1984 essay on winston

Doublethink Is Stronger Than Orwell Imagined

What 1984 means today

No novel of the past century has had more influence than George Orwell’s 1984 . The title, the adjectival form of the author’s last name, the vocabulary of the all-powerful Party that rules the superstate Oceania with the ideology of Ingsoc— doublethink , memory hole , unperson , thoughtcrime , Newspeak , Thought Police , Room 101 , Big Brother —they’ve all entered the English language as instantly recognizable signs of a nightmare future. It’s almost impossible to talk about propaganda, surveillance, authoritarian politics, or perversions of truth without dropping a reference to 1984. Throughout the Cold War, the novel found avid underground readers behind the Iron Curtain who wondered, How did he know?

It was also assigned reading for several generations of American high-school students. I first encountered 1984 in 10th-grade English class. Orwell’s novel was paired with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World , whose hedonistic and pharmaceutical dystopia seemed more relevant to a California teenager in the 1970s than did the bleak sadism of Oceania. I was too young and historically ignorant to understand where 1984 came from and exactly what it was warning against. Neither the book nor its author stuck with me. In my 20s, I discovered Orwell’s essays and nonfiction books and reread them so many times that my copies started to disintegrate, but I didn’t go back to 1984 . Since high school, I’d lived through another decade of the 20th century, including the calendar year of the title, and I assumed I already “knew” the book. It was too familiar to revisit.

Read: Teaching ‘1984’ in 2016

So when I recently read the novel again, I wasn’t prepared for its power. You have to clear away what you think you know, all the terminology and iconography and cultural spin-offs, to grasp the original genius and lasting greatness of 1984 . It is both a profound political essay and a shocking, heartbreaking work of art. And in the Trump era , it’s a best seller .

The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 , by the British music critic Dorian Lynskey, makes a rich and compelling case for the novel as the summation of Orwell’s entire body of work and a master key to understanding the modern world. The book was published in 1949, when Orwell was dying of tuberculosis , but Lynskey dates its biographical sources back more than a decade to Orwell’s months in Spain as a volunteer on the republican side of the country’s civil war. His introduction to totalitarianism came in Barcelona, when agents of the Soviet Union created an elaborate lie to discredit Trotskyists in the Spanish government as fascist spies.

Left-wing journalists readily accepted the fabrication, useful as it was to the cause of communism. Orwell didn’t, exposing the lie with eyewitness testimony in journalism that preceded his classic book Homage to Catalonia —and that made him a heretic on the left. He was stoical about the boredom and discomforts of trench warfare—he was shot in the neck and barely escaped Spain with his life—but he took the erasure of truth hard. It threatened his sense of what makes us sane, and life worth living. “History stopped in 1936,” he later told his friend Arthur Koestler, who knew exactly what Orwell meant. After Spain, just about everything he wrote and read led to the creation of his final masterpiece. “History stopped,” Lynskey writes, “and Nineteen Eighty-Four began.”

The biographical story of 1984 —the dying man’s race against time to finish his novel in a remote cottage on the Isle of Jura , off Scotland—will be familiar to many Orwell readers. One of Lynskey’s contributions is to destroy the notion that its terrifying vision can be attributed to, and in some way disregarded as, the death wish of a tuberculosis patient. In fact, terminal illness roused in Orwell a rage to live—he got remarried on his deathbed—just as the novel’s pessimism is relieved, until its last pages, by Winston Smith’s attachment to nature, antique objects, the smell of coffee, the sound of a proletarian woman singing, and above all his lover, Julia. 1984 is crushingly grim, but its clarity and rigor are stimulants to consciousness and resistance. According to Lynskey, “Nothing in Orwell’s life and work supports a diagnosis of despair.”

