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
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
'There are
three stages in your reintegration,' said O'Brien. 'There is learning, there is
understanding, and there is acceptance. It is time for you to enter upon the
second stage.'
As
always, Winston was lying flat on his back. But of late his bonds were looser.
They still held him to the bed, but he could move his knees a little and could
turn his head from side to side and raise his arms from the elbow. The dial,
also, had grown to be less of a terror. He could evade its pangs if he was quick-witted
enough: it was chiefly when he showed stupidity that O'Brien pulled the lever.
Sometimes they got through a whole session without use of the dial. He could
not remember how many sessions there had been. The whole process seemed to
stretch out over a long, indefinite time — weeks, possibly — and the intervals
between the sessions might sometimes have been days, sometimes only an hour or
two.
'As
you lie there,' said O'Brien, 'you have often wondered you have even asked me —
why the Ministry of Love should expend so much time and trouble on you. And
when you were free you were puzzled by what was essentially the same question.
You could grasp the mechanics of the Society you lived in, but not its
underlying motives. Do you remember writing in your diary, "I understand
how: I do not understand why"? It was when you thought about
"why" that you doubted your own sanity. You have read the book,
Goldstein's book, or parts of it, at least. Did it tell you anything that you
did not know already?'
'You
have read it?' said Winston.
'I
wrote it. That is to say, I collaborated in writing it. No book is produced
individually, as you know.'
'Is
it true, what it says?'
'A
description, yes. The programme it sets forth is nonsense. The secret
accumulation of knowledge — a gradual spread of enlightenment — ultimately a
proletarian rebellion — the overthrow of the Party. You foresaw yourself that
that was what it would say. It is all nonsense. The proletarians will never
revolt, not in a thousand years or a million. They cannot. I do not have to
tell you the reason: you know it already. If you have ever cherished any dreams
of violent insurrection, you must abandon them. There is no way in which the
Party can be overthrown. The rule of the Party is for ever. Make that the
starting-point of your thoughts.'
He
came closer to the bed. 'For ever!' he repeated. 'And now let us get back to
the question of "how" and "why". You understand well enough
how the Party maintains
itself in power. Now tell me why we cling to power. What is our motive? Why
should we want power? Go on, speak,' he added as Winston remained silent.
Nevertheless
Winston did not speak for another moment or two. A feeling of weariness had
overwhelmed him. The faint, mad gleam of enthusiasm had come back into O'Brien's
face. He knew in advance what O'Brien would say. That the Party did not seek
power for its own ends, but only for the good of the majority. That it sought
power because men in the mass were frail cowardly creatures who could not
endure liberty or face the truth, and must be ruled over and systematically
deceived by others who were stronger than themselves. That the choice for
mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of
mankind, happiness was better. That the party was the eternal guardian of the
weak, a dedicated sect doing evil that good might come, sacrificing its own
happiness to that of others. The terrible thing, thought Winston, the terrible
thing was that when O'Brien said this he would believe it. You could see it in
his face. O'Brien knew everything. A thousand times better than Winston he knew
what the world was really like, in what degradation the mass of human beings
lived and by what lies and barbarities the Party kept them there. He had
understood it all, weighed it all, and it made no difference: all was justified
by the ultimate purpose. What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic
who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing
and then simply persists in his lunacy?
'You
are ruling over us for our own good,' he said feebly. 'You believe that human
beings are not fit to govern themselves, and therefore-'
He
started and almost cried out. A pang of pain had shot through his body. O'Brien
had pushed the lever of the dial up to thirty-five.
'That
was stupid, Winston, stupid!' he said. 'You should know better than to say a
thing like that.'
He
pulled the lever back and continued:
'Now
I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power
entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others ; we are
interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness:
only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We
are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are
doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were- cowards and
hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us
in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own
motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power
unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a
paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know
that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is
not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to
safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the
dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture
is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?'
Winston
was struck, as he had been struck before, by the tiredness of O'Brien's face.
It was strong and fleshy and brutal, it was full of intelligence and a sort of
controlled passion before which he felt himself helpless; but it was tired.
There were pouches under the eyes, the skin sagged from the cheekbones. O'Brien
leaned over him, deliberately bringing the worn face nearer.
'You
are thinking,' he said, 'that my face is old and tired. You are thinking that I
talk of power, and yet I am not even able to prevent the decay of my own body.
Can you not understand, Winston, that the individual is only a cell? The
weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism. Do you die when you cut
your fingernails?'
He
turned away from the bed and began strolling up and down again, one hand in his
pocket.
