Do I Dare / Disturb the Universe?: Stray Thoughts on 1984
Up until around the dawn of the twentieth century, most novels took place in realisticallydepicted human communities. Even speculative fiction, i.e. what passed for science fiction at the
time, tended to portray future society in one of two ways: either as a continuation of the
recognizable traditions of the present, or as a glorious leap forward from it. It’s this latter type that
fascinated a large set of spec-fic writers, which makes sense: why bother imagining a future where
things are markedly worse? As Erich Fromm points out in his Afterword to 1984, this literary yearning
for a better tomorrow has its roots in the Old Testament: the idea that mankind is not yet what he
can be, but will reach that potential someday. The movement gained further traction with Thomas
More’s publication of Utopia – which literally means “no place” in Greek, but which we’ve since
taken to mean “good place” – and carried on all the way through the beginning of the twentieth
century, at which point the first World War shattered a generation and introduced a level of anxiety
about the future on a global scale. This anxiety fueled a counter-movement of sorts, a drive to
produce “dystopias,” or tales about “bad places.”
Dystopian societies as portrayed in 1984 – in most dystopian novels, actually – share the
following characteristics:
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
Propaganda is used to control the citizens of society
Information, independent thought, and freedom are restricted
A figurehead or concept is worshipped by the citizens of the society
Citizens are perceived to be under constant surveillance
Citizens have a fear of the outside world
Citizens live in a dehumanized state
The natural world is banished and distrusted
Citizens conform to uniform expectations
Individuality and dissent are bad
The society is an illusion of a perfect utopian world
Such novels rarely invent horrible, oppressive worlds from whole cloth; Oceania, for all its alien
awfulness, represents the end result of modern man’s doomed pursuit of Utopian ideals. Dystopian
authors like Orwell must decide whether the ideals themselves are faulty, unrealistic, or naïve, or
whether our collective failure to realize them reflects some deeper flaw in our own natures. After all,
why shouldn’t we be capable of building a Utopian world? The vast majority of people behave
decently to each other the vast majority of the time; dystopian writers examine why this individual
tendency towards the good isn’t always expressed in our collective political or societal models, and
how failures in those systems affect individual choices and behaviors. (Does a society reflect its
citizens’ preferences or shape them?)
Authors like Orwell and Ishiguro (whose Never Let Me Go lies further ahead in our studies)
can use dystopian narratives not simply as works of speculative fiction, but as a means of criticizing
current trends, societal norms, or political systems. Orwell in particular paints a worst-case scenario
of the modern Western world’s downfall; he feared people would allow their leaders to hurt them
with the things they hated by disguising them as the things they loved. And from the first chapter
onwards, he starts trying to make as persuasive a case for his fears as possible.
1984’s first chapter accomplishes a tremendous amount in a very short time. Orwell lays out
his nightmare world’s rules in broad strokes, pausing to explain a few while merely referencing
others. (We trust he’ll tell us later, and he largely justifies the trust.) In juxtaposing the familiar
(London!) with the patently unfamiliar (what’s Airstrip One? What’s Oceania?), the writer also
establishes the first section’s narrative tone and perspective: grim and scattered, granular in its
attention to detail, with glimmers of hope flickering, barely noticed, at the edges of his images.
But beyond establishing his world, tone, and narrative perspective, Orwell uses Chapter One
to introduce Winston Smith, a character who’s initially a baffling, contradictory mixture of
thoughtfulness, decency, cowardice, and vice. Winston would cut a deeply unsympathetic figure in
any other type of narrative, but having just been stranded in 1984’s terrible universe, we latch onto
what remains of his fundamental humanity like a drowning man clings to passing driftwood – no
time to be choosy! As strangers in a strange land, we’re forced to feel just as helpless as he is.
What’s really brilliant about that beginning is the way that everything’s close-but-not-quiteright – the “uncanny valley” effect from motion-capture animation expressed on a much, much larger
scale – and how that particular setup ties into the book’s larger themes and plot points. Think of it
like this: Pretend you’re a bilingual speaker who’s listening to a conversation in your second
language. You can keep up, but it’s not quite as easy as listening to your mother tongue. Maybe your
brain skips a beat when weird slang pops up, or you get distracted when people use words that
aren’t nearly as fitting as those in your other language. (Think Greek speakers, English speakers, and
the words each group uses for “love.”) Now pretend you’re listening to the conversation in a
crowded room – a bar, a stadium, somewhere – which adds a bunch of background noise. You
aren’t consciously listening to the other sounds, but you’re trying to tune it out while still listening to
something else. Can you still focus? Sure, but it’s a strain, and more likely than not you’re going to
miss something you shouldn’t, or distort the meaning of something you would’ve caught without the
distractions.
Because we’re not looking at Oceania through Oceanian eyes yet, we perceive this world
through our inappropriate pre-existing perspective. We’re not familiar enough with what we’re
discovering to adopt the correct mindset; our backgrounds, experiences, and upbringings leave us
likely to miss important details, even as we curse the Symes and proles of the world for not seeing
what they should. We’re not nearly skeptical enough; we’re so preconditioned to search for nuggets
of hope in bad situations that the moment when Winston hides in his corner alcove and writes “April
4th, 1984” in his diary feels triumphant rather than fatally reckless.
Orwell counts on this, the self-inflicted distortion, because he’s proving a point: You see what
you’re conditioned to see.
see. This is how the Inner Party, seriously undermanned and starved of
resources, can keep a massive population in check as it enriches itself (relatively speaking): it
conditions those who could easily replace it to depend upon it instead. It does so by convincing
anyone who will listen to fear a future without it, a common tactic in modern politics as well. You
can persuade a voter to support a law that runs counter to his principles or interests via two
approaches: one centered around hope and compassion, the other based upon fear and greed.
Orwell’s body of work indicates that the latter proves more persuasive, and I sometimes have a very
tough time disagreeing.
The problem, of course, is that we don’t like to recognize this quality in ourselves: one of the
reasons people can manipulate us is that we reflexively recoil from the idea that we could be so
basely motivated. All you have to do at that point is play with language: dress up pain as noble
sacrifice, prejudice as patriotism, etc. Chapter One toys with that dichotomy between ideology and
reality, studying what we’ll ignore or miss outright in the name of maintaining a “normal” everyday
routine, and it does so both through linguistic juxtapositions and the split-screened
Expectations/Reality trick from last semester’s (500) Days of Summer.