Lynskey traces the literary genesis of 1984 to the utopian fictions of the optimistic 19th century—Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888); the sci-fi novels of H. G. Wells, which Orwell read as a boy—and their dystopian successors in the 20th, including the Russian Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924) and Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). The most interesting pages in The Ministry of Truth are Lynskey’s account of the novel’s afterlife. The struggle to claim 1984 began immediately upon publication, with a battle over its political meaning. Conservative American reviewers concluded that Orwell’s main target wasn’t just the Soviet Union but the left generally. Orwell, fading fast, waded in with a statement explaining that the novel was not an attack on any particular government but a satire of the totalitarian tendencies in Western society and intellectuals: “The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: Don’t let it happen. It depends on you .” But every work of art escapes the artist’s control—the more popular and complex, the greater the misunderstandings.

Lynskey’s account of the reach of 1984 is revelatory. The novel has inspired movies, television shows, plays, a ballet, an opera, a David Bowie album , imitations, parodies, sequels, rebuttals, Lee Harvey Oswald, the Black Panther Party, and the John Birch Society. It has acquired something of the smothering ubiquity of Big Brother himself: 1984 is watching you. With the arrival of the year 1984, the cultural appropriations rose to a deafening level. That January an ad for the Apple Macintosh was watched by 96 million people during the Super Bowl and became a marketing legend. The Mac, represented by a female athlete, hurls a sledgehammer at a giant telescreen and explodes the shouting face of a man—oppressive technology—to the astonishment of a crowd of gray zombies. The message: “You’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’ ”

The argument recurs every decade or so: Orwell got it wrong. Things haven’t turned out that bad. The Soviet Union is history. Technology is liberating. But Orwell never intended his novel to be a prediction, only a warning. And it’s as a warning that 1984 keeps finding new relevance. The week of Donald Trump’s inauguration, when the president’s adviser Kellyanne Conway justified his false crowd estimate by using the phrase alternative facts , the novel returned to the best-seller lists. A theatrical adaptation was rushed to Broadway. The vocabulary of Newspeak went viral. An authoritarian president who stood the term fake news on its head, who once said, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,” has given 1984 a whole new life.

What does the novel mean for us? Not Room 101 in the Ministry of Love, where Winston is interrogated and tortured until he loses everything he holds dear. We don’t live under anything like a totalitarian system. “By definition, a country in which you are free to read Nineteen Eighty-Four is not the country described in Nineteen Eighty-Four ,” Lynskey acknowledges. Instead, we pass our days under the nonstop surveillance of a telescreen that we bought at the Apple Store, carry with us everywhere, and tell everything to, without any coercion by the state. The Ministry of Truth is Facebook, Google, and cable news. We have met Big Brother and he is us.

Trump’s election brought a rush of cautionary books with titles like On Tyranny , Fascism: A Warning , and How Fascism Works . My local bookstore set up a totalitarian-themed table and placed the new books alongside 1984 . They pointed back to the 20th century—if it happened in Germany, it could happen here—and warned readers how easily democracies collapse. They were alarm bells against complacency and fatalism—“ the politics of inevitability ,” in the words of the historian Timothy Snyder, “a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done.” The warnings were justified, but their emphasis on the mechanisms of earlier dictatorships drew attention away from the heart of the malignancy—not the state, but the individual. The crucial issue was not that Trump might abolish democracy but that Americans had put him in a position to try. Unfreedom today is voluntary. It comes from the bottom up.

We are living with a new kind of regime that didn’t exist in Orwell’s time. It combines hard nationalism—the diversion of frustration and cynicism into xenophobia and hatred—with soft distraction and confusion: a blend of Orwell and Huxley, cruelty and entertainment. The state of mind that the Party enforces through terror in 1984 , where truth becomes so unstable that it ceases to exist, we now induce in ourselves. Totalitarian propaganda unifies control over all information, until reality is what the Party says it is—the goal of Newspeak is to impoverish language so that politically incorrect thoughts are no longer possible. Today the problem is too much information from too many sources, with a resulting plague of fragmentation and division—not excessive authority but its disappearance, which leaves ordinary people to work out the facts for themselves, at the mercy of their own prejudices and delusions.

