Nineteen
Eighty-Four is a rare work that grows more haunting as its
futuristic purgatory becomes more real. Published in 1949, the book
offers political satirist George Orwell's nightmare vision of a
totalitarian, bureaucratic world and one poor stiff's attempt to find
individuality. The brilliance of the novel is Orwell's prescience of
modern life--the ubiquity of television, the distortion of the
language--and his ability to construct such a thorough version of
hell. Required reading for students since it was published, it ranks
among the most terrifying novels ever written.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Winston had
woken up with his eyes full of tears. Julia rolled sleepily against him,
murmuring something that might have been 'What's the matter?'
'I
dreamt-' he began, and stopped short. It was too complex to be put into words.
There was the dream itself, and there was a memory connected with it that had
swum into his mind in the few seconds after waking.
He
lay back with his eyes shut, still sodden in the atmosphere of the dream. It
was a vast, luminous dream in which his whole life seemed to stretch out before
him like a landscape on a summer evening after rain. It had all occurred inside
the glass paperweight, but the surface of the glass was the dome of the sky,
and inside the dome everything was flooded with clear soft light in which one
could see into interminable distances. The dream had also been comprehended by
— indeed, in some sense it had consisted in — a gesture of the arm made by his
mother, and made again thirty years later by the Jewish woman he had seen on
the news film, trying to shelter the small boy from the bullets, before the
helicopter blew them both to pieces.
'Do
you know,' he said, 'that until this moment I believed I had murdered my
mother?'
'Why
did you murder her?' said Julia, almost asleep.
'I
didn't murder her. Not physically.'
In
the dream he had remembered his last glimpse of his mother, and within a few
moments of waking the cluster of small events surrounding it had all come back.
It was a memory that he must have deliberately pushed out of his consciousness
over many years. He was not certain of the date, but he could not have been
less than ten years old, possibly twelve, when it had happened.
His
father had disappeared some time earlier, how much earlier he could not
remember. He remembered better the rackety, uneasy circumstances of the time:
the periodical panics about air-raids and the sheltering in Tube stations, the
piles of rubble everywhere, the unintelligible proclamations posted at street
corners, the gangs of youths in shirts all the same colour, the enormous queues
outside the bakeries, the intermittent machine-gun fire in the distance — above
all, the fact that there was never enough to eat. He remembered long afternoons
spent with other boys in scrounging round dustbins and rubbish heaps, picking
out the ribs of cabbage leaves, potato peelings, sometimes even scraps of stale
breadcrust from which they carefully scraped away the cinders; and also in
waiting for the passing of trucks which travelled over a certain route and were
known to carry cattle feed, and which, when they jolted over the bad patches in
the road, sometimes spilt a few fragments of oil-cake.
When
his father disappeared, his mother did not show any surprise or any violent
grief, but a sudden change came over her. She seemed to have become completely
spiritless. It was evident even to Winston that she was waiting for something
that she knew must happen. She did everything that was needed — cooked, washed,
mended, made the bed, swept the floor, dusted the mantelpiece — always very
slowly and with a curious lack of superfluous motion, like an artist's
lay-figure moving of its own accord. Her large shapely body seemed to relapse
naturally into stillness. For hours at a time she would sit almost immobile on
the bed, nursing his young sister, a tiny, ailing, very silent child of two or
three, with a face made simian by thinness. Very occasionally she would take
Winston in her arms and press him against her for a long time without saying
anything. He was aware, in spite of his youthfulness and selfishness, that this
was somehow connected with the never-mentioned thing that was about to happen.
He
remembered the room where they lived, a dark, close-smelling room that seemed
half filled by a bed with a white counterpane. There was a gas ring in the
fender, and a shelf where food was kept, and on the landing outside there was a
brown earthenware sink, common to several rooms. He remembered his mother's
statuesque body bending over the gas ring to stir at something in a saucepan.
Above all he remembered his continuous hunger, and the fierce sordid battles at
mealtimes. He would ask his mother naggingly, over and over again, why there
was not more food, he would shout and storm at her (he even remembered the
tones of his voice, which was beginning to break prematurely and sometimes
boomed in a peculiar way), or he would attempt a snivelling note of pathos in
his efforts to get more than his share. His mother was quite ready to give him
more than his share. She took it for granted that he, 'the boy', should have
the biggest portion; but however much she gave him he invariably demanded more.
At every meal she would beseech him not to be selfish and to remember that his
little sister was sick and also needed food, but it was no use. He would cry
out with rage when she stopped ladling, he would try to wrench the saucepan and
spoon out of her hands, he would grab bits from his sister's plate. He knew
that he was starving the other two, but he could not help it; he even felt that
he had a right to do it. The clamorous hunger in his belly seemed to justify
him. Between meals, if his mother did not stand guard, he was constantly
pilfering at the wretched store of food on the shelf.
One
day a chocolate-ration was issued. There had been no such issue for weeks or
months past. He remembered quite clearly that precious little morsel of
chocolate. It was a two-ounce slab (they still talked about ounces in those
days) between the three of them. It was obvious that it ought to be divided
into three equal parts. Suddenly, as though he were listening to somebody else,
Winston heard himself demanding in a loud booming voice that he should be given
the whole piece. His mother told him not to be greedy. There was a long,
nagging argument that went round and round, with shouts, whines, tears,
remonstrances, bargainings. His tiny sister, clinging to her mother with both
hands, exactly like a baby monkey, sat looking over her shoulder at him with
large, mournful eyes. In the end his mother broke off three-quarters of the
chocolate and gave it to Winston, giving the other quarter to his sister. The
little girl took hold of it and looked at it dully, perhaps not knowing what it
was. Winston stood watching her for a moment. Then with a sudden swift spring
he had snatched the piece of chocolate out of his sister's hand and was fleeing for the door.