First, the language. From the instant the clocks strike thirteen, we know this book is going to
be trouble: either the laws of time have been screwed up somehow, or the society we’re about to
study has been permanently militarized (since military time dispenses with am/pm designations,
operating instead on a twenty-four-hour cycle). We suspect it’s the latter when we realize
everything’s branded “Victory This” and “Victory That.” And as Orwell continues, we realize that we
not only lack the specialized terms needed to understand what’s happening – what the heck is
doublethink? What’s duckspeak? – but that the words we think we know have come untethered from
their conventional meanings. We’ve fallen into a world governed by a negative principle: that people
will give up everything in the name of safety and selfishness. We don’t have the vocabulary, let alone
the mindset, to process that yet.
What’s interesting is that Orwell’s narrative lens (Winston) isn’t someone who has it all figured
out, navigating a complicated, challenging world suavely and smoothly. Winston’s frightened,
broken, and alone, just as powerless as we are – and he’s our only entry point into this world. What
ends up happening, of course, is that we end up trusting him completely – because he’s the only one
we can relate to. Never mind that we should know that Winston’s perceptions are unreliable. We
come to trust him because we need him.
Orwell studies the relationship between trust and need throughout the book. We tend to
define trust in terms of whether someone deserves or earns it. We certainly wouldn’t want to be
people who just trust indiscriminately (how naïve!), so people have to win their place in your life and
heart. Except, Orwell counters, that’s not what happens. You trust whom you need to trust in order
to survive. If everyone treats you fairly horribly, and three people treat you somewhat less so, you’ll
trust them more without even realizing your mistake. You need them, so you make them necessary.
It’s what Winston does with Julia, and with O’Brien: in a society defined by fear, suspicion, hostility,
selfishness, and pain, any outlet will do, whether it’s deserving or not.
This is also where Orwell begins teaching us to appreciate beauty in small bursts. He
describes Winston in blunt, unsentimental language, chronicling flaws like his varicose ulcer (the
symbol for the constant irritation of life under Party rule) as though reading a list of ingredients, only
to linger lovingly on a description of his old journal. This subconsciously primes readers to both
value nice moments and fear their destruction; by the end of the chapter, when Orwell interrupts
Winston’s writing with sudden knocks at his door (sounding for all the world like fateful gunfire), his
readers are as tense as his protagonist.
Through Winston’s reflections, Orwell offers readers their first glimpses of daily life – routines
like the Two Minutes’ Hate, or unflattering depictions of those who thrive under Party Rule. We’re
truly starting out in media res – this is Winston at his tipping point, crossing the moral threshold
Captain Sisko mentions in the first semester’s In the Pale Moonlight, even though he seems
convinced he’ll be captured and killed by the Thought Police for doing so. And the thrill of
witnessing Winston’s first real risk blinds us to the details Orwell uses to foreshadow much of the
book’s final section. (The first chapter is really important, even if it seems like “nothing happens.”)
The second chapter establishes some more social structure – youth organizations, family
systems, and so on – as well as explaining more about thoughtcrime, slogans, etc. It also includes
some devastating social commentary: our desire to “re-savage” our youth in order to mold them into
ideal citizen/soldiers comes back to destroy us, because children can’t be trusted. Similarly, the
hatred displayed by Parsons’ children crystallizes Orwell’s feelings regarding the demonization of
foes: that hatred begets hatred, not safety. Finally, the children’s taunt of Winston, shrugged off here
as kids messing around, helps underline something Orwell establishes in the first chapter and pays
off in Part Two: that Winston, having committed thoughtcrime, is “already dead.”’ When better to
start living than now?
Part One’s third chapter gives us hints of Winston’s past; the “dream” of his mother and sister
in the ship’s saloon will eventually reveal a great deal about what Winston won’t acknowledge
(which makes perfect sense, considering the horrible nature of his past). It’s our first real hint of preRevolution life’s actual nature, and the chapter further examines the Ingsoc dystopia, deconstructing
the methods used to keep people exhausted, scared, and distrustful of others. Everything we see
here helps reinforce the “dehumanization” motif that’s present in everything the Party does; the less
like humans the Party can make us, the more effective its rule.
The fourth chapter gives us a more well-rounded picture of Winston’s purpose in Oceanian
society, and fills in the “sketch” we’ve formed of him through the first three chapters. It’s a
particularly helpful section for those trying to understand what the Ministries do, as it at least hints at
each one’s true purpose. We also see exactly how history easily can be “written” rather than
captured (one of the things Orwell feared most) when Winston replaces all mentions of Comrade
Withers in the official records with the fictional Comrade Ogilvy. Finally, the chapter reveals a great
deal about the Party’s “psychological profile” – its pathological need to be flawless, its all-consuming
and unceasing hungers, its blatant contradictions and inefficiencies, and its compulsive desire to
dominate anything and everything.
In the fifth chapter, our cast expands: We meet Syme and Parsons, which gives us a spectrumwide view of the people the Party controls. We also begin to really understand Newspeak’s nefarious
nature: that its elimination of words necessarily limits one’s range of thought, which in turn helps
entrench the Party in a position of permanent authority. Winston continues ruminating on the bizarre
reality of Oceanian existence – the false faces everyone wears and the false stats everyone swallows.
We start seeing hints about how life was before the Revolution. And most importantly, the darkhaired girl is back…until she’s gone again!
The sixth chapter provides us with some more insight into Winston’s psychological profile,
damaged though it might be. We’ve wondered why he seems so obsessed with sex and love; now
we understand why he’s deeply lonely, as the “marriage” outlined here sounds profoundly broken
and sad. (Also, Katharine’s not dead; she’s just not here, and she never will be.) Orwell’s inclusion of
the toothless prole paints an explicit picture of the way the Party has twisted human instinct,
particularly when it comes to love and sexuality. But we remain confused about why the Party
bothers to do all of this…a question that won’t be answered soon.
The seventh chapter gives us more information about the proles, who have received cursory
mentions previously. It also goes back into life before the Revolution (notice the pattern?). This
chapter – along with the next one – is one of the most important in terms of foreshadowing;
everything from the song playing in the Chestnut Tree Café to Winston’s quotes – “I understand
HOW…” – is incredibly critical, and should not be forgotten or passed over.
Part One’s final chapter takes us into the Prole village, showing us all of its weird quirks – its
exposure to the war, its lottery and trivial concerns, its connection to a past that fascinates Winston
but seems unimportant to the proles themselves. The chapter essentially allows Winston to try his
hand at time-traveling; some attempts are less successful (Old Prole Man) than others (Charrington’s
shop). Winston also finds the paperweight, an important symbol of a lost heritage – one last piece of
beauty in an ugly world…something finally worth saving.
----In Orwell’s universe, it’s important to recognize that nothing comes for free. There’s a cost to
believing. There’s a cost to loving. And there’s a cost to living.
Each of these costs ties, in some way, to Orwell’s examination of power and its related issues.
Cost, after all, simply refers to our concept of exchange: you have something I want, so I give you
something for it. The first question is: who, in that scenario, has power?