During the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, propagandists at a Russian troll farm used social media to disseminate a meme: “ ‘The People Will Believe What the Media Tells Them They Believe.’  — George Orwell.” But Orwell never said this. The moral authority of his name was stolen and turned into a lie toward that most Orwellian end: the destruction of belief in truth. The Russians needed partners in this effort and found them by the millions, especially among America’s non-elites. In 1984 , working-class people are called “proles,” and Winston believes they’re the only hope for the future. As Lynskey points out, Orwell didn’t foresee “that the common man and woman would embrace doublethink as enthusiastically as the intellectuals and, without the need for terror or torture, would choose to believe that two plus two was whatever they wanted it to be.”

We stagger under the daily load of doublethink pouring from Trump, his enablers in the Inner Party, his mouthpieces in the Ministry of Truth, and his fanatical supporters among the proles. Spotting doublethink in ourselves is much harder. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” Orwell wrote . In front of my nose, in the world of enlightened and progressive people where I live and work, a different sort of doublethink has become pervasive. It’s not the claim that true is fake or that two plus two makes five. Progressive doublethink—which has grown worse in reaction to the right-wing kind—creates a more insidious unreality because it operates in the name of all that is good. Its key word is justice —a word no one should want to live without. But today the demand for justice forces you to accept contradictions that are the essence of doublethink.

For example, many on the left now share an unacknowledged but common assumption that a good work of art is made of good politics and that good politics is a matter of identity. The progressive view of a book or play depends on its political stance, and its stance—even its subject matter—is scrutinized in light of the group affiliation of the artist: Personal identity plus political position equals aesthetic value. This confusion of categories guides judgments all across the worlds of media, the arts, and education, from movie reviews to grant committees. Some people who register the assumption as doublethink might be privately troubled, but they don’t say so publicly. Then self-censorship turns into self-deception, until the recognition itself disappears—a lie you accept becomes a lie you forget. In this way, intelligent people do the work of eliminating their own unorthodoxy without the Thought Police.

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Orthodoxy is also enforced by social pressure, nowhere more intensely than on Twitter, where the specter of being shamed or “canceled” produces conformity as much as the prospect of adding to your tribe of followers does. This pressure can be more powerful than a party or state, because it speaks in the name of the people and in the language of moral outrage, against which there is, in a way, no defense. Certain commissars with large followings patrol the precincts of social media and punish thought criminals, but most progressives assent without difficulty to the stifling consensus of the moment and the intolerance it breeds—not out of fear, but because they want to be counted on the side of justice.

This willing constriction of intellectual freedom will do lasting damage. It corrupts the ability to think clearly, and it undermines both culture and progress. Good art doesn’t come from wokeness, and social problems starved of debate can’t find real solutions. “Nothing is gained by teaching a parrot a new word,” Orwell wrote in 1946. “What is needed is the right to print what one believes to be true, without having to fear bullying or blackmail from any side.” Not much has changed since the 1940s. The will to power still passes through hatred on the right and virtue on the left.

1984 will always be an essential book, regardless of changes in ideologies, for its portrayal of one person struggling to hold on to what is real and valuable. “Sanity is not statistical,” Winston thinks one night as he slips off to sleep. Truth, it turns out, is the most fragile thing in the world. The central drama of politics is the one inside your skull.

This article appears in the July 2019 print edition with the headline “George Orwell’s Unheeded Warning.”

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

George Orwell

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Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on George Orwell's 1984 . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

1984: Introduction

1984: plot summary, 1984: detailed summary & analysis, 1984: themes, 1984: quotes, 1984: characters, 1984: symbols, 1984: theme wheel, brief biography of george orwell.

Historical Context of 1984

Other books related to 1984.

• Full Title: Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel
• When Written: 1945-49; outline written 1943
• Where Written: Jura, Scotland
• When Published: June 1949
• Literary Period: Late Modernism
• Genre: Novel / Satire / Parable
• Setting: London in the year 1984
• Climax: Winston is tortured in Room 101
• Antagonist: O'Brien
• Point of View: Third-Person Limited

Extra Credit for 1984

Outspoken Anti-Communist. Orwell didn't just write literature that condemned the Communist state of the USSR. He did everything he could, from writing editorials to compiling lists of men he knew were Soviet spies, to combat the willful blindness of many intellectuals in the West to USSR atrocities.