'Winston,
Winston!' his mother called after him. 'Come back! Give your sister back her
chocolate!'
He
stopped, but did not come back. His mother's anxious eyes were fixed on his
face. Even now he was thinking about the thing, he did not know what it was
that was on the point of happening. His sister, conscious of having been robbed
of something, had set up a feeble wail. His mother drew her arm round the child
and pressed its face against her breast. Something in the gesture told him that
his sister was dying. He turned and fled down the stairs. with the chocolate
growing sticky in his hand.
He
never saw his mother again. After he had devoured the chocolate he felt
somewhat ashamed of himself and hung about in the streets for several hours,
until hunger drove him home. When he came back his mother had disappeared. This
was already becoming normal at that time. Nothing was gone from the room except
his mother and his sister. They had not taken any clothes, not even his
mother's overcoat. To this day he did not know with any certainty that his
mother was dead. It was perfectly possible that she had merely been sent to a
forced-labour camp. As for his sister, she might have been removed, like
Winston himself, to one of the colonies for homeless children (Reclamation
Centres, they were called) which had grown up as a result of the civil war, or
she might have been sent to the labour camp along with his mother, or simply
left somewhere or other to die.
The
dream was still vivid in his mind, especially the enveloping protecting gesture
of the arm in which its whole meaning seemed to be contained. His mind went
back to another dream of two months ago. Exactly as his mother had sat on the
dingy whitequilted bed, with the child clinging to her, so she had sat in the
sunken ship, far underneath him, and drowning deeper every minute, but still
looking up at him through the darkening water.
He
told Julia the story of his mother's disappearance. Without opening her eyes
she rolled over and settled herself into a more comfortable position.
'I
expect you were a beastly little swine in those days,' she said indistinctly.
'All children are swine.'
'Yes.
But the real point of the story-'
From
her breathing it was evident that she was going off to sleep again. He would
have liked to continue talking about his mother. He did not suppose, from what
he could remember of her, that she had been an unusual woman, still less an
intelligent one; and yet she had possessed a kind of nobility, a kind of
purity, simply because the standards that she obeyed were private ones. Her
feelings were her own, and could not be altered from outside. It would not have
occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes
meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else
to give, you still gave him love. When the last of the chocolate was gone, his
mother had clasped the child in her arms. It was no use, it changed nothing, it
did not produce more chocolate, it did not avert the child's death or her own;
but it seemed natural to her to do it. The refugee woman in the boat had also
covered the little boy with her arm, which was no more use against the bullets
than a sheet of paper. The terrible thing that the Party had done was to
persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at
the same time robbing you of all power over the material world. When once you
were in the grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or
refrained from doing, made literally no difference. Whatever happened you
vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever heard of again. You were
lifted clean out of the stream of history. And yet to the people of only two
generations ago this would not have seemed all-important, because they were not
attempting to alter history. They were governed by private loyalties which they
did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely
helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have
value in itself. The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this
condition. They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were
loyal to one another. For the first time in his life he did not despise the
proles or think of them merely as an inert force which would one day spring to
life and regenerate the world. The proles had stayed human. They had not become
hardened inside. They had held on to the primitive emotions which he himself
had to re-learn by conscious effort. And in thinking this he remembered,
without apparent relevance, how a few weeks ago he had seen a severed hand
lying on the pavement and had kicked it into the gutter as though it had been a
cabbage-stalk.
'The
proles are human beings,' he said aloud. 'We are not human.'
'Why
not?' said Julia, who had woken up again.
He
thought for a little while. 'Has it ever occurred to you. he said, 'that the
best thing for us to do would be simply to walk out of here before it's too
late, and never see each other again?'
'Yes,
dear, it has occurred to me, several times. But I'm not going to do it, all the
same.'
'We've
been lucky,' he said 'but it can't last much longer. You're young. You look
normal and innocent. If you keep clear of people like me, you might stay alive
for another fifty years.'
'No.
I've thought it all out. What you do, I'm going to do. And don't be too
downhearted. I'm rather good at staying alive.'
'We
may be together for another six months — a year — there's no knowing. At the
end we're certain to be apart. Do you realize how utterly alone we shall be?
When once they get hold of us there will be nothing, literally nothing, that
either of us can do for the other. If I confess, they'll shoot you, and if I
refuse to confess, they'll shoot you just the same. Nothing that I can do or
say, or stop myself from saying, will put off your death for as much as five
minutes. Neither of us will even know whether the other is alive or dead. We
shall be utterly without power of any kind. The one thing that matters is that
we shouldn't betray one another, although even that can't make the slightest
difference.'
'If
you mean confessing,' she said, 'we shall do that, right enough. Everybody
always confesses. You can't help it. They torture you.'
'I
don't mean confessing. Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't
matter: only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you — that
would be the real betrayal.'
She
thought it over. 'They can't do that,' she said finally. 'It's the one thing
they can't do. They can make you say anything — anything — but they can't make
you believe it. They can't get inside you.'
'No,'
he said a little more hopefully, 'no; that's quite true. They can't get inside
you. If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have
any result whatever, you've beaten them.'
He
thought of the telescreen with its never-sleeping ear. They could spy upon you
night and day, but if you kept your head you could still outwit them.
With all their
cleverness they had never mastered the secret of finding out what another human
being was thinking. Perhaps that was less true when you were actually in their
hands. One did not know what happened inside the Ministry of Love, but it was
possible to guess: tortures, drugs, delicate instruments that registered your
nervous reactions, gradual wearing-down by sleeplessness and solitude and
persistent questioning. Facts, at any rate, could not be kept hidden. They
could be tracked down by enquiry, they could be squeezed out of you by torture.
But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did
it ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings: for that matter you
could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in
the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the
inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained
impregnable.
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