There are two types of power, or “controls,” at the heart of 1984. The first is an external
control – the sort of authority a parent wields over a child or a boss over an employee. This sort of
power matters (for the wielder) because it allows him / her to:
o protect himself / herself
o protect his / her loved ones
o protect his / her legacy – how he / she is perceived – if he / she chooses
As it so happens, the Party cares a great deal about how it is perceived. It has a pathological need to
be seen as invulnerable, immortal, irresistible. A great deal of its power, in fact, stems from that
perception: it can seem stronger than it is if nobody bothers challenging it.
But while the Party is chiefly concerned with its own self-perpetuation, and thusly its
permanent hold on power, those controls also operate at an individual level in the novel. In
Goldstein’s book, one message is hammered home, over and over again: that hierarchical society is
unjust. The idea of a hierarchical society can only succeed if one accepts the basic need for
inequality. (That is, after all, the point of a hierarchy: that some make out better than others.) The
most successful hierarchies, of course, are able to walk a careful balance: to arrange conditions for
permanent inequality by clothing them in the trappings of equality or freedom. This is what Orwell
was getting at in Animal Farm, with its bitingly satirical “All animals are equal, but some animals are
more equal than others.”
It’s much the same in Oceania. There’s a strict hierarchy in place – hence the divisions
between the Inner Party (which gets the good stuff) and the Outer Party (which takes whatever it
can) – and very little movement between the groups. The only way to get members of the Outer
Party (who, unlike the proles, have received some semblance of a formal Party education) to accept
their lot in life (and not, say, rebel against the smaller and more elite Inner Party) is to perpetually
force them to accept their lesser status. That’s why O’Brien can shut his telescreen off, and why
Winston can’t. The monitoring devices don’t just keep everyone in line: they’re subconscious,
inescapable reminders of one’s lower place in the social order. And Winston accepts this – or at
least his peers do – because the only alternative they’re ever shown is prole life. Compared to that,
Winston’s blessed.
And it’s interesting, then, that 1984 is the story of what happens when Winston begins
resisting those external controls. At first – Part One – he resists alone. But it’s in Part Two that we
begin to see some particularly interesting social dynamics, because Winston incorporates others into
his resistance.
Before he can do this, however, Winston has to master internal control – the other source of
power within the narrative. Essentially, this means he can be his own boss. Intellectually speaking, he
controls the direction of his thoughts, independently reaches conclusions and makes choices, and
feels secure with his own/collective identity. (Obviously, Winston’s better at some of these aspects,
while others elude him.) From a physical standpoint, internal control allows Winston the freedom to
choose independent action for himself, establish a role for himself that he’s comfortable with, and
provide for immediate security (a primary concern, particularly in a nation that’s at war).
Obviously, the Party has very little use for its citizens’ internal controls: they’re a direct threat
to its perpetual stranglehold on collective security. Thus it targets its external controls at the internal
ones: it aims to control thought, speech, action, and environment. This is why it’s so important, in
short, to reduce us to duckspeaking automatons: robots don’t care about free will.
The free will question – how should one pursue what one wants? – is at the heart of any
society, much less 1984. It’s how we decide to make rules: as a collective body, we decide what
people can and cannot seek and how they may or may not seek it. And in 1984, the means by which
Winston learns to pursue what he wants is key to understanding what Orwell’s arguing.
Before I go into greater detail, let’s pause and look at how people can pursue what they want.
There’s the positive approach, and the negative approach: one involves a person pursuing what they
want, whereas the other involves decision-making processes based on what one doesn’t want. The
differences between the two approaches highlight the two ways people can sustain power – through
either negative or positive consequences – and the vast differences between the approaches in
terms of relationships and sustainability.
NegativeNegative-Consequence
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Established in terms of what you don’t want to happen
This can be framed positively (“Protect”) or negatively (“Avoid”)
Provides motivation by granting influence/power to elements out of an individual’s control
Relationships based on fear, mutual harm, and deficiency
PositivePositive-Consequence
o
o
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Established in terms of what you want to happen
Difficult to frame negatively
Provides motivation by granting influence/power to elements an individual controls
Relationships based on loyalty, respect, and consistency
Here’s a fascinating quirk: you only establish truly positive relationships when you have the luxury of
survival. If you aren’t “assured” of survival, virtually everything you’re doing is a buttress against a fate
you’re trying to avoid (i.e., death). It’s the difference between tossing a cupcake to a starving man,
who eats it without hesitation – without thought – because he instinctively avoids oblivion, and
tossing one to someone who’s well-fed and therefore can make an intelligent decision regarding the
cupcake. Do I want to eat the empty calories? Is too much sugar good for me? Should I give it back?
In this sense, the things our characters convince themselves they need tend to influence negative,
powerless approaches to existence rather than positive, proactive ones; they stunt their own growth
in order to simply survive.
If eating the cupcake is an example of a “negative-consequence decision” – things you choose
to do to avoid a larger negative consequence (who cares about sugar?? I don’t want to starve!!) –
you’ll find some relationships qualify as “negative-consequence relationships.” Those relationships,
which are based on mutual need rather than a desire to bond, tend to pop up more in the “macro”
sphere – impersonal but necessary connections between nations, or between companies, or even
between people who compete for leadership positions and have to be civil to one another in the
process. Positive-consequence relationships tend to be the friendships one consciously pursues. The
key, then, is to prevent your friendships from becoming negative ones – “I hang out with Person X
because it’s easy” vs. “I hang out with Person X because I don’t want to face the consequences of not
being with them.”
Winston, interestingly, seems to have hybrid relationships! You can say that he’s loyal to Julia
because he loves her, but he never states it. You can say that he “wants Julia to happen” because he
desires her physically. But it’s also easy to see how Winston treats Julia like the starving man treats
the cupcake: she gives him a reason to live, implying that without her, he’d go back to the slightly
suicidal pattern of behavior he’d established earlier in the book.
Does Winston keep spending time with Julia because he loves her, or because he can’t bear
the thought of being alone again after he’s had a taste of “the good life” as it’s defined in Orwell’s
universe – i.e., life as an actual human being? The fact that we even consider this question is a
testament to how badly the Party warps human beings.
As we mentioned earlier, the Party operates based on a series of negative consequences
obsessively repurposed as positives – to the point that history must be changed to justify the lies the
Party tells. (We’ll wonder about whether Orwell argues that positive-consequence or negativeconsequence relationships last longer at the end of this section.) Orwell then goes on to make a
comparison between approaches to maintaining power – since that seems to be the Party’s
endgame, regardless of whether it’s a fundamentally positive or negative one – from different
periods of human history. He compares Party rule to the Inquisition and what we call the
Totalitarians.
