, O'Brien tortures Winston with electroshock, telling him it will cure him of his insanity—his manifest hatred for the Party. In long, complex conversation, he explains that the Inner Party's motivation: power as an end unto itself, achieved by abolishing the family, the orgasm, and the libido—thus eliminating every obstacle to loving Big Brother and Ingsoc in a ruthless, anti-intellectual society without art, literature, and science to distract from devotion to the Party.
Asked if the Brotherhood exists, O'Brien replies that Winston will never know whilst alive; it will remain an unsolvable riddle in his mind. During a torture session, his imprisonment in the Miniluv is explained: "There are three stages in your reintegration," said O'Brien. "There is learning, there is understanding, and there is acceptance" of the Party's reality; afterwards, Winston will eventually be killed.
Confession and betrayal
During political re-education, Winston admits to and confesses his crimes and to crimes he did not commit, implicating others and his beloved Julia. In the second stage of re-education for reintegration, O'Brien makes Winston understand he is "rotting away". Countering that the Party cannot win, Winston admits: "I have not betrayed Julia". O'Brien understands that despite his criminal confession and implication of Julia, Winston has not betrayed her in that he "had not stopped loving her; his feeling toward her had remained the same".
One night in his cell Winston suddenly awakens, screaming: "Julia! Julia! Julia, my love! Julia!", whereupon O'Brien rushes in, not to interrogate but to send him to Room 101, the Miniluv's most feared room where resides the worst thing in the world. There, the prisoner's greatest fear is forced on them; the final step in political re-education: acceptance. Winston's primal fear of rats is imposed upon him as a wire cage holding hungry rats that will be fitted to his face. When the rats are about to devour his face, he frantically shouts: "Do it to Julia!" - in his moment of fear, ultimately relinquishing his love for Julia. The torture ends and Winston is reintegrated to society, brainwashed to accept the Party's doctrine and to love Big Brother.
During Winston's re-education, O'Brien always understands Winston's thoughts, it seems that he always speaks what Winston is thinking at the time.
Re-encountering Julia
After reintegration to Oceanian society, Winston encounters Julia in a park where each admits having betrayed the other and that betrayal changes a person:
"I betrayed you," she said baldly.
"I betrayed you," he said.
She gave him another quick look of dislike.
"Sometimes," she said, "they threaten you with something—something you can't stand up to, can't even think about. And then you say, 'Don't do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to so-and-so.' And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn't really mean it. But that isn't true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there's no other way of saving yourself and you're quite ready to save yourself that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You don't give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself."
"All you care about is yourself," he echoed.
"And after that, you don't feel the same toward the other person any longer."
"No," he said, "you don't feel the same."
Throughout, a score recurs in Winston's mind:
Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me—
The lyric is an ambiguous bastardization of a Glen Miller lyric, which in form has many sinister implications[
Capitulation and conversion
Winston Smith, now an alcoholic reconciled to his impending execution, has accepted the Party's depiction of life, and sincerely celebrates a news bulletin reporting Oceania's decisive victory over Eurasia. The metaphoric bullet had entered his brain, at that moment ". . . he had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother".
Principal characters
• Winston Smith — the protagonist is a phlegmatic everyman.
• Julia — Winston's lover is a covert "rebel from the waist downwards" who espouses Party doctrines whilst living contrarily.
• Big Brother — the dark-eyed, mustachioed embodiment of the Party governing Oceania (viz. Joseph Stalin), whom few people have seen, if anyone. There is doubt as to whether he exists.
• O'Brien — the antagonist, a member of the Inner Party who deceives Winston and Julia that he is of the Brotherhood resistance.
• Emmanuel Goldstein — a former Party leader, bespectacled and with a goatee beard like the Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky (an original leader of the Bolshevik Revolution whose real last name was Bronstein and who, after losing to Stalin in the struggle for power, was deported from the USSR and after some years writing against the Soviet regime was eventually murdered). Goldstein's persona is as an enemy of the state - the national nemesis used to ideologically unite Oceanians with the Party, purported author of "the book" (The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism), and leader of the Brotherhood. The Book was actually created and collaborated on by O'Brien. Goldstein allows the Party to encourage Two Minutes Hate and other fear mongering.
Note that it is never made clear in the novel if either Big Brother or Emmanuel Goldstein actually exist.