Working Title. Orwell's working title for the novel was The Last Man in Europe .

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1984 Character Analysis

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Published: Mar 13, 2024

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Winston smith is introduced to the reader as a disillusioned and discontented member of the party, one of the most intriguing aspects of winston's character is his complex relationship with julia, as the novel progresses, winston's internal struggles and external conflicts come to a head, in conclusion, winston smith emerges as a complex and compelling character whose journey serves as a powerful allegory for the dangers of totalitarianism and the enduring human desire for freedom.

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1984 essay questions.

Compare and contrast Julia and Winston. How does each rebel against the Party, and are these rebellions at all effective?

Trace Winston's path towards destruction. Where do we first see his fatalistic outlook? Is his defeat inevitable?

Discuss the role of technology in Oceania. In what areas is technology highly advanced, and in what areas has its progress stalled? Why?

Discuss the role of Big Brother in Oceania and in Winston's life. What role does Big Brother play in each?

Discuss contradiction in Oceania and the Party's governance, i.e. Ministry of Love, Ministry of Truth, Ministry of Plenty, Ministry of Peace. Why is such contradiction accepted so widely?

Discuss and analyze the role O'Brien plays in Winston's life. Why is he such a revered and respected character, even during Winston's time in the Ministry of Love?

Discuss the symbolic importance of the prole woman singing in the yard behind Mr. Charrington's apartment. What does she represent for Winston, and what does she represent for Julia?

1984 is a presentation of Orwell's definition of dystopia and was meant as a warning to those of the modern era. What specifically is Orwell warning us against, and how does he achieve this?

Analyze the interactions between Winston and the old man in the pub, Syme, and Mr. Charrington. How do Winston's interactions with these individuals guide him towards his ultimate arrest?

Analyze the Party's level of power over its citizens, specifically through the lens of psychological manipulation. Name the tools the Party uses to maintain this control and discuss their effectiveness.

Outline the social hierarchy of Oceania. How does this hierarchy support the Party and its goals?

1984 Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for 1984 is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Describe O’Briens apartment and lifestyle. How do they differ from Winston’s?

From the text:

It was only on very rare occasions that one saw inside the dwelling-places of the Inner Party, or even penetrated into the quarter of the town where they lived. The whole atmosphere of the huge block of flats, the richness and...

What was the result of Washington exam

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how is one put into the inner or outer party in the book 1984

The Outer Party is a huge government bureaucracy. They hold positions of trust but are largely responsible for keeping the totalitarian structure of Big Brother functional. The Outer Party numbers around 18 to 19 percent of the population and the...

Study Guide for 1984

1984 study guide contains a biography of George Orwell, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• 1984 Summary
• Character List

Essays for 1984

1984 essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of 1984 by George Orwell.

• The Reflection of George Orwell
• Totalitarian Collectivism in 1984, or, Big Brother Loves You
• Sex as Rebellion
• Class Ties: The Dealings of Human Nature Depicted through Social Classes in 1984
• 1984: The Ultimate Parody of the Utopian World

Lesson Plan for 1984

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to 1984
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• 1984 Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for 1984

• Introduction
• Writing and publication

George Orwell's Anti-Utopian Reality in 1984 Novel

The overwhelming spread of military literature in the 20th century gave readers a great abundance of books to read on these topics. Some authors take both the pro and con sides of the military states and actions in discussing the political realities of their times. Among them, George Orwell wrote a novel that depicted the future that is relevant for all centuries and all political powers. The book 1984 (published in 1949, right after World War II) talks about a personality that has to survive under the pressures of an oppressive government.

About George Orwell

George Orwell, whose real name was Eric Arthur Blair, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic known for his keen observations on social injustice, totalitarianism, and democratic socialism. Born in India in 1903, Orwell spent much of his life in England and was deeply influenced by his experiences during the Spanish Civil War, where he fought against fascism.

George Orwell's life and career were marked by a commitment to truth-telling and a staunch opposition to propaganda and censorship. His experiences as a colonial police officer in Burma provided him with firsthand insight into the workings of the empire and the abuses of power. Orwell's disdain for authoritarianism extended to his critique of capitalism, evident in works such as Animal Farm, a satirical allegory of the Russian Revolution. Despite his socialist leanings, Orwell remained fiercely independent in his thinking, resisting ideological conformity and maintaining skepticism towards political movements of all stripes.

