My take on 1984's Winston Smith

Most reviews that I have read of the novel paint Smith as a tragic hero, “the last man in Europe” who valiantly tried and failed to rebel against Big Brother. But having read the novel this is not the impression I get. What I get is that Smith was a weak contemptable fool whose fall was inevitable. My take on the character is that Smith is the prototypical “liberal idiot”, long on idealism and short on cajones, and perhaps even a whipping boy for Orwell’s own disillusionment with socialism and the political left.

For starters, it can be argued that Smith was broken not in a Ministry of Love torture cell but decades eariler. When he and his mother and baby sister are struggling to survive in the chaos of the civil war, he lets hunger turn him into a starving animal. He steals their last bar of chocolate and then runs away, leaving his family presumably to die either of starvation or at the hands of the revolutionaries. Smith turned his back on the love of his family then to save himself.

Decades later as an adult, Smith works for the Ministry of Truth. Despite all his ruminating and lamenting the fact that history is no longer reliable and the truth impossible to obtain, Smith actually helps the party continually falsify the records. He even takes personal pride in a tricky job well done. Now it can be argued that Smith had little choice- resigning from the Outer Party would be suicidal-; and perhaps falsifying records that are already garbage isn’t much of a sellout. But that Smith hangs onto the pathetic Oceanic equivalent of a middle-class existence despite his supposed hatred for what it stands for is at best hypocritical and at worst collabaration.

Then Smith tries his hand at “fighting the power”. Supposedly being recruited into the “Brotherhood” by O’Brien, he vows to do anything to overthrow the Party. Including:

“commit murder”; “commit acts of sabotage which may cause the deaths of hundreds of innocent people”; “betray your country to a foreign power”; “to cheat, to forge, to blackmail, to corrupt the minds of children, to distribute habit-forming drugs, to encourage prostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases”; “to throw sulphuric acid in a chid’s face”.

What Smith isn’t asked is, “would you give up your last chocolate bar to someone else and starve to death?”; “would you stick your face in a cagefull of hungry rats?”; “Would you accept being slowly beaten to death?”. One gets the feeling that Smith might not have been able to say yes to those.

And speaking of being beaten: Smith is, at bottom, a coward. He has no physical courage at all. About to be arrested by the Thought Police, he forgoes even a futile attempt at escape because:

“One thing alone mattered: to keep still, to keep still and not give them an excuse to hit you!”

After having previously sworn to commit suicide if necessary to protect the “Brotherhood”, Smith reflects that:

“Everything came back to his sick body, which shrank trembling from the smallest pain. He was not certain that he would use the razor blade even if he got the chance. It was more natural to exist from moment to moment, accepting another ten minute’s life even with the certainty that there was torture at the end of it”.

And when he finally does take a truncheon blow:

“The elbow! He had slumped to his knees, almost paralyzed, clasping the stricken elbow with his other hand. Everything had exploded into yellow light. Inconceivable, inconceivable that one blow could cause such pain! The light cleared and he could see the other two looking down at him. The guard was laughing at his contortions. One question at any rate was answered. Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase of pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there were no heroes, no heroes, he thought over and over as he writhed on the floor, clutching uselessly at his disabled left arm”.

Even though Smith consoles himself with the thought that everyone gives in, no one holds out, yet it is impossible to avoid the impression that O’Brien, Inner Party member and Smith’s torturer, really would do anything that Big Brother demanded of him, including dying by torture without a sound in an Eastasian torture cell. Or for that matter, even the stupid oxlike Proles endure an existence of grueling physical labor that would kill Smith in a month. The distinguishing mark of an Outer Party member, it seems, is an absolute lack of courage.

In summary, whatever else O’Brien might claim, one thing seems true: Winston Smith’s rebellion against Big Brother was a shallow and hypocritical one.

Why do you hate Eurasia?

I give your report a B for effort, but a D- overall.

Because Oceania is at war with Eurasia. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.

But, no, Lumpy, I agree with you. Smith isn’t particularly heroic, and that’s the point of the novel.

There’s a trivial inconsistancy on the suicide issue, in that Winston reflects on its difficulty in a society where weapons are hard to acquire, yet there is also in the narrative a description of the towers of the four ministries, and how all could be seen from the roof of Victory Flats (Winston’s apartment building), which is at least seven stories tall. The suggestion is that if Winston wanted to off himself, he could take a dive.