Political geography
[pic]
[pic]
Perpetual War: The news report Oceania has captured Africa, 1984.
Three perpetually warring totalitarian super-states, control the world:[27]
• Oceania (ideology: Ingsoc, i.e., English Socialism) comprises Great Britain, Ireland, Saveca, Australia, Polynesia, Southern Africa, and the Americas.
• Eurasia (ideology: Neo-Bolshevism) comprises continental Europe and northern Asia.
• Eastasia (ideology: Obliteration of the Self, i.e., "Death worship") comprises China, Japan, Korea, and Northern India.
The perpetual war is fought for control of the "disputed area" lying "between the frontiers of the super-states", it forms "a rough parallelogram with its corners at Tangier, Brazzaville, Darwin and Hong Kong",[27] thus northern Africa, the Middle East, southern India and south-east Asia are where the super-states capture slaves. Emmanuel Goldstein's book, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism explains that the super-states' ideologies are alike and that the public's ignorance of this fact is imperative so that they might continue believing in the detestability of the opposing ideologies. The only references to the exterior world for the Oceanian citizenry (the Outer Party and the Proles), are Minitrue maps and propaganda ensuring their belief in "the war".
The Revolution
Winston Smith's memory and Emmanuel Goldstein's book communicate some of the history that precipitated the Revolution; Eurasia was established after the Second World War (1939–45), when US and Commonwealth soldiers withdrew from continental Europe, thus the USSR conquered Europe against slight opposition. Eurasia does not include the British Empire because the US annexed it, Latin America, southern Africa, Australasia and Canada, in establishing Oceania gaining control a quarter of the planet. The annexation of Britain was part of the Atomic Wars that provoked civil war; per the Party, it was not a revolution but a coup d'état that installed a ruling élite derived from the native intelligentsia.
Eastasia, the last superstate established, comprises the Asian lands conquered by China and Japan. Although Eurasia prevented Eastasia from matching it in size, its skilled populace compensate for that handicap; despite an unclear chronology most of that global reorganisation occurred between 1945 and the 1960s.
The War
|Perpetual War |
|[pic] |
|The telescreen war: The arrows of the warring Black (Eurasian) and |
|White (Oceanian) forces. |
In 1984, there is a perpetual war between Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, the super-states which emerged from the atomic global war. "The book", The Theory and Practice of Oligarchic Collectivism by Emmanuel Goldstein, explains that each state is so strong it cannot be defeated, even with the combined forces of two super-states—despite changing alliances. To hide such contradictions, history is re-written to explain that the (new) alliance always was so; the populaces accustomed to doublethink accept it. The war is not fought in Oceanian, Eurasian or Eastasian territory but in a disputed zone comprising the sea and land from Tangiers (northern Africa) to Darwin (Australia) to the Arctic. At the start, Oceania and Eastasia are allies combatting Eurasia in northern Africa.
That alliance ends and Oceania allied with Eurasia fights Eastasia, a change which occurred during the Hate Week dedicated to creating patriotic fervour for the Party's perpetual war. The public are blind to the change; in mid-sentence an orator changes the name of the enemy from "Eurasia" to "Eastasia" without pause. When the public are enraged at noticing that the wrong flags and posters are displayed they tear them down—thus the origin of the idiom "We've always been at war with Eastasia"; later the Party claims to have captured Africa.
"The book" explains that the purpose of the unwinnable, perpetual war is to consume human labour and commodities, hence the economy of a super-state cannot support economic equality (a high standard of life) for every citizen. Goldstein also details an Oceanian strategy of attacking enemy cities with atomic rockets before invasion, yet dismisses it as unfeasible and contrary to the war's purpose; despite the atomic bombing of cities in the 1950s the super-states stopped such warfare lest it imbalance the powers. The military technology in 1984 differs little from that of the Second World War, yet strategic bomber aeroplanes were replaced with Rocket Bombs, Helicopters were heavily used as weapons of war (while they didn't figure in WW2 in any form but prototypes) and surface combat units have been all but replaced by immense and unsinkable Floating Fortresses, island-like contraptions concentrating the firepower of a whole naval task force in a single, semi-mobile platform (in the novel one is said to have been anchored between Iceland and the Faroe Islands, suggesting a preference for sea lane interdiction and denial).
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