His writing style, characterized by clarity, precision, and mastery of language, continues to captivate readers and influence writers to this day. Through his literary legacy, 1984 stands as one of his most famous works, a dystopian masterpiece that continues to resonate with readers worldwide.

Throughout the whole story, Orwell depicts an invisible fight between the individual and the system. The book is pretty dark, heavy and depressing. Under enormous pressure, the protagonist of the story betrays his love, admits that 2+2 is 5 and glorifies his oppressors. He can’t afford an extra move, step, or look – Big Brother is watching him. The reader can get scared reading the book – but not reading it will leave all of us blind to the potential dangers of this world.

It would be mistaken to assume that 1984 makes a specific reference to one well-known social totalitarian state that no longer exists. The resistance to oppression was relevant before the USSR appeared; it is still relevant in many situations today and will still be relevant no matter how democratic and liberal our societies claim to be. That’s why 1984 was, is and will be the desk companion for many readers throughout the world.

Initially met with mixed reviews, the novel gradually gained widespread acclaim for its chilling portrayal of a dystopian future. Critics and scholars alike have praised Orwell's prescient vision of a totalitarian society where individual freedoms are systematically eroded, and truth becomes a malleable commodity. "1984" has been lauded for its incisive critique of surveillance, propaganda, and the abuse of power by authoritarian regimes.

Over the years, the book has become a cultural touchstone, inspiring countless adaptations, references in popular culture, and ongoing discussions about its relevance to contemporary political realities. Its themes of government overreach, thought control and resistance against oppression continue to resonate with readers worldwide, cementing "1984" as a timeless and indispensable work of literature.

What Is the Main Point in 1984?

The main point in George Orwell's "1984" revolves around the dangers of totalitarianism and the suppression of individual freedom. Set in a dystopian future where the ruling Party exerts complete control over every aspect of society, including language, history, and thought, the novel portrays a bleak world where truth is manipulated, dissent is punished, and surveillance is omnipresent.

Through the protagonist Winston Smith's journey of rebellion and disillusionment, Orwell underscores the importance of critical thinking, truth-seeking, and the inherent value of human autonomy. "1984" serves as a stark warning against the encroachment of oppressive governments on individual liberties, urging readers to remain vigilant against threats to freedom and to resist attempts to undermine the integrity of truth and independent thought.

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Main Characters and Roles of 1984

The characters of the book each serve very specific roles and purposes in the text, so let’s first briefly explore what the 1984 book is about. The book talks about a possible scenario for the development of the world. After several sanguinary wars and revolutions, the Earth was divided into 3 super states named Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia. Their alfa governments are in constant conflict with each other. Such never-ending conflicts are needed to distract the attention of the population from poor internal public management, terrible living conditions of the counties. More importantly, the existence of the conflict allows the government to fully control the inhabitants of the states.

Winston Smith Character Analysis

In one of such “superstates”, namely Oceania, lives the protagonist of the book. He is 39, he is thin and has a somewhat unhealthy look on his face. An employee of the Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith serves the government institution that works day and night to rewrite the past and destroy the facts that are unwanted by the government. Every day Winston changes the past with his own hands and makes it conform to the new standards devised by the ruling party.

In addition to changing the past, the Ministry of Truth also works tirelessly to promulgate the values and mantras of the county’s political elite. Seeing such truth tailoring and past elimination on a daily basis, Mr. Smith can’t help but wonder whether what is happening is right.

His soul grows a seed of suspicion and doubt and that induces him to start writing a diary. This diary is the only thing that hears what Winston thinks about his job, his life and his government, it marks the beginning of his protest.

The protagonist has to be very careful and do the writing in complete secrecy, hiding from other people and devices. As mentioned in Part 1 Chapter 1, his TV is not only a tool to feed him proper information, it also spies on him:

“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”.