Among other things, the Inquisition didn’t succeed because they created martyrs with their
punishments. They operated under a strict credo of “Thou shalt not” – which, if you’ve ever dealt
with five-year-olds, only increases peoples’ desire to commit forbidden actions. They could not
control peoples’ thoughts; they could not control peoples’ actions. And they fundamentally believed
they were building a better world.
The Totalitarians, learning the lessons of the failed Inquisition, desperately sought to avoid
creating martyrs (unless it served their purposes). They operated under a strict credo of “Thou shalt”
– more effective than “thou shalt not,” but still doomed. They could control peoples’ actions, but not
their thoughts. And they, too, fundamentally believed they were building a better world.
But the Party – the evolutionary Totalitarians – takes an even more efficient approach. Like the
Totalitarians, the Party seeks to avoid creating martyrs (unless it serves its purposes). It operates
under a strict credo of “Thou art” – irresistible. It aims to control peoples’ thoughts; people would
then control their own actions. And, most terrifyingly, they make no pretenses about trying to build a
better world: they’re trying to pull heaven down.
The Party’s behavior suggests a extremely cynical view of humanity – that while we profess to
be positive and outwardly-focused beings, at our core we’re willing to surrender everything just to
stay safe…or even just to survive. Moreover, we can’t bring ourselves to recognize this
independently because we prefer to think of ourselves differently. Therefore, the Party frames things
in language that expresses itself in terms of what we want to want – positive things – while reducing
us to our basest desire (self-perpetuation, even in the negative abstract) and sparing nothing else.
It’s interesting that the desire for self-perpetuation – so powerfully independent – is nurtured
and used to sustain the Party rather than eliminated. But this points back to a realization Winston
reaches about the Party’s attitude towards the things it can’t kill. It can’t kill human sexuality – so it
makes it toxic. It can’t kill the desire for family life and family structure – so it subverts its original
purpose and turns it against itself. In this same fashion, it can’t kill the human desire to survive – so
what does it do? It reshapes it. It behaves, in short, like cancer.
O’Brien describes relationships between people and bodies (think the Brotherhood or the
Party) in terms of cells and organs. This gets down to the foundation of individualism, for a cell
doesn’t desire existence over the organ – and that attitude has to be conditioned into a human being.
If it can convince you that the Party is more important than the individual – that life is impermanent
and the Party is immortal – then it wins, plain and simple. So the Party ends up removing the
conscious desire for survival by shoving it into the unconscious / subconscious / instinctive part of
the brain. This means that, in essence, the Party can never kill it because it’s now out of reach. At the
same time, the Party replaces the conscious desire for self-perpetuation in people like Parsons with
the conscious desire for the Party’s self-perpetuation – and, thus repurposed, the survival instinct no
longer needs to be destroyed.
Thus the Party praises sacrifice – sacrifice above all else. You convince yourself a) that
sacrifice is noble, b) that you’re making a sacrifice voluntarily for the good of the whole, and that c)
this therefore confers individual nobility upon yourself. In actuality, the Party has made you into a
being whose every action somehow perpetuates the organ while starving the cell – repurposing the
survival instinct to fuel itself rather than its population.
It’s not a flattering picture of humanity, and many people resist the idea that they’d react in
the same way. One wonders if these things Orwell writes about are really at the core of who we are –
if the Party’s behavior is accurate – or if human beings are fundamentally better, or at least more
complicated. For this, we have to look at what threatens the Party.
If we jump ahead for a bit to Part Three, we see that compassion (care for a fellow human
instead of an inhuman ruling body) seems to be a threat to them. Winston’s experiences in the
Ministry of Love, both in the “waiting room” and in the torture chambers, reinforce this. But while
love and sex are obvious threats (Julia explains why when she refers to “sex gone sour”),
compassion is somewhat trickier. After all, more than anything else, compassion allows people to
help each other. In theory, people helping other people keeps the workforce strong (you aren’t
constantly having to replace people who fail alone); why kill compassion if it helps perpetuate the
workforce?
Perhaps the Party’s attitude reflects a belief that compassion is fundamentally ingrained in
human beings, just as the aforementioned desires for love and sex are, and therefore is (on some
level) an indestructible trait. Fine, then. Just change what you can’t crush. That’s the Party’s modus
operandi in every other circumstance. But whereas the other two can be twisted, perverted, and
repurposed to serve the Party, how can you repurpose compassion as a negative?
The simple answer, of course, is that you can’t. No matter how hard you strive to make
compassion a hallmark of physical or moral weakness, no matter how much time you dedicate to
severing human connections and isolating them from each other, and no matter how much energy is
channeled towards keeping a group of people constantly angry, hateful, and on edge, compassion
cannot be eliminated from the vast majority of human psyches. And by its very nature – sympathy =
alignment with another – it cannot be used for evil.
So the Party can’t kill it, and the Party can’t change it. You understand, then, why the Party
reverts to Inquisition-level tactics – Thou shalt not!!! – while dealing with Bumstead (the Fat Man)
when he attempts to share food with the Skull-Faced Man. It’s an Achilles’ heel, a weak spot, a fly in
the ointment, a glitch in the Matrix. It’s something they don’t know how to deal with and can’t
possibly fit into their worldview; it flies in the face of everything Oceanians teach and believe. And
it’s the secret reason why the proles need to be kept as stupid drones – because they can feel loyal
to each other, and the Party lacks the power to kill that feeling on that large a scale. It can only use
ignorance as a stop-gap measure, just as it uses hate and paranoia to control the instinct in Party
members. As long as the proles are willing to be stupid – it is easier in the short term – and the Outer
Party members are willing to follow, the Inner Party is safe.
Ironically, the thing that would inspire the proles to rise up is if they felt aggrieved – is if they
realized the nature of what was being done to all of them, understood the injustice of the system
they worked themselves to the bone to uphold, and reacted. As a result, the Party’s minimal
interventions in the lives of the proles serve a dual purpose. The Thought Police identify and remove
“dangerous” proles in a precise and surgical way, which allows the Party to avoid over-extending
itself (relative to its resources) without making their influence felt. Otherwise, they don’t seem to be
a big part of the proles’ lives, and therefore avoid the anger and frustration that the commoners redirect at each other. The reason they shout over soup is that they perceive it – it’s real, it’s in front of
them, it affects them in the here and now. The Party’s a distant abstraction, and when push comes to
shove, you’ll concentrate more on the concrete and present than the absent and vague. This pattern
of Party behavior indicates that they share Winston’s view of the proles, even on some level that’s
been double-thought into the unconscious realm.
Ultimately, arguments about human beings as “fundamentally bad” run into the gray areas of
instincts that run the gamut from base to noble. Yes, people may be greedy, or stupid, or hateful, or
easily frightened…but they’re also usually selfless when their survival is assured, and capable of
being so even when it isn’t. Ram Dass once pointed out that “caring is a reflex. Someone slips, your
arm goes out. A car is in the ditch, you join the others and push...You live, you help.” Even in the
Ministry of Love – when humans are reduced to the lowest of the low – it takes a long time to break
compassion; we see that prisoners even instinctively seek it in their captors.
