Yes, this is the key here-- Winston must be seen by the public to be genuinely ‘rehabilitated’, so the Party is not creating a martyr. But it’s just for show. However successful their brainwashing may have been to make Winston love Big Brother, who’s to say the brainwashing would last? He’s damaged goods.
I’m of the camp that at the end of the novel a bullet was definitely in Winston’s very near future.
My headcanon — and that’s all it is — is that there was an actual person that they propagandized the hell out of: wise and strong, stern but benevolent, a tireless protector and a manly man with a manly mustache. And that marketing campaign went over great!
And then he died, and they figured, hey, why publicize that he’s now dead? Why ever publicize that he died? Why not just keep on keeping on?
Unlike you, I was sure the ending meant he was executed. Which struck me, at the age of 17, as a waste of time and effort. Why go to all the trouble of “fixing” Smith only to throw him away. How can the average person be manipulated if no one knows what happened? In other words, “what good is a doomsday device if you keep it a secret?”
As I got older, I learned from the Soviet Union and Argentina and etc etc etc that they don’t actually care about the expense, and that it is incredibly easy to find cruel people willing to do the dirty work for nothing at all.
The one thing I still think Orwell ignored is the Proles. He handwaved away the majority of people as NPCs. The outer party and inner party are a relatively small subset of the population. They may not have the power to overthrow the party, but in some ways I think they lead freer lives than Smith el al. You can’t watch everyone.
And speaking of, the number of people watching the telescreens for non acceptable behavior must themselves be monitored, as must those watchers. Pretty soon its watchers all the way down.
The optiminst in me thinks the war isn’t real, and that Oceana is just North Korea. Keep the flow of information restricted and no one need know, The privation isn’t because of the war, it’s because they actually have nothing.
What I’ve heard said about both books is:
“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.”
Don’t know where Fahrenheit 451 fits in there.
I think both books are considered prophetic because they both extrapolate flaws in human societies that have been true, probably since the first human societies. To function properly, any society needs to be a balance of individual needs vs common good, order vs freedom, work vs play, tradition vs progression, etc. Taking any of these traits to their extreme leads to a dystopia.
I feel Orwell’s intent in avoiding a happy ending was to warn against complacency. He was worried about the attitude some people had of figuring they could sit back and fix anything once it became a problem. In this specific case, the reasoning would be “If the government ever does become a dictatorship, we’ll rise up and overthrow it.”
Orwell was saying that some things can’t be fixed once they’re broken. If a government like Oceania was allowed to establish itself, it could never be overthrown. So if people wanted to avoid living under a totalitarian dictatorship, they had to fight against it before the totalitarian dictatorship took control. Orwell was telling his readers in 1948 not to end up in 1984.
This relates to one of my few complaints about the 1984 movie: BB as depicted looks more like a Civil Service IV clerk at the DMV.
Honestly, when I first read the novel, it didn’t even occur to me that Big Brother wouldn’t be a dead ringer for Joseph Stalin.
As I was reading your full quote, I was thinking about Bradburry, even before you broght it up. I was putting Fahrenheit 451 in the Huxley camp. People have rooms where all the walls were video; “interactive” TV; etc. Then I thought about the firemen - tasked with burning books.
I’m thinking Bradburry is in the middle, but more towards Huxley than Orwell.
How did O’Brien know that Winston is terrified of rats? No mystery to it, no mind-reading involved. One time in the love nest with Julia, he saw a rat and freaked out; they talked about his terror of rats; Julia promised to bring stuff to bung up the rat’s hole.
This is in the love nest, with the concealed telescreen. (Revealed when they’re arrested.)
Remember: Big Brother is watching you. Always…
Even if he had never given a hint about his terrible fear of rats prior to his arrest, remember, Winston was “interrogated” for months—months of torture, drugs administered, deprivations and degradations of every kind. He barely recognized whether he was awake or unconscious in any given moment.
I have no doubt that those guys would find out anyone’s “worst thing in the world.” I bet they were really good at it.
I once wrote a parody of 1984 (mercifully unpublished) in which the premise was that they adapted it on the cheap by Public Broadcasting. So in the morning routine, the fund-raising host with the tote bags can chide “You – Smith, Winston – you’re not giving enough! I know you have enough to pledge $50 a week!”
And on the walls are posters reading Big Bird is Watching You.
It has those ping pong ball eyes staring directly at you.
Yeah, I also interpreted Fahrenheit 451 falling into the same camp as Huxley along with other works like Logan’s Run, Zardoz, and Idiocracy. A world that has become (or perhaps manipulated to become) willfully vapid, ignorant and hedonistic.
I’m following along and glad there is still some discourse to be had now that the last adult on earth to read 1984 did so in 2024.
Not to distract from the conversation here, but I’m queueing up my next classic of this genre and am torn between Farenheit 451 and Brave New World. I found Orwells prose very easy to digest, are F451 and BNW similar in style? Looks like F451 is much shorter. Which should I do next?
Although Orwell treats the proles much like the members of Huxley’s Brave New World - kept politically inactive by the prolefeed of televised distractions, sports, cheap booze and pornography in abundance. The essence of how the government of Oceania in 1984 works that the proles need little real supervision - any attempt to rouse the proles to action would founder on the sheer numbers of people needed to make it a real threat, at which point any of the instigators could be co-opted and liquidated.
The Outer Party, on the other hand, is where the threat to the Inner Party’s domination comes, so they require much more monitoring and correction. As another commenter said, it’s watchers all the way down - which leaves little time for the material needs of the Party and the demands of the war.
Also - the quote was from Neil Postman, was is not?
Definitely Brave New World. Both are excellent books, but BNW is most often compared and contrasted with 1984, so I think you’ll enjoy reading them back to back.
This sounds pretty definitive so I’ll go with BNW. Thanks!
Definitely F451. BNW has better name recognition, but the dystopian society is harder to believe. Plus, it was written earlier, and the style is a little stiff. Haven’t read it in a long long time, so YMMV, but I have read F451 in the last 10 years, and was amazed at how prophetic it was.
Anthony Burgess wrote his 1985, which reads as an endorsement of coming Thatcherism written on the condition that he could include a minor, no longer relevant denouncement of Oswald Mosley.
Is that the implication?
If it’s meant to be an in-universe text — rather than just the author explaining stuff about a work of fiction to us — then, sure, I can of course see the argument that it means Newspeak didn’t wind up really catching on after 1984 in the way the Inner Party had hoped: among other things, that’s why it’s written not in Newspeak, but in pretty much the same language that people throughout the book speak. But: what’s the argument that it also means Big Brother has passed into history? Isn’t the entire point of the book that the whole Big-Brother-Inner-Party-Outer-Party-Proles arrangement is perfectly capable of grinding up Winston and Julia and so on in a setting where most people talk like Oldspeak Brits most of the time? If so, what rules out Big Brother still being the order of the day in a world where most people still talk like Oldspeak Brits most of the time?
(That said, consider the aside in the Appendix about how “for example, the Records Department, in which Winston Smith worked, was called Recdep”. That makes perfect sense if the author of the book is addressing us; after all, we’ve just been reading about Winston Smith. But why the heck would an in-universe writer so namecheck Winston Smith?)
I remember reading something that compared Newspeak to telegram abbreviations using an exchange between a writer and his editor over a battle that ended up not happening:
Writer: No war
Editor: No war No Job
Writer: Take job. Upstick asswise