Whatever he writes in his diary is a crime of through and qualifies for the death penalty.

Big Brother Character Analysis

Big Brother is the supreme ruler of Oceania. He has zero tolerance for individualism or diversity and absolutely no need for pluralism of opinion. He also has a network of Spies and tools set up in the country to make sure that every move of his citizens is observed, controlled and can be contained, if necessary. The Spies adore him and the Party:

Part 1, Chapter 2 “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.”

It’s impossible to do something privately in Oceania: all the houses are made of glass, all walls have surveillance and wiretapping, the Thought Police watches every move of every citizen. However, there is a difference in how Big Brother treats certain classes of its citizens. For example, for their love affair, Winston and Julia often choose secret places for dating, such as the countryside or other places where normally low-class labor workers hang out because the state doesn’t have that much security there. Low worker class is considered to have less tendency for thinking thus is treated as a lower-risk population.

Big Brother is an ultimate leader of Oceania, he is like a God and the ultimate goal is to please him. All the mistakes and loopholes of Big Brother or the Party are simply rewritten just like the newspapers. His pictures are everywhere, all the slogans are signed by his name. He is the only source of information, faith and worship in Oceania.

O'Brien Character Analysis

O’Brien is an undercover agent of the party. He secretly works for the Thought Police trying to find people who are thinking about rebellion. He is well-behaved, reserved, has a strong body. He deliberately pretends to oppose the party and Big Brother. His role is similar to that of Mephistopheles in Faust, he is the agent of the devil.

O’Brien is both a character and a concept in the book. He invades the dreams and provokes Smith to think that he doesn’t share Party ideas, he constantly pushes Smith to give birth to his unspoken internal conflict. Finally, when Smith and Julia are ready, he offers them to join the rebel movement. Later O’Brien will personally supervise the torture of his capturers, slowly killing any traces of personalities or thinking in them.

Emmanuel Goldstein Character Analysis

Emmanuel Goldstein was once a leader of the Party that brought it to power. He is now in exile and represents the only opposition available. He established an organization “Brotherhood” that is proclaimed by the Party to be the Enemy of the People. In fact, nobody knows for sure whether the organization really exists and what it does. Goldstein is an imaginary magnet for potential opposition, he serves the purpose of bringing all those who are against the Party under one roof to be destroyed then.

The Party spends a great deal of effort to publicly broadcast the hate clips about Goldstein and the Brotherhood just to give a bait for those who are seeking allies to create a rebellion.

Tom Parsons Character Analysis

Tom Parsons and his wife Mrs. Parsons live next door to Winston. Tom is a complete opposite of Smith, he follows the Party blindly and never doubts Oceania for a second. He is devoted to the war against other states and will do whatever he can to contribute to Oceania’s victory.

Ironically, he brought up a daughter who is just as fierce and loyal to Oceania as her parents are. One day she betrays her father by reporting to the Thought Police that Parsons spoke badly of Big Brother in his sleep. To aggravate the irony even more, Orwell makes Tome immensely proud of his daughter for “doing the right thing”.

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Julia Character Analysis

Julia is another protagonist of 1984. She is 26, she also works for the Ministry of Truth in the Fiction Department. She writes novels depicting the greatness of her country and its ruler. She is quite experienced sexually and is known to seduce Party members. She is instinctive, not very logical, irrational, with lots of untamed desire and energy. She is courageous and much more adventurous than her lover Smith. In fact, she is the one who tells about her feelings to Winston and takes him outside of town.

It’s difficult to elaborate on the nature of Julia’s and Winston’s relationship since they are the only creatures with a soul portrayed in this book. So it makes sense that they found each other and grew fond of each other. Would they have felt just as fond of each other if there were other options available – who knows? But the main point Orwell makes is that in such an authoritarian government as Oceania, finding people who think and have their own opinion is an extremely rare thing.

Julia’s sexual and emotional freedom is her way to protest against the strict order of her country. She wants to put her energy into love, emotions, memories and enjoyment, not for the glorification of Big Brother and Oceania. And it only makes the reader even more upset when in the end she breaks under the tortures of O’Brien and says in Part 3 Chapter 6:

“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”.