So perhaps we’re better than the Party gives us credit for – which is why it has to try to ruin
us, change us into humans who aren’t human, in order to stay in power. But the Party can’t fully ruin
human beings – even if it can get at Winston and other deviant Outer Party folks – unless they’re
complicit in their own ruination. At this point, the Party is unable to ascertain what a person thinks if
that individual chooses to hide his/her thoughts. So it forces its prisoners into a fundamentally awful
choice – obliterate yourself as yourself (allow yourself to die a horrible death in Room 101), or
survive as something unlike yourself. Is it worthwhile for a man to keep breathing once he’s
thoroughly compromised himself – once he’s sustaining a body instead of a soul?
The Party’s good at identifying necessary conditions for survival – the ability to think and feel,
access to sustenance, air, and water, and so on – and then stripping them away from people, one by
one. This isn’t just true in the Ministry of Love; it’s also true for any ordinary person living in, say,
Airstrip One. The air’s thick, gray, and poisonous; the food is barely food, and exists in short supply;
thought and emotion have been thoroughly compromised. Anything you can think of that’s necessary
for survival – friendship? Faith? Family? – has been corrupted. And we’re not left with survival
(meaningful existence), but survival (self-perpetuation of cells and organs). We conduct our lives like
the Party itself – consumed by the need to exist, with no real regard for anything else.
At the same time, we don’t – because the Inner Party isn’t particularly concerned with which
individuals (the metaphorical cells and organs). Unlike us, it can easily sacrifice a “lung.” All that
matters is the perpetuation of the idea. And that’s the Party’s main advantage over its opposition: in
the end, we fear death, and it can’t die.
Ultimately, we’re confronted with the three concerns I mentioned before: the costs of living,
believing, and loving. We see that they’re deeply interrelated, and that each of them comes back to
issues of internal power vs. external controls (i.e., how much control you’re willing to surrender in
order to get what you want).
The cost of loving – here – may be survival or control. Are the benefits worth the sacrifice?
The cost of believing – here – is control and philosophy. Are these the components of the
human soul?
The cost of living – here – is control and belief. Again, are the benefits worth the sacrifice?
And perhaps there’s another condition for survival: memory. This is a great fear for a great
many people: we equate the loss of memory with the loss of self. This is why Orwell keeps asking:
Does the past exist? Can we have anything without the power to think, learn, remember, and grow?
Is the freedom to think, then, the highest of all human freedoms?
You must surrender those freedoms in order to survive in Oceania. It’s a truly evil bargain, and
there’s not an easy choice at the end of it.
Either way…the cost is heavy, isn’t it?
-----
1984 forces us to be human, and to notice what we do as human beings. We hope for an
impossible outcome, placing our trust in characters we have no reason to believe…or even like. Its
characters spend each day in a lopsided battle to preserve their dignity and control, treating nuggets
of fresh awareness and self-knowledge as though they’re treasures.
I mentioned that the Star diagram was incredibly distorted for Winston, a man whose every
action carries with it the possibility of retaliatory execution and erasure. What are independence and
security for him but abstract concepts, ideas whose very existence fade further with the publication
of each edition of the Newspeak dictionary? How can he hope to understand love when everything
we know about relationships and family structures has been twisted and corrupted beyond
recognition? How can he find enlightenment when everything and everyone that governs his
existence seeks to further enslave him in ignorance and separate him from his history? And how can
he develop an identity when his entire job depends on his ability to make his influence invisible?
Yet the Star exists for Winston, just as it exists for each of you. Every moment from Parts One
and Two is about his attempt to drag one of those disparate points a little bit closer to himself, while
Part Three is about how each of those points is systematically torn from him. First, the Party removes
his independence (via imprisonment). Next, they remove his security (through physical torture).
They then begin destroying his knowledge and understanding (torturing him into believing he’s
insane, entering the second stage of re-integration). They take away his sense of identity (“we will
empty you and fill you with ourselves”). Finally, they destroy the last vestige of humanity within him
– his love for Julia. It’s worth noting that as long as Winston can cling to one of the Star Points, he
cannot be beaten. The Party can destroy everything about him, his body and mind, but they cannot
declare victory until they earn that final, desperate surrender.
I’ve described Orwell’s study of humanity in terms of the Star Points, and I want you to notice
the contrast the author consciously draws between his “sides” (the human and inhuman). The Party
is, by its goals and by its very nature, inhuman. You can’t really imagine other human beings doing
this to one another – doing these things to people they know, to people with whom they have
relationships – and yet Orwell does just that.
The dehumanized Inner Party is particularly eerie because O’Brien serves as its avatar, putting
a “refined” face on ruthlessness and greed. The Inner Party are gluttons – not just because they enjoy
better tobacco and food, but because they consume simply for the sake of consumption. If you’ve
read The Inferno, you remember Dante’s punishment for the Gluttons: that they’re doomed to rot in
piles of trash and filth, freezing and distorted and torn apart until they no longer resemble their
human selves. With that image in mind, Oceania’s environment makes more sense.
The Party represents what we’re willing to do in the pursuit of more – how quickly we’ll
sacrifice basic human qualities in order to justify a desirable end, or what terrible lengths we’ll go to
in the name of control and protection. In other words, they are what we become when we throw
away the Star, when we dedicate all of our energy to the amassing of power for power’s sake.
The other element I want you to notice lies on the opposite end of the political spectrum
from the Inner Party. We’re told that the proles are mindless and disgusting, contentedly grinding
their way through each day without questioning why their lives take the shapes they do. Yet they are
the source of Winston’s tentative optimism, his great sleeping hope for the future. Theoretically, the
proles will rise up one day and undo the damages the insurgent middle class has wrought on the rest
of the world; sheer numbers dictate that they will overthrow the Party.
You’ve already noticed that Orwell always foreshadows developments. Do you really think his
repeated insistence (through Winston) that the proles will rise up, bookended with Winston’s
repeated (and eventually proven) assertion that he will be captured and killed, was an accident?
Nothing in this book is accidental. What are the proles obsessed with? A lottery – a probability
game. Since the odds are overwhelmingly high that the proles – the 85% of the population currently
dominated by the Party – will eventually become tired of living under someone else’s boots, a
knowledge of odds seems to be a worthwhile and symbolic pursuit. The proles’ greatest strength is
that the Party takes them for granted and ignores them as deeply as they ignore it. Their reasoning is
exquisitely “doublethinkful”: Party orthodoxy holds that the proles aren’t dangerous because they
lack the intellectual capacity for danger, but they also stay largely out of the proles’ lives to keep
from spurring them into action. Thus the proles are simultaneously a source of comfort and danger,
the jet of gasoline fueling the Party’s engine as it shoots past an open flame.