'We
are the priests of power,' he said. 'God is power. But at present power is only
a word so far as you are concerned. It is time for you to gather some idea of
what power means. The first thing you must realize is that power is collective.
The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual. You
know the Party slogan: "Freedom is Slavery". Has it ever occurred to
you that it is reversible? Slavery is freedom. Alone — free — the human being
is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die,
which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter
submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the
Party so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal. The second
thing for you to realize is that power is power over human beings. Over the
body but, above all, over the mind. Power over matter — external reality, as
you would call it — is not important. Already our control over matter is
absolute.'
For
a moment Winston ignored the dial. He made a violent effort to raise himself
into a sitting position, and merely succeeded in wrenching his body painfully.
'But
how can you control matter?' he burst out. 'You don't even control the climate
or the law of gravity. And there are disease, pain, death-'
O'Brien
silenced him by a movement of his hand. 'We control matter because we control
the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston.
There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation — anything. I
could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to. I do not wish to,
because the Party does not wish it. You must get rid of those nineteenth-
century ideas about the laws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature.'
'But
you do not! You are not even masters of this planet. What about Eurasia and
Eastasia? You have not conquered them yet.'
'Unimportant.
We shall conquer them when it suits us. And if we did not, what difference
would it make? We can shut them out of existence. Oceania is the world.'
'But
the world itself is only a speck of dust. And man is tiny helpless! How long
has he been in existence? For millions of years the earth was uninhabited.'
'Nonsense.
The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists
except through human consciousness.'
'But
the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals — mammoths and mastodons and
enormous reptiles which lived here long before man was ever heard of.'
'Have
you ever seen those bones, Winston? Of course not. Nineteenth- century
biologists invented them. Before man there was nothing. After man, if he could
come to an end, there would be nothing. Outside man there is nothing.'
'But
the whole universe is outside us. Look at the stars! Some of them are a million
light-years away. They are out of our reach for ever.'
'What
are the stars?' said O'Brien indifferently. 'They are bits of fire a few
kilometres away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot them out. The earth is the centre of the universe. The sun and the
stars go round it.'
Winston
made another convulsive movement. This time he did not say anything. O'Brien
continued as though answering a spoken objection:
'For
certain purposes, of course, that is not true. When we navigate the ocean, or
when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient to assume that the
earth goes round the sun and that the stars are millions upon millions of
kilometres away. But what of it? Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a
dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near or distant, according as we
need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that? Have you
forgotten doublethink?'
Winston
shrank back upon the bed. Whatever he said, the swift answer crushed him like a
bludgeon. And yet he knew, he knew, that he was in the right. The belief that
nothing exists outside your own mind — surely there must be some way of
demonstrating that it was false? Had it not been exposed long ago as a fallacy?
There was even a name for it, which he had forgotten. A faint smile twitched
the corners of O'Brien's mouth as he looked down at him.
'I
told you, Winston,' he said, 'that metaphysics is not your strong point. The
word you are trying to think of is solipsism. But you are mistaken. This is not
solipsism. Collective solipsism, if you like. But that is a different thing: in
fact, the opposite thing. All this is a digression,' he added in a different
tone. 'The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not
power over things, but over men.' He paused, and for a moment assumed again his
air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: 'How does one man assert
his power over another, Winston?'
Winston
thought. 'By making him suffer,' he said.
'Exactly.
By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can
you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in
inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and
putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to
see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the
stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and
treachery is torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world
which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in
our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed
that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our
world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement.
Everything else we shall destroy everything. Already we are breaking down the
habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut
the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man
and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in
the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from
their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be
eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a
ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it
now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be
no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the
laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no
science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There
will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity,
no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do
not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power,
constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there
will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is
helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a
human face — for ever.'
He
paused as though he expected Winston to speak. Winston had tried to shrink back
into the surface of the bed again. He could not say anything. His heart seemed
to be frozen. O'Brien went on:
'And
remember that it is for ever. The face will always be there to be stamped upon.
The heretic, the enemy of society, will always be there, so that he can be
defeated and humiliated over again. Everything that you have undergone since
you have been in our hands — all that will continue, and worse. The espionage,
the betrayals, the arrests, the tortures, the executions, the disappearances
will never cease. It will be a world of terror as much as a world of triumph.