Mr. Charrington Character Analysis

Mr. Charrington is the owner of a thrift shop in a parole district. Proles are the majority of Oceania population who are not part of the Inner Party (those who rule) or Outer Party (those who serve the rulers) and are deemed incapable of thinking or posing a threat to the government. However, in Part 1 Chapter 7 Winston expressed his opinion in the diary that proles might rebel one day and take the Party down:

“If there is hope, it lies in the proles”.

Winston buys his diary from Mr. Charrington and that marks the beginning of Winston’s journey into critical thinking and rebellion. Later, Winston will rent a bedroom upstairs above the shop to meet with Julia there.

Winston trusts Mr. Charrington because he holds on to the past (second-hand items) and thus keeps the past intact when Oceania is doing everything it can to change or destroy the past. At some point, Winston even thinks that Mr. Charrington is a member of the Brotherhood. But as it turns out, he is an informant of the Police and spies on everything Winston and Julia do in his shop.

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1984 Full Summary

After the Second World War, the civil war broke down in Great Britain, which lead to it being occupied by a new superstate – Oceania. The citizens of Oceania live under the rule of an ideology of one Party. The ruler and impersonification of that Party is a leader called Big Brother.

The Party is divided into Inner Party (the 2% of the ruling population), Outer Party (the 13% who implement their policies) and the others, who are called proles and don’t have any opinion or importance whatsoever. But not all members of the Outer Party are in unanimous agreement with the Party ideology. Winston Smith works for the Ministry of Truth and is starting to question the Party’s right to rule and tell him what to do. But he understands that there’s nobody with whom he can share his concerns. So he shares his thoughts in a diary, which is also quite a dangerous thing to do.

One day Smith notices that his colleague Julia is paying a lot of attention to him. At first, he is afraid that she busted him and will give him up for the Thought Police. But after some time he finds a love note from her. They start a secret relationship that is prohibited by the government. They hide and dream about a revolution. Smith believes that their relationship will not end well – such encounters between men and women are strictly prohibited in Oceania.

Eventually, they meet a representative of a real revolutionary movement, O’Brien, who gives them a book on the philosophy of the upcoming rebellion. While reading the book in the room they rented for dating, the couple is busted by the Through Police – the so-called revolution movement representative was nothing but a set-up of Big Brother to find and eliminate potential rebels.

The government imprisons Julia and Winston and tortures them cruelly. They break under the tortures and betray each other. In the end, both Winston and his ex-beloved Julia praise the majesty and powerfulness of Big Brother and sincerely believe that their country is doing great. The Through Police manages to “cure” Winston from his revolutionary thoughts. At first, Smith thinks that he gave up Julia and his freedom just to evade the torture, but once he is released, he realizes that he is now the right man who sincerely believes in Big Brother and the Party.

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1984 Essay Sample

Dive into a literary exploration with our essay sample, where '1984' is examined under the microscope of expert analysis.

1984 Theme 1: War. The author wrote his dystopian classic in 1948 and he simply changes the last two digits of the year when naming his book. The first theme that is present in the text is the war – 1948 is the time after one of the biggest tragedies in human history, Second World War, and the time when the world watched in terror the emergence of two huge military powers – USA and USSR. Despite the victory and defeat of the fascist movement, people, tired of the loss and tragedy the WW2 brought about, felt helpless when it came to the conception of potential World War Three. The danger was in the air, the fatigue was in the minds, the fear was in the nightmares lived by almost everybody around the world. 1984 was just one of the many military literature pieces heavily exploring one of the possible scenarios that were about to happen.

In 1984 there are three states — two of which are allied, while the third is an enemy. The alliances change regularly and yesterday’s ally can turn into an enemy tomorrow. The war and conflict give Oceania a powerful excuse to disregard the shortages of food, ever-present surveillance and other social problems. The war is a guarantee of internal order in Oceania – how can a loyal citizen undermine his own country when they are at war with an external enemy?