The Party’s inability to crush the proles entirely leads them to hold the massive group at arm’s
length. The problem with that approach is that the Party’s power lies in its proximity; for Winston
and others, the appearance that the Party seems to be everywhere keeps them in line. By removing
themselves from the proles’ daily lives and thoughts, the Party allows them to retain their humanity –
which we’ve already seen is the greatest weapon in an ideological battle against the Party itself. By
allowing its most dangerous opponent to retain its humanity, the Party may have devised its own
demise. True, dangerous individuals are hunted down and killed – but look at how far Winston – the
character Orwell took such pains to cast in a negative light from the start – got on his own! It may
seem unlikely, but the odds are actually overwhelmingly stacked in favor of the proles; it’s simply a
matter of noticing that truth and acting on it. Orwell drops hints that this will happen; whether you
believe him determines whether you feel 1984 ends with hope or despair.
Around this time a few years back, I had a conversation with a student named Kat Thompson
regarding the concept of narrative-as-magic-trick. If you’ve watched The Prestige, you know that
there are three elements to any good magic trick.
The first part is called the Pledge. The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck
of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it
to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But, of course, it probably isn’t.
The second act is called the Turn. The magician takes the ordinary something and
makes it do something extraordinary. Now you're looking for the secret...but you
won’t find it, because of course you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to
know. You want to be fooled.
But you wouldn’t clap yet. Because making something disappear isn't enough; you
have to bring it back. That’s why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the
part we call the Prestige.
It’s easy to see how Winston’s journey could satisfy the criteria I just listed. He’s ordinary, plain,
mildly repellant – a walking Pledge. When this ordinary man dares to be different, dares to live –
when our Prufrock rises up and disturbs his universe – we’re astonished. If Part One is about
allowing you to examine the ordinary object, Part Two is about doing something spectacular with
the object. But, of course, all things must return, and Part Three’s deliberate unraveling of everything
Winston accomplished is the literary equivalent of putting the woman who’s been sawed in two back
together.
Or is it? I would submit instead that Orwell is doing something particularly devious with his
narrative, with his magic trick: I would submit that he’s intentionally misdirecting your attention. This
has very little to do with the doublethinkful mindset that we adopt as we read: we understand that
the Party is uncrushable, we read Winston say as much over and over again, yet we simultaneously
expect the impossible – for this little man to overthrow the Party.
When the story ends, we assume the story ends. But did the story begin where we began?
Why, then, would it end where we end? By adopting the narrative perspective that he does – the
perspective of an Outer Party member – Orwell leads us into adopting the same trapped mindset as
the rest of the Party, even though we know that the Party can’t be trusted. That is to say, he
encourages us to dismiss the proles – the true Pledge.
At its core, 1984 isn’t just a five-alarm siren raging against the spread of a particularly toxic
brand of totalitarian Communism. It’s not even simply a warning about what could happen if we
allow it to, let alone a stab at an accurate prediction of the future. Orwell’s book is chiefly about
what happens to us when we abandon the author’s idea of connection, of cooperation, of unified
efforts to build a better world. It is a warning not simply against Communism, but against isolation.
isolation.
Winston is at his weakest in Room 101 because he is fundamentally alone. But the Party is
isolating itself just as thoroughly, trying to make itself disappear completely from the consciousness
of the proles. By aggressively making itself stupid, rigid, perfectly orthodox, incapable of perceiving
an unanticipated thought, the Party is likely dooming itself. Because while it will come to operate on
Duckspeak, the proles still, and always will, use Oldspeak. They may be asleep, but they aren’t dead.
The Party is death – and seems dead-set on driving itself into a position of complete vulnerability
with respect to the threat at its doorstep.And the point of the story, at least while we’re reading it,
isn’t for Winston to succeed: it’s for the Party to fall. That’s why I can see the ending as
simultaneously brutal (for Winston) and open (for the proles). Your mileage may vary.
As for the theme of oppression, it’s not hard to find it here. If you’re looking for specific
examples, look at the ways in which the Party controls its citizens from waking (the Physical Jerks) to
sleeping (the telescreens watching them as they sleep). The Eye always watches you – or at least you
think it does, and you don’t really want to risk finding out whether it’s working. Thus the telescreen
becomes a self-sustaining system of control – no one even needs to monitor them as long as people
believe the surveillance is active.
1984 is built on loss – the loss of our humanity, our heritage, and our thoughts. Winston loses
everything in the end because he allows himself to be isolated, to be severed from humankind
(something he resists instinctively, just like Bumstead; this is why he comes to feel affection for his
torturer). Once that happens, he loses himself. His desperate screams in the rat-cage are the death
rattles of his soul, with his freshly emptied body crying out for physical preservation. At the end, he’s
hollow and alone. Those “close” to him are killed or torn from him. He cannot enjoy a family because
he’s lost the concept of what a family should be. He cannot enjoy much of anything; the basic human
right to the pursuit of happiness has been removed.
Before he reaches the very end, Winston loses his paperweight (an important symbol in the
book, and a charmed object for him), the most concrete link to the past in a book filled with them.
Winston dreams of the past, but such dreams are transitory, and disappear upon waking. He loses
song lyrics; he loses his wife. His job deals with loss, and as long as Winston’s doing his job well, no
one will even know he’s doing it. In other words, Winston’s job is about losing truth so effectively
that no trace of himself exists to be remembered.
Everything done in Oceania is done out of fear. People compromise themselves out of fear, or
play on fears in order to elevate themselves. Winston refusing to express himself outside of the diary
in Part One is an example of the former; Parsons’s daughter’s decision to have her father imprisoned
in order to gain attention is an example of the latter. It is the fear of the Unknown Other that sustains
Oceania’s drive toward war – and the fact that the fear is completely misplaced, that Oceania’s
enemies are identical to itself, only makes it more effective. By fearing Neo-Bolshevism and
Obliteration of the Self/Death-Worship, followers of Ingsoc can assure themselves that their way of
life is superior to other ways, and that those other ways threaten a familiar existence. This gives them
something to fight for and against, which gives the country the ability to sustain itself (and the Party
the ability to hold power). In this way, 1984’s central paradox is revealed: the country can only
survive in its current fashion if it keeps destroying itself from within. This war – not simply on
Eastasia or Eurasia, but on everyone within the Party’s extensive reach – brings peace.
