1984 by George Orwell

George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece 1984, published in June 1949, was written in the shadow of World War II and the rise of totalitarian regimes in Stalin’s Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Drawing on his firsthand experiences fighting fascism in the Spanish Civil War and his growing alarm at the erosion of truth and individual liberty under authoritarian rule, Orwell (the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair) created a nightmarish vision of a near-future superstate called Oceania, where the Party, led by the omnipresent figurehead Big Brother, maintains absolute power through constant surveillance, propaganda, historical revisionism, and the systematic destruction of language and thought. Centered on the quiet rebellion of a low-level bureaucrat named Winston Smith who works in the Ministry of Truth rewriting the past to suit the regime’s narrative, the novel introduced enduring concepts such as Newspeak, doublethink, thoughtcrime, and the telescreen—tools of control that have since entered the cultural lexicon as shorthand for government overreach, censorship, and the manipulation of reality. Widely hailed upon release as both a literary triumph and a stark political warning, 1984 remains one of the most influential novels of the twentieth century, its relevance only sharpened by subsequent decades of technological surveillance and ideological extremism.

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Transcript

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1984 by George Orwell. Winston Smith, a thin man of thirty-nine with a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, pushed open the glass doors of Victory Mansions and climbed the seven flights of stairs to his flat. The lift, like most things in London, Airstrip one, was out of order more often than not. On the wall opposite the lift poster with the enormous face of Big Brother gazed down at him from every landing, the eyes following him as he moved. Inside the flat the telescreen was always on, pouring forth a ceaseless babble of music, news, and propaganda. It could receive as well as transmit, and any sound Winston made above a very low whisper would be picked up. It was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston's job was in the record department of the Ministry of Truth. The Ministry of Truth, Min True and You Speak, was a vast pyramidal building of glittering white concrete that soared 300 meters into the air. On its face, three slogans of the party were inscribed in elegant lettering. War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength. Inside its labyrinthine corridors, Winston spent his days correcting the past. When the party altered his alliances or production figures, Winston and his colleagues rewrote the old newspapers and documents so that the record would always show that the party had been right. Today he was altering a speech by Big Brother that had praised the wrong person for an invention that had never happened. He dropped the corrected slips into the pneumatic tube and watched them disappear. At lunch in a canteen, he sat with his fellow workers. Parsons, a cheerful fat man from the next cubicle, was collecting subscriptions for Hate Week. Syme, a small dark man from a research department, was enthusiastically describing the new edition of the Newspeak Dictionary. It's a beautiful thing, Syme said. The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought. In the end, we should make thought crime literally impossible. Winston felt a chill of recognition. He himself had begun to commit thought crime. That evening, alone in his flat, he took out a thick notebook with a marble cover that he had bought from a junk shop in a proletarian district. On the first page, in small shaky handwriting, he wrote, April fourth, nineteen eighty-four. He did not know whether it was nineteen eighty-four. The date was uncertain because the party changed history daily. But he wrote it anyway. He wrote about a film he had seen the night before, about the two minutes hate that morning, when the image of Emmanuel Goldstein, the enemy of the people, had appeared on every telescreen and the entire audience had screamed with hatred. He wrote about a girl from the fiction department who had brushed against him the corridor and whose very existence filled him with vague dread. He stopped writing, aware that the telescreen might be watching and hid the book in a drawer. The next day, during the two minutes hate, the dark haired girl from the fiction department sat a few rows ahead of him. She turned and looked straight at him with a strange intensity. Winston felt a sudden panic. Was she a thought police spy? Days passed. He saw her again and again. Once she fell and hurt her arm, he helped her up and she pressed a small piece of paper into his hand. When he was alone he read it. I love you. The word struck him like a blow. He arranged a meeting in the crowded streets where conversation was impossible. Then another in the countryside beyond the city. There, among the bluebells, she told him her name was Julia. She hated the party as much as he did. She had had many lovers. She was expert at deception. They made love violently, joylessly, because the act itself was a political gesture against the party. Afterwards they returned separately to London. They began to meet in a room above Mr. Charrington's junk shop in the Pearl District. The room had no telescreen, an extraordinary luxury. An old fashioned double bed stood in one corner. A twelve hour clock with a face that set the time in ordinary figures ticked on the mantelpiece. Mr. Charrington, an elderly man with mild blue eyes, seemed harmless. Winston and Julia met theirs often as they dared. They ate real chocolate and real coffee that Julia obtained through the black market. They read the forbidden book that O'Brien had given them. Emmanuel Goldstein's A Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism. The book explained that the three superstates, Oceania, Eurasia, and East Asia, were deliberately kept in a state of permanent but limited war so that their economies could be devoted to weapons rather than consumer goods, keeping the masses poor and ignorant. It described how the party maintained power by breaking the link between past and future, by controlling thought itself. Winston read the book aloud to Julia while she slept in his arms. O'Brien, a high official of the inner party whom Winston had long suspected of being secretly opposed to the regime, had once spoken in the corridor and given him his address. One evening Winston and Julia went to O'Brien's luxurious flat. He received them courteously, switched off the telescreen, and admitted he was a member of the Brotherhood, the underground resistance led by Goldstein. He gave them the book and asked if they were willing to commit any crime in the service of the revolution. They said yes. O'Brien pour them wine and proposed a toast to the past. Then he sent them away with instructions to wait for further contact. A week later the blow fell. Winston and Julia were arrested in the room above the shop. Mr Charrington, it turned out, was a member of the Thought Police. They were taken separately to the Ministry of Love. Winston was placed in a cell with no windows. The lights were never turned off. He was beaten, starred, and questioned endlessly. He confessed everything they wanted, spying for Eurasia, sabotage, murder, anything to stop the pain. But the real interrogation came later from O'Brien himself. O'Brien was not a rebel. He was a faithful servant of the party. He explained to Winston that the party did not seek power for his own sake. It sought power absolutely and forever. If you want to picture the future, O'Brien said, Imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever. He showed Winston that two plus two could equal five if the party willed it. He destroyed Winston's memories, his sense of reality. He forced him to look at his own emaciated body in a mirror, and then made him deny what he saw. Winston learned that the party could make a man believe anything. The worst was yet to come. O'Brien knew Winston's deepest fear, rats. In room one hundred one a cage was brought forward containing enormous starving rats. The mask was fitted to Winston's face. He could smell the rats, feel their whiskers. In that moment of utter terror he screamed, Do it to Julia. Do it to Julia. Not me, Julia. The cage was withdrawn. He had betrayed her. Time passed, weeks, months, he could not tell. He was released into the outside world again. He sat in the chestnut tree cafe, a place where defeated party members went to drink gin that tasted a clothes and to wait for the bullet that would one day come. His mind was empty. He had been reeducated. He met Julia once in the park. She too had been broken. They spoke briefly and coldly. Each knew the other had betrayed them. There was nothing left between them. One day the telescreen announced a great victory on the Malabar Front. Winston looked up at the portrait of Big Brother on the wall. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother. Tears filled his eyes as the voice on the telescreen continued its triumphant announcements. Outside, in the streets of London, the proles went about their lives, singing their tuneless songs, unaware of the vast machinery that controlled them. In the ministries the endless work of rewriting the past went on, and somewhere, far away, the war continued. Three superstates locked in a dance of hatred, each claiming victory while the bombs fell and the telescreens blared and Big Brother watched. Winston Smith was back at his desk in the Ministry of Truth. He no longer kept a diary. He no longer thought dangerous thoughts. When the telescreen instructed him to raise his hands for the physical jerks, he obeyed without hesitation. When the two minutes hate began, he shouted with the loudest of them. He had become one with the party. The struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.