1984 theme 2: Control. Dictatorship and the right of any institution or any given personality to exercise control over people was a hot topic for discussion towards the end of the 20th century. The thing is that there are people who don’t like making decisions because with decisions comes responsibility. So they welcome others to make decisions for them and society accepts it as their right to use predefined solutions. But step by step such willingness to let others make your choices can turn into a dangerous overcontrolling net. Oceania didn’t appear in one day, some processes led to it being like we know it. In 1984 Orwell elaborates what consequences can the war between authoritarian states have and how easy it is to turn to tyranny “for the greater good of the society”.

The citizens of Oceania are in the absolute unity with their state: if they are following the state, they have nothing to worry about, nothing to hide, nothing to think about. They are the state, and the state is at war – so when Oceania wins the war, they will win as well. The control chain is eternal.

1984 theme 3: Mind Control through Newspeak language. The overwhelming control over social life was enhanced through another theme heavily explored by Orwell – the creation of a new language for Oceania called Newspeak. The new English Socialism ideology developed by the ruling party was imposed through the invention of its own language, where each word and grammatical rule were carefully handpicked. When the events in the book took place, the new language was in the process of being introduced: it appeared in the newspapers and party members wouldn’t miss an opportunity to insert a phrase or two in their speeches. The Newspeak was supposed to have completely replaced the Oldspeak (regular English language known and spoken today and in 1980s) by 2050. That would mean yet another victory of Oceania over people’s minds and freedoms.

1984 theme 4: New and improved truth. To keep the society in place and make sure the country is not disturbed and remains focused on the war with another state, the employees of the Ministry of Truth change the news. Every day they rewrite the newspapers of yesterday, backdate them and put them back into circulation.

The altered truth concept is also revealed in the fact that Winston is not actually that good of a character. He wants to be able to think and to love, but the truth is that he is also a wicked personality: he used to steal food from his mother and sisters, he ran away from home. And the readers aren’t sure whether he regrets doing it or not.

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Symbolism in 1984

The Memory Hole

Winston’s job was about changing the news so that it matched the reality that Oceania wanted its citizens to see. In his office there were three holes in the wall: for notes on changes that had to be made, for newspapers that had to be edited and for recycling of all the materials. They were called “memory holes” as symbols of ways to destroy and alter memories of thousands of people. Memory holes are also symbols for distorted communication channels Oceania used to brainwash its citizens.

Big Brother

There was one recognizable face that appeared on numerous propaganda materials (posters, TV clips, newspapers and etc.). These materials persuaded citizens how great Oceania was and also delivered a message that “he is watching” everybody at all times. It’s a message of hope (the country will be great one day) and desperation (you are watched 24/7). Big Brother is a symbol of Oceania’s national agenda, he is an idol, a person who gained enormous power not due to his leadership potential, but because of Oceania’s inhumate treatment of its citizens.

Winston had to admit to this famous calculation when he was tortured by the Though Police. This is the symbol of a vivid false statement that is accepted socially in the society governed by a totalitarian ideology.

Winston's Varicose Ulcer

The medical condition that bothers Winston represents his oppressed feelings and desires. It is an external expression of his internal pains. From one point of view, varicose ulcer is a symbol of Smith sexual desire that is prohibited to exhibit in Oceania. On another hand, it’s a mark of Winston’s dissatisfaction with what is going on around him, it’s a visible physical repercussion of living under total control.

The Red-armed Singing Prole Woman

The woman from a lower worker class (prole) is a symbol of potential rebellion. Winston believed that proles would rebel one day and that the hope for Oceania to regain its civic freedoms lies with proles. Her female capacity to give birth is a symbol that a thought can be born within proles’ minds and new generations can see the world without total control of Big Brother.

1984 is a book that will live forever. It will resonate with readers from different countries, backgrounds, and political views. It is an instruction for government managers on how to compel obedience from its citizens. It’s also a vivid demonstration for citizens how the government can make them do whatever. It’s a scary but real story, cruel but eye-opening, it changes the way we treat our fundamental freedom rights. This book helps us appreciate what we have – the possibility to choose friends, love the people we find attractive, do what we like doing, think, speak, and make decisions in our lives.

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Where Does 1984 Take Place?

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