In Orwell’s novel, memory is both useless and extremely dangerous. It’s useless because the
Party can annihilate you for remembering something you aren’t supposed to know; they have an
entire Ministry dedicated to destroying/altering memory and preserving those changes. To remember
something is to make yourself a target, to weaken your chances at a long life; to remain ignorant is to
give yourself strength. Moreover, memories are unreliable. The Old Prole Man doesn’t seem to be
giving Winston any information he can use (although those who re-read the section will notice
Winston simply doesn’t know how to recognize the information he’s been given). Winston’s own
memories of the past come and go. He begins to doubt his own memories once he’s forced to do so.
What’s the point of remembering something when it can’t do you any good?
However, memory represents the Party’s Achilles’ heel. You can convince people they’re
insane once they’re in your clutches, but what happens if some of your targets evade you for a
while? What happens if their influence spreads? Fewer things make people instinctively, obsessively
angrier than being lied to or about, and the fury of the proles upon finding out they’ve been duped
all along would be tremendous. This is why the Party obsesses over making itself look perfect in the
past even as it tries to stop people from thinking; it’s trying to cut off the means of its own inevitable
destruction.
Conflict exists within certain members of Oceanian society; it is that internal conflict that
leads to thoughtcrime. That’s why Newspeak, doublethink, etc. are each predicated on the idea of
ordering everything. With order, conflict (and the need for it) becomes unthinkable. Notice, also,
how many of the conflicts in 1984 are manufactured. The battle between the Brotherhood and the
Party is almost certainly fake; so, too, is the war itself. The prisoners of war are real, but they’re just
fuel for the hate machine – like so many coals in so many furnaces. Why manufacture conflict?
Because people tend to do stupid things in order to feel safe. The promise of conflict (and the chaos
that ensues) paradoxically allows the Party to hold power as the bastion of safety and stability
Oceania needs.
Freedom, on the other hand, doesn’t exist, even for the Inner Party. While the Party gains total
control over virtually anything it wants, it also controls itself. It may give itself access to “luxuries,”
and its members may be able to shut off their telescreens – but it imprisons its most powerful
members in the vise of doublethink most strongly. The proles are the only ones who are free, along
with the animals, because they aren’t supposed to matter. It’s just another paradox: the more you
matter, the less free you are.
Finally, the party corrupts everything – the family instinct, the sex instinct, the urge to belong,
compassion for others – that makes a person a person. Look at Winston when we first meet him. He
has no idea where his wife is, or what happened to her – nor does he care. (Kierkegaard’s quote
about losing the self screams in our ears here.) This is a chilling image of what the Party can do to the
idea of family, underscored by the Parsons’ children running roughshod in Chapter II. The Party also
perverts the sex instinct to the point where human beings are no longer supposed to desire it – yet it
simultaneously forces them to engage in actions that now disgust them. By conditioning people to
hate what they are now forced to do, the Party asserts its total dominance over them. That’s the key
to the corruption in 1984 – it’s all about asserting control over people (for the sake of getting to do
so) by making them do things that run contrary to their “natures.”
As for the people, Winston is the book’s protagonist, an unhealthy middle-aged man whose
simultaneously optimistic and pessimistic perspective provides us with access to Orwell’s horrifying
world. He’s mildly intelligent, although certainly not a genius; he’s perceptive enough to pick up on
certain Party lies, and his ability to remember the past makes him unusual. What makes Winston
stand out, however, is his willingness to be guided by his instincts. It’s his instinct that makes him
realize that the world’s gone wrong somehow, his instinct that drives him to meet with Julia rather
than condemn her as a thought-criminal, and his instinct that inexorably drives him into O’Brien’s
clutches.
He’s a flawed human being, and not an incredibly likeable one. There’s no reason to believe
that this ordinary man can defeat an unbeatable system. His normalcy, however, allows him to be
honest, and leads us to trust him in ways we trust no other character. What we see with Winston is
what we get, and there’s something comforting about that in a world where parents can’t even trust
their children.
Julia begins the book as Winston’s imagined enemy; he views her with a combination of lust
and disgust during the initial “Hate” scene. However, Part Two paints Julia as an enthusiastic (yet
apathetic) ally. She’s overjoyed to make contact with someone else who loathes the Party, and her
unusually quick wits allow her to see through Party doctrines that even Winston swallows
unthinkingly. Unfortunately, her interest in overthrowing the party is mild at best. The Theory and
Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism literally puts her to sleep. She has the gifts Winston needs with
none of his drive. Together, they make a revolutionary; apart, they are incomplete halves.
As the only major female character in the novel, Julia’s painted pretty shallowly, which is a
shame. Orwell may have intentionally botched her portrayal to emphasize the “damaged humans”
motif, which is one of the reasons the Julia/Winston conversations sound so oddly stilted (whereas
the Winston/O’Brien conversations seem fairly normal)…or he just couldn’t write believable female
dialogue (a sadly common problem for male authors). But obvious limitations aside, Julia gives the
novel its narrative kick. Her partnership with Winston drives the middle section of the book, and
their separation sets the stage for the conclusion. Without the bond between the two main
characters, the book could have ended fairly quickly. Instead, the silent battle each fights (and loses)
on behalf of the other prolongs their pain – and makes their individual defeats all the harder to
stomach.
O’Brien is the novel’s multifaceted villain, a figure whose influence hovers over the entire
narrative until the final chapter. He is, like Julia, both unusually perceptive and frustratingly blind. As
a member of the Inner Party, O’Brien engages in the strongest type of doublethink. Doublethink
enables O’Brien and his ilk to maintain their stranglehold on power in Oceania, and allows him to
justify what he does to Winston and others. Yet he simultaneously seems to think that he’s doing
something that’s almost noble – even though he’s clearly aware he’s “evil.”
O’Brien fascinates readers as thoroughly as he fascinates Winston. There’s a seductive air of
mystery about him, and that mystery leads us to hope irrationally – as Winston does – that he’ll save
the day in the end. He seems so refined, with his spectacles, servants, and wine. His betrayal of
Winston punches readers in the proverbial gut, and the revelation that he’s been waiting to snare
Winston immediately removes any sort of rationality from readers. Think about what you thought as
you read the end…you probably felt dread, and anger, and disappointment, but were you thinking
things through logically as you turned the pages? Had you been hoping Winston would somehow
escape the seemingly inescapable? Were you still holding out hope in Part Three?
Finally, O’Brien represents contradiction, and not simply through doublethink. He is the father
figure who punishes, the torturer who perfects through torment, the darkness and the light. When he
leaves the narrative for good, he leaves behind a “perfect” Winston – a Winston who is no longer
himself. In this way, O’Brien is a sort of “anti-god” – the creator who destroys.