Absolutely true. That’s sorta the point. The horror of 1984 is not the totalitarianism or the doublethink themselves. It’s the absolute loss of individual human dignity required to survive in the State. We know the State is evil because any minor show of personal volition or choice is met with terrible consequences. It’s not that Smith lives in a bad place – everybody lives in a place that could be better. But there is no way Smith or anyone else is ever going to make things better for himself or for society, because there’s no freedom. Your analysis is flawed in that it condemns Smith for being cowardly and self-interested. But humans are cowardly and self-interested. There is nothing wrong with being cowardly and self-interested. But the State uses that to strip everything else away from us as well. This is why 1984 is effective as a cautionary tale (or at least one hopes). Because the reader of the novel is no hero either – he (you, I, whoever) is just a guy, same as Smith. And what 1984 shows us is that this is what will happen to all of us if we don’t prevent the State from taking that kind of control now, when we still claim to hold liberty dear.

–Cliffy

To me, the very ordinariness of Winston Smith is one of the most striking things about the book. He isn’t some big, bold hero, nor was he meant to be. He’s a weaselly little nebbish like most of us.

The point of the book was just as you described it. I think your real beef, if any, is with the critics and blurb writers who tried to cast (sell?) it as a heroic story.

I think your analysis of Smith as a ‘liberal idiot’ is based on your own prejudices/observations and not those of Orwell.

As folks have said, Winston didn’t ‘lack cajones’ because he was liberal, but because he was human. Nor, in the context of Orwell’s future does Smith seem bizarrely idealistic. Orwell wants us most definitely to believe that 1984s world is a horrible one, and it definitely is. Faulting Smith for feeling the same way is really not fair.

The first sentence of Anthony Burgess’s response to 1984, 1985, is, “1984 is a comic book.” (That is, it is a joke, not that it’s a graphic novel.)

Smith apparently is meant to be contemptible.

This is kind of a hijack, but I do have a question about the book.

Did anyone else get the impression that Julia was a member of the Thought Police?

O’Brien says he’s been playing a game with Winston for years, so unless he was lying, he had been watching Winston for longer than he had been with Julia. It seems odd that in this society where you can’t trust anyone that she would suddenly come from nowhere and start up this relationship with him.

So my hypothesis is that O’Brien knew Winston was guilty of Thought Crime and put the events in motion to crush him by the end of the book.

Naw, I think O’Brien was playing mind games. Rememeber the key to that society is the paranoia that you were always under the scrutiny of someon else. You never knew when you were being monitored by the viewscreen so you had to play it safe and assume you were always watched. O’Brien was just reinforcing that illusion.

Julia’s reaction to him when she saw him again after the events gave me the impression that she too had undergone treatment.

What I always found interesting is that the Proles were given as much freedom as they were. True they were cowed by other means, subpar entertainment, alcohol and porn, but they didn’t seem to notice how screwed up the rest of Oceana was. I may be mistaken but wouldn’t the best place to be in that society is in the Prole quarters.

I can’t believe the Inner party members weren’t monitoring each other to keep their realatively cushy positions.

It’s been a while since I read 1984, but IIRC it’s stated that any proles that display traits The Party finds even a tiny bit threatening are culled.

Nope. One of the slogans was “Proles and animals are free.” There were Party agents among the Proles spreading false rumours and occassionally eliminating dangerous individuals, but the impression I had was that these individuals would have to have serious political potential (i.e. a possible trade unionist or a Howark Roark type) for the Party to care enough to take them out.

Another (slight) hijack:

1984 was published in 1948. Was the novel a big hit in the late 1940s/1950s? Or has the book become more popular over time?

I think you are misinterpreting the “proles and animals are free” slogan. That slogan wasn’t aimed at the proles, it was for the outer party members. The proles were controlled by different means than the outer party members, but they were controlled.
As time permits, I must re-read.

Ithink you’re misinterpreting my post. The proles were under some controls, but not the relentless surveillance bestowed on individual Party members, nor were they casually “disappeared” for trivial offences. Note Winston’s diary entry about the violent newsreel and the prole woman who loudly objected. She was ejected from the theatre, but Winston didn’t expect anything would happen to her because “nobody” cared what proles did.

Winston is, at best, an unreliable source of information for how the system works. Like everybody else in his society, he knows only what his government wants him to know and that information itself is demonstrably unreliable.
Did something happen to the proletariot woman from the theater? Winston not thinking so in unconvincing; he was wrong about so many other things.

From Chapter 7

Note also the difference between “polits” and common criminals in the cells at the Ministry of Love. The prole prisoners treat it like a drunk tank, while former Party members mostly sit in quiet terror.

As a minor correction, the 1984 euphamism for someone arbitrarily arrested and executed is “vaporized”, not “disappeared”, as I stated earlier.