The more the Party is powerful, the less it will be tolerant: the weaker the
opposition, the tighter the despotism. Goldstein and his heresies will live for
ever. Every day, at every moment, they will be defeated, discredited,
ridiculed, spat upon and yet they will always survive. This drama that I have
played out with you during seven years will be played out over and over again
generation after generation, always in subtler forms. Always we shall have the
heretic here at our mercy, screaming with pain, broken up, contemptible — and
in the end utterly penitent, saved from himself, crawling to our feet of his
own accord. That is the world that we are preparing, Winston. A world of
victory after victory, triumph after triumph after triumph: an endless
pressing, pressing, pressing upon the nerve of power. You are beginning, I can
see, to realize what that world will be like. But in the end you will do more
than understand it. You will accept it, welcome it, become part of it.'
Winston
had recovered himself sufficiently to speak. 'You can't!' he said weakly.
'What
do you mean by that remark, Winston?'
'You
could not create such a world as you have just described. It is a dream. It is impossible.'
'Why?'
'It
is impossible to found a civilization on fear and hatred and cruelty. It would
never endure.'
'Why
not?'
'It
would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide.'
'Nonsense.
You are under the impression that hatred is more exhausting than love. Why
should it be? And if it were, what difference would that make? Suppose that we
choose to wear ourselves out faster. Suppose that we quicken the tempo of human
life till men are senile at thirty. Still what difference would it make? Can
you not understand that the death of the individual is not death? The party is
immortal.'
As
usual, the voice had battered Winston into helplessness. Moreover he was in
dread that if he persisted in his disagreement O'Brien would twist the dial
again. And yet he could not keep silent. Feebly, without arguments, with
nothing to support him except his inarticulate horror of what O'Brien had said,
he returned to the attack.
'I
don't know — I don't care. Somehow you will fail. Something will defeat you.
Life will defeat you.'
'We
control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining that there is
something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will
turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable. Or
perhaps you have returned to your old idea that the proletarians or the slaves
will arise and overthrow us. Put it out of your mind. They are helpless, like
the animals. Humanity is the Party. The others are outside — irrelevant.'
'I
don't care. In the end they will beat you. Sooner or later they will see you
for what you are, and then they will tear you to pieces.'
'Do
you see any evidence that that is happening? Or any reason why it should?'
'No.
I believe it. I know that you will fail. There is something in the universe — I
don't know, some spirit, some principle — that you will never overcome.'
'Do
you believe in God, Winston?'
'No.'
'Then
what is it, this principle that will defeat us?'
'I
don't know. The spirit of Man.'
'And
do you consider yourself a man?.'
'Yes.'
'If
you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct; we are the
inheritors. Do you understand that you are alone? You are outside history, you
are non-existent.' His manner changed and he said more harshly: 'And you
consider yourself morally superior to us, with our lies and our cruelty?'
'Yes,
I consider myself superior.'
O'Brien
did not speak. Two other voices were speaking. After a moment Winston
recognized one of them as his own. It was a sound-track of the conversation he
had had with O'Brien, on the night when he had enrolled himself in the
Brotherhood. He heard himself promising to lie, to steal, to forge, to murder,
to encourage drug-taking and prostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases,
to throw vitriol in a child's face. O'Brien made a small impatient gesture, as
though to say that the demonstration was hardly worth making. Then he turned a
switch and the voices stopped.
'Get
up from that bed,' he said.
The
bonds had loosened themselves. Winston lowered himself to the floor and stood
up unsteadily.
'You
are the last man,' said O'Brien. 'You are the guardian of the human spirit. You
shall see yourself as you are. Take off your clothes.'
Winston
undid the bit of string that held his overalls together. The zip fastener had
long since been wrenched out of them. He could not remember whether at any time
since his arrest he had taken off all his clothes at one time. Beneath the
overalls his body was looped with filthy yellowish rags, just recognizable as
the remnants of underclothes. As he slid them to the ground he saw that there
was a three-sided mirror at the far end of the room. He approached it, then
stopped short. An involuntary cry had broken out of him.
'Go
on,' said O'Brien. 'Stand between the wings of the mirror. You shall see the
side view as well.'
He
had stopped because he was frightened. A bowed, grey-coloured, skeletonlike
thing was coming towards him. Its actual appearance was frightening, and not
merely the fact that he knew it to be himself. He moved closer to the glass.
