Interesting. What do you mean? How was he happy?
He loves Big Brother.
He’s free of the doubt and fear he used to have. He imagines that he’s confessed to everything and is being granted the execution that he believes he deserves, but instead Big Brother has shown mercy. Everything is clear to him now and there’s nothing to worry about - all he has to do is trust in Big Brother. From our perspective it’s a sad ending because the state has truly crushed his soul, but Winston is happy.
Had to resort to Link+ to request it from the library (sorry, not paying $30 for a paperback from Amazon when I haven’t read the book to find out if I think it’s worth that much to me).
Good move.
I think we had to wait another decade for the Internet before our screens and phones monitored everything we did and told us what to do.
I think that’s one of the scariest things about AI. Not that we are going to create Skynet and Matrices but that people will just be listening to some black box telling them what to do without really knowing how or why it makes the decisions it makes or on whose behalf.
I don’t recall that it was specifically explained, but I don’t think it needed to be. The state observed your every move, reaction and utterance, even when you were alone. Their torture methods meant you could keep nothing secret.
I had no trouble believing that identifying your “worst thing in the world” was a particular talent for them.
Also, for what it’s worth:
Y’know, if a torturer/interrogator mentions stuff that you don’t remember saying, and your memories aren’t continuous because of the blank interval you’re mentally swimming up from when you note the syringe in the hands of a man in a white lab coat standing next to said torturer/interrogator, it’s not impossible that you did some stream-of-consciousness rambling while drugged; it’s not a sure thing, there are other ways to explain it, but you could argue that it’s the least bad explanation…
See also: the ending of Brazil.
On another note, it has been pointed out that the ending of 1984 isn’t the ending - the glossary is, with its implication that the world of Big Brother and Newspeak has passed into history at the time of writing.
The Party learned not to execute an enemy of the Party-- that’s how martyrs are created. So the Party brainwashes them until they truly love the Party, then puts a bullet in their brain.
It’s been awhile since I read the novel, but I remember a scene early on in which Winston is in the local cafe and he sees a trio of former enemies of the Party, who quietly sit at a table drinking until the Party comes and takes them away, and they go willingly, even happily.
Winston sitting in the cafe at the very end, realizing he now loves Big Brother, is the novel coming full circle; he is now in the same position as the trio of former Party enemies. Winston will soon willingly be taken away to be shot just like they had been. At least that’s how I interpreted the ending.
Even before the internet, advertisers and marketers already kept vast analogue databases of people, and could pretty accurately predict one’s interests, needs, level of education, etc. from what zip code they lived in. Now of course they’re only getting levels of magnitude better at it.
I’ve often thought that Orwell was eerily prescient, except that Big Brother is an advertiser, not a dictator. But of course with situations like Cambridge Analytica helping the trump administration get elected back in 2016, Big Brother can be both.
You’re probably referring to the 1956 movie, of which I know little. But I can say that the 1984 movie that actually came out in 1984 is very well made, true to the novel and has what seems to me like a very accurate gritty, grim look and feel to it. I highly recommend it.
I think that’s exactly right. In fact, it’s the only interpretation I think makes sense. The criminal must be rehabilitated, he must be seen to be rehabilitated, and then there’s no further use for him.
Does Big Brother exist? There isn’t an actual person, is there?
I read this in 2005, by the way. I thought it was stunningly great, one of the books that lives up to its reputation.
“Does Big Brother exist in the same sense that you and I exist?”
“You don’t exist.”
I was in college in 1984. We did our own stage version of 1984. The director noticed that one of the original Mouseketeers was Cubby O’Brien. Yes, in our version, Big Brother was Walt Disney. Winston was afraid of mice. Everyone wore blue t-shirts with their name on it, and mouse ears. Everything else fell into place.
A bit of movie trivia - John Hurt who played Winston in the 1984 film later played the very “Big Brother”-esq Adam Sutler in V for Vendetta.
I didn’t even know there was a movie.
More specifically, I was pretty sure at least one movie has been made based on the novel, but before this thread I couldn’t have told you how many, or when, or who was in them, or anything else about them. So in my case at least, I don’t have any movie-influenced perceptions of characters or settings from the book.
Yes! This is addresses my poorly worded question. I do realize that he was still alive at the last sentence but I interpreted the preceding passage (quoted in an earlier post) to imply that his time had come to be put down and him admitting he loved Big Brother was the cue for that to happen.
Thanks for writing what I was thinking!
So I suppose my earlier question of “Was Winston shot at the end?” Is better phrased as “Was Winston shot immediately after the end?”
In the movie (available on Amazon Prime) it ends with Julia and Winston meeting in the cafe and not caring about anything besides Big Brother. Whether or not Winston is eventually executed is moot IMHO as Big Brother has succeeded in eliminating any competing feelings.
At the end of the book, at least, I think it is implied, if not made explicit, that a bullet is in Winston’s very near future. He may be ‘rehabilitated’, but he’s still damaged goods.
Why shoot Winston? Once he’s been brainwashed, he’s no longer a threat. He’s educted, so he’s still useful. I never thought he was about to be executed. The real horror isn’t that you’ll be killed – it’s that you’ll be absorbed.
I, too, never thought of the world of 1984 as high tech. It’s described as falling down and patched together, so I assume it’s pretty much that way for most people. Party officials get well-put-together things and quality food, but why waste effort on the rest of the population? Especially when you can tell them their sacrifices are part of the perpetual War Effort.
That’s the society of 1984 – Do no more than necessary, keep everyone in a constant state of alarm about possible attack, and don’t give them time to get into any mischief. Upper crust keeps the good stuff for themselves. It’s a very different dystopian vision that Huxley’s Brave New World, where the powers-that-be maintain their control without war and deprivation by keeping the lower classes happy, drugged, abnd sated without crative or inquisitive outlets, and tailoring the capbilities of the classes to their requirements. If you only need an epsilon minus semi-moron for a repetitive, thoughtless task, that’s what you breed for the part, and you fill his/her downtime with pointless and thoughtless diversions and Soma. No threat of an insurrection.
The version actually made in 1984 starred John Hurt as Winston Smith, in large part because he looked like George Orwell. Plus, he’s good at “downtrodden hero” roles. They actually filmed it in London during the stretch of time the novel nominally takes place – they were able to find plenty of decrepit and falling-down locations that were appropriate.
The 1950s version with Edmund O’Brien made the society a little too glitzy, with fancy memory holes, but it’s really low tech. I think they figured it was “the future”, so some of it had to look futuristic. There’s a persistent story that there are two endings – an American one and a British one. The former follows the book, while the latter supposedly has a resisting Smith dying in a hail of bullets. I can’t find any evidence that this supposed alternate version exists. It seems to be a myth, like the supposed two endings to the original King Kong vs. Godzilla, in which Kong triumphs in one and Godzilla in the other.
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