Parsons is another type of villain altogether. He’s not malevolent, but he’s definitely
dangerous. While O’Brien is dangerous because his insanity turns his brilliant mind toward evil ends,
Parsons is dangerous because men like O’Brien are powerless without the support of him and his
kind. Parsons blends mindless, blind loyalty with tireless enthusiasm in order to support the Party,
and the Party taps this “stupid nationalism” whenever they need to shore up their power. They do it
to the Outer Party, they do it to the proles – and they do it well.
Parsons crosses into self-parody when we see him in Part Three; he’s completely unaware that
he didn’t say anything against the Party, and splits his time between loathing himself for his
“disloyalty,” feeling grateful to Big Brother for “his” willingness to “cure” him, and feeling proud of his
daughter for loving the Party enough to turn in her own father. It never occurs to him that
unconscious speech against Big Brother shouldn’t be an offense punishable by death. However,
nothing is funny about that scene; most readers are either disgusted, horrified, or some combination
of both.
Parsons’s patriotism is as relentless and mechanical as the actions of any Inner Party member,
and that’s why he, and those like him, are so dangerous – more dangerous, I would submit, than the
Inner Party itself. Without people like him, the Inner Party has no one else to protect it from the larger
Outer Party, let alone the proles. Ironically, the Inner Party is incredibly aware of history and
historical trends (I say “ironically” because they are simultaneously dedicated to eradicating that
history). They know all too well that some of history’s worst atrocities have been committed by
leaders who were empowered by the violent and the loudmouthed, the angry and the stupid. The
support from millions of persons – millions of Parsons – powers the Party, and when they’re used up,
the Party discards them like so many used batteries.
Syme works in the Ministry of Truth, and edits an edition of the Newspeak dictionary. He is
the anti-Parsons, resembling O’Brien more than anyone else. His casual dismissal of the proles, along
with his enthusiasm for Newspeak and the destruction of thoughtcrime, make him a wonderful
supporter of Party ideology (Winston thinks to himself that Syme’s mind is “viciously orthodox”). Yet
his mind makes him dangerous because, like Julia’s, it’s too perceptive.
The Party does two things with strong minds: It incorporates them (O’Brien says they “got him
a long time ago,” implying that he did not always occupy his privileged position) or destroys them.
Syme is destroyed. But it’s important to note that it’s not Syme's knowledge that makes him
dangerous. After all, if that were the case, the Inner Party would be too busy executing its own
members to function. Instead, it's his ability to reason that threatens the Party. His death is the book’s
casual reminder of the lost value of intelligence – and the danger inherent in “standing out.” Note that
while Julia insists that yelling with the crowd is the only way to stay safe, Syme shows that’s not
necessarily true. It’s more accurate to say you have to be the crowd in order to ensure your safety,
especially considering how the Party aims to obliterate the “self” in its followers.
Ampleforth is a poet who works for the Ministry of Truth. We see him a couple of times – he’s
mentioned when we first see Winston at work, interferes with Winston’s initial attempts to meet
Julia, and thrown into prison at the outset of Part Three. His crime was his decision to preserve
“God” as the final word in the second line of a Kipling couplet.
Ampleforth matters because his crime matters, and the nature of his crime is two-fold. Firstly,
Orwell is obsessed with language and the ways in which it controls our ability to think – just look at
how much attention he pays to the creation of Newspeak! His other writings also grapple with the
idea of words giving and limiting power – well-chosen words have the power to liberate, and so on.
I submit that Ampleforth is an extension of Orwell himself, especially because he decides to
preserve Kipling’s rhyme – something the author, an obsessive lover of language himself, doubtless
would have done. (What is Orwell saying, then, when Ampleforth is finally dispatched in the worst
possible way?)
Secondly, look at the word he left in – “God.” While the Party itself is clearly atheist, it’s not
exactly secular – the devotion they demand to Big Brother goes beyond “cult” levels and becomes a
type of worship. They substitute human fiction – Big Brother probably isn’t even real – for the human
spirit, just as they substitute fiction and deceit for everything else. Ampleforth’s imprisonment
doesn’t represent atheistic overreach – it represents the intentional destruction of the spirit and the
soul. If you think about it, the entire purpose of the Ministry of Love – especially Room 101 – is to
defeat the soul. It only makes sense that Ampleforth’s refusal to pervert a poem any further would
threaten the party enough to warrant his destruction. After all, what is poetry but the language of the
heart?
Charrington is eventually revealed to be a member of the Thought Police. Before then, he
appears to be a kindly and discreet shopkeeper. He provides Winston with the seeds of his own
destruction – the diary, the paperweight, the loft, and access for (and to) Julia. We should be
suspicious when he refuses to engage in thoughtcrime himself (refusing to finish the song), but we,
like Winston, are too caught up in everything else to notice that this fellow seems a bit odd. In fact,
we’re just as willfully blind about Charrington as Winston is for the exact same reasons; we want to
believe he’s everything he seems because we want to have a source of hope in a narrative that, at the
point of Charrington’s introduction, has been incredibly bleak. Just as Winston knows how his life
will end, we know how the book will end; we just don’t want to acknowledge that the book can only
end one conceivable way.
Considering he’s a member of the Thought Police, Charrington’s picked a perversely perfect
location, surrounding himself with relics that contradict orthodoxy. After all, how better to catch
those with dangerous thoughts, with a dangerous interest in a non-existent, non-Party-sanctioned
version of the past, than to run an antique shop?
Finally, the Skull-Faced Man and the Fat Man (identified later as Bumstead) represent dueling
arguments regarding human nature. Which describes us as we are? Are we fundamentally, foolishly,
irredeemably good – compassionate to a fault, even at the end of all of our selfishness and
deception? Or are we really just creatures of self-preservation?
The Skull-Faced Man represents our survival instinct. He’s been literally starved by the Party –
an effective visual metaphor – but his desperation to survive confuses us. It’s not until we see Room
101 that we understand his fear, for it’s not physical survival he wants, but spiritual survival; he still
believes a piece of himself remains, and he had held out hope that he’d keep it until he died.
Bumstead, on the other hand, represents one of the Party’s greatest frustrations – that its
conditioning isn’t perfect. With the knowledge that he’s being monitored by every telescreen in the
room, Bumstead still walks over to the Skull-Faced Man and offers him a hidden supply of food. It’s
almost compulsive – an action that reveals a conscience that can’t be “properly” betrayed. The
inhuman shriek that issues from the telescreen is the fury of an authority that can’t accept anything
less than perfect devotion, and the violence they deal out in response indicates an almost childlike
ferocity at not getting what they want.
We see Bumstead receive this retribution and judge his actions as stupid, but that decision is
also one of the only purely honest ones we see in the book. Bumstead guiltily and unwittingly stands
up for the things we say we’d die to defend – honor, kindness, and brotherhood – and pays for it.
But the mark of principle is not whether it appears for free in times of goodness, but when the cost is
high, in times of darkness…even in the place where there is none.