Nineteen Eighty-Four/Recap

Warning: Spoilers Ahead

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."

Winston Smith, a seasoned member of the Outer Party, is also a secret rebel -- although since his dreams of defiance are the mundane ones typical of the common man, they apparently haven't yet been discovered. What finally drives him over the edge into becoming the hero of our story is his constant, instinctive feeling that there must be more to life than the uniformly dull and dreary present and the nightmarish future. If the Party can constantly reshape the collective memory, including your very existence, on an ever-changing whim...what meaning is there in anything? As the novel opens, Winston commits a decisive act of thoughtcrime: writing all of this down in a secret diary.

His heresy next expands to take in a boldly attractive, down-to-earth young woman named Julia, who one day passes him a note that changes his life: I love you. Sexually eager and shrewd in all the small day-to-day methods of rebellion, she joins him on secret trysts in an upstairs room he rents from what he thinks is a nice old pawnbroker. For a few months the lovers meet and live like a heartbreakingly teenage-like couple.

Partly through Julia's influence and partly out of his own fierce longing, Winston dares to hold on to the belief that the Party can somehow be toppled. The major hope lies in the Brotherhood, a rumored underground organization seeking to overthrow Big Brother. Winston's golden opportunity seems to come in the form of O'Brien, an extremely powerful member of the Inner Party who through various subtle signals to Winston appears to be harboring rebellious thoughts of his own. Alas, it's only a cruel delusion: soon after Winston and Julia believe they have enlisted in the Brotherhood through O'Brien, it is revealed that the Party had known of their defection all along. They are arrested by the Thought Police and sent to the Ministry of Love.

Winston is imprisoned for weeks and then tortured by O'Brien, whose only loyalty turns out to be to the Party, into believing that two plus two make five and that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, because Big Brother says so. Gradually Winston becomes the perfect Big Brother devotee -- on the outside at least; but still clinging desperately to the hope that "they can't get inside you." That spark is smashed out from him once and for all by a scarring visit to the dreaded Room 101, where his worst fear is cruelly used against him. He betrays Julia, and with that relinquishes the last of his humanity. After his public confession and release, while awaiting his inevitable execution, Winston realizes that he loves Big Brother.