The creature's face seemed to be protruded, because of its bent carriage. A
forlorn, jailbird's face with a nobby forehead running back into a bald scalp,
a crooked nose, and battered-looking cheekbones above which his eyes were
fierce and watchful. The cheeks were seamed, the mouth had a drawn-in look. Certainly
it was his own face, but it seemed to him that it had changed more than he had
changed inside. The emotions it registered would be different from the ones he
felt. He had gone partially bald. For the first moment he had thought that he
had gone grey as well, but it was only the scalp that was grey. Except for his
hands and a circle of his face, his body was grey all over with ancient,
ingrained dirt. Here and there under the dirt there were the red scars of
wounds, and near the ankle the varicose ulcer was an inflamed mass with flakes
of skin peeling off it. But the truly frightening thing was the emaciation of
his body. The barrel of the ribs was as narrow as that of a skeleton: the legs
had shrunk so that the knees were thicker than the thighs. He saw now what
O'Brien had meant about seeing the side view. The curvature of the spine was
astonishing. The thin shoulders were hunched forward so as to make a cavity of
the chest, the scraggy neck seemed to be bending double under the weight of the
skull. At a guess he would have said that it was the body of a man of sixty,
suffering from some malignant disease.
'You
have thought sometimes,' said O'Brien, 'that my face — the face of a member of
the Inner Party — looks old and worn. What do you think of your own face?'
He
seized Winston's shoulder and spun him round so that he was facing him.
'Look
at the condition you are in!' he said. 'Look at this filthy grime all over your
body. Look at the dirt between your toes. Look at that disgusting running sore
on your leg. Do you know that you stink like a goat? Probably you have ceased
to notice it. Look at your emaciation. Do you see? I can make my thumb and
forefinger meet round your bicep. I could snap your neck like a carrot. Do you
know that you have lost twenty-five kilograms since you have been in our hands?
Even your hair is coming out in handfuls. Look!' He plucked at Winston's head
and brought away a tuft of hair. 'Open your mouth. Nine, ten, eleven teeth
left. How many had you when you came to us? And the few you have left are
dropping out of your head. Look here!'
He
seized one of Winston's remaining front teeth between his powerful thumb and
forefinger. A twinge of pain shot through Winston's jaw. O'Brien had wrenched
the loose tooth out by the roots. He tossed it across the cell.
'You
are rotting away,' he said; 'you are falling to pieces. What are you? A bag of
filth. Now turn around and look into that mirror again. Do you see that thing
facing you? That is the last man. If you are human, that is humanity. Now put
your clothes on again.'
Winston
began to dress himself with slow stiff movements. Until now he had not seemed
to notice how thin and weak he was. Only one thought stirred in his mind: that
he must have been in this place longer than he had imagined. Then suddenly as
he fixed the miserable rags round himself a feeling of pity for his ruined body
overcame him. Before he knew what he was doing he had collapsed on to a small
stool that stood beside the bed and burst into tears. He was aware of his
ugliness, his gracelessness, a bundle of bones in filthy underclothes sitting
weeping in the harsh white light: but he could not stop himself. O'Brien laid a
hand on his shoulder, almost kindly.
'It
will not last for ever,' he said. 'You can escape from it whenever you choose.
Everything depends on yourself.'
'You
did it!' sobbed Winston. 'You reduced me to this state.'
'No,
Winston, you reduced yourself to it. This is what you accepted when you set
yourself up against the Party. It was all contained in that first act. Nothing
has happened that you did not foresee.'
He
paused, and then went on:
'We
have beaten you, Winston. We have broken you up. You have seen what your body
is like. Your mind is in the same state. I do not think there can be much pride
left in you. You have been kicked and flogged and insulted, you have screamed
with pain, you have rolled on the floor in your own blood and vomit. You have
whimpered for mercy, you have betrayed everybody and everything. Can you think
of a single degradation that has not happened to you?'
Winston
had stopped weeping, though the tears were still oozing out of his eyes. He
looked up at O'Brien.
'I
have not betrayed Julia,' he said.
O'Brien
looked down at him thoughtfully. 'No,' he said; 'no; that is perfectly true.
You have not betrayed Julia.'
The
peculiar reverence for O'Brien, which nothing seemed able to destroy, flooded
Winston's heart again. How intelligent, he thought, how intelligent! Never did
O'Brien fail to understand what was said to him. Anyone else on earth would
have answered promptly that he had betrayed Julia. For what was there that they
had not screwed out of him under the torture? He had told them everything he knew
about her, her habits, her character, her past life; he had confessed in the
most trivial detail everything that had happened at their meetings, all that he
had said to her and she to him, their black-market meals, their adulteries,
their vague plottings against the Party — everything. And yet, in the sense in
which he intended the word, he had not betrayed her. He had not stopped loving
her; his feelings towards her had remained the same. O'Brien had seen what he
meant without the need for explanation.
'Tell
me,' he said, 'how soon will they shoot me?'
'It
might be a long time,' said O'Brien. 'You are a difficult case. But don't give
up hope. Everyone is cured sooner or later. In the end we shall shoot you.'
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