• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Again the story begins when its hero, Winston Smith, whose daily task is to play a tiny part in the Party's incessant rewriting of history, finds himself questioning this totalitarian power which claims sway over every aspect of the world he lives in. It purports to be wholly benign, under the fatherly guidance of Big Brother, `full of power and mysterious calm' ('My Saviour' shouts one woman when she sees him on the telescreen). All evil and darkness in the world is concentrated in the figure of the shadowy traitor Goldstein and in the country's external enemies. But Winston becomes increasingly aware that the whole system is built on lies, a total dark inversion of the truth. He then surreptitiously meets and falls in love with the heroine, Julia, whom he had initially assumed was a fanatical Party member, but who then becomes a brave, loving anima-figure, much more practical and ingenious than himself in knowing how to evade the Party's controls. Their secret commitment to each other is their ultimate act of disobedience to the regime, and as they are drawn ever further into opposition to all it stands for, they come to believe that a seemingly wise, powerful member of the `Inner Party, O'Brien, is secretly sympathetic to their beliefs. O'Brien encourages them in this, and gives them a book which explains how the Party is in fact `dark' and Goldstein `light.

It seems they are on the edge of an astonishing, life-giving revelation. But suddenly Winston and Julia are arrested, prisoners of the all-seeing Party. Like Job when brought face to face with God, or Marx and the Savage in their interview with the World Controller, they are confronted by O'Brien himself, who turns out to be a senior member of the Thought Police. In the cells of the Ministry of Love O'Brien crushes Winston by physical torture and shows him how the Party is more all-powerful and all-seeing than he had ever imagined. For years he tells Winston:

`I have watched over you. Now the turning point has come. I shall save you. I shall make you perfect.'

O'Brien tells Smith he has:

`failed in humility ... you would not make the act of submission ... you believe that reality is something objective, external ... but reality exists only in the human mind.'

The aim is to `cure' a man of such illusions:

`We convert him ... we burn all evil and illusion out of him ... we bring him over to our side ... heart and soul.'

Winston asks whether Big Brother will ever die. `Of course not. By now, like job, he has been physically reduced to a rotting `bag of filth. He accuses O'Brien of having done this to him. `No Winston, you reduced yourself to it. This is what you accepted when you set yourself up against the Party'. Although Winston now accepts Big Brother's authority, he still hates him. The time has come for the final ordeal. `It is not enough to obey Big Brother', says O'Brien, `you must love him.' Winston must be exposed to that which he fears most in all the world ('he was standing in front of a wall of darkness, and on the other side of was something unendurable, something too dreadful to be faced'). The nature of this ordeal, because it is so profoundly personal, is for each victim different. In Winston's case, it is the sight of giant, ravenous rats ready to gnaw his face. He shouts out that they should do it to Julia rather than himself. He has committed the ultimate betrayal. He has disowned his anima. He has submitted to the universal Dark Power. He can be released, to live out his days for a short time as a broken figure, in a kind of limbo. One day he meets Julia. She too has betrayed him and is a broken ghost. Winston waits for the unknown day when he will be summoned to be shot. In the meantime, he feels himself at one with the Party and all it stands for. As the story ends, `he had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother'.

The Dark Self

In an earlier chapter, `Going Nowhere, we looked at one way in which twentiethcentury storytelling reflected the