Interestingly enough, you can make a case for Winston being a Christ-like figure. He is tortured, dies (metaphorically) and is reborn. He is weak. He is human. He is sad and his existence is pathetic. I think that is mostly the point. I think he really didn’t have the courage to truly rebel until the girl pushed him to it. He felt he wanted to do something, but couldn’t get it up to do so until he had the “wild” sex thing go on.
Winston isn’t so much a heroic figure as he is an everyman portrayal. He is the common man trapped in the hell of a controlling society.
Now, for grins read Brave New World and compare how right, in different ways, Orwell and Huxley were in that long ago time. I feel they understood the nature of people and societies better than any writer ever did.
I reread this a few days ago and I was definitely impressed with just how common Orwell wrote Winston Smith, and how depressing he allowed the ending to be. A lesser writer would have sold out the ending and let Winston rebel a little in his heart, but the way Smith’s “brokenness” is depicted is so final and complete. There’s no hope here. Maybe that’s why the OP doesn’t like it, because we’re trained to believe that good things happen to fictional characters and a hopeless ending leaves a bad taste in your mouth. And that just means that the book is working.
And, duh, the book wasn’t about The Left or communism (or at least, not just communism), it was about authoritarianism. I am always dismayed when people see this as an anti-commie novel. You have to be doing some serious doublethinking not to see the parallels between Oceanic society and current American society (and I don’t just mean Bush II, but all authoritarian presidents, which is pretty much all of them).
The thing is, totalitarian society turns everyone into cowards and collaborators. If you aren’t willing to go along, if you try to stand up for yourself you get squashed. Take Winston’s grabbing the chocolate. If he hadn’t taken the chocolate he probably would have starved to death. His mother allowed him to take the chocolate, sacrificing herself. She died. Anyone who isn’t willing to grab the chocolate, who isn’t willing to rat on his neighbor, who isn’t willing to shut up and do their job, gets destroyed.
Totalitarian regimes require everyone to commit crimes in order to survive. The force people to realize that they are just as bad as the powerful…the powerful kill, murder and enslave, but the common people must do the same on a petty level. Winston can’t fight back with all his strength because the compromises he’s had to make in order to survive have destroyed his self-worth. He doesn’t really believe he’s entitled to freedom, and when the take him off for re-education he’s already half convinced he deserves it.
What I always found the most fascination part of 1984 is the enormous amount of effort that is expended on a single, rather small-fry little rebel.
Why would they? It’s not to get information out of him, as he doesn’t know anything important and they know it. It’s not to set an example for others, because while everybody knows that it’s a bad idea to get on the Ministry of Love’s enemies list, the details of what goes on in there are not made public.
It’s not to turn Winston back into a productive member of society either, because it is made quite clear at the end of the book that after he has been tortured into submission, they don’t really care much about him anymore. Het gets a busy-work job, but nothing worth going through all that trouble for.
So, why didn’t O’Brien just shoot both of them during their first meeting, and be done with it? Simple sadism could be an explanation, but it’s a bit weak for the creation of an entire government branch with carefully designed procedures.
Apparently, then, getting Winston back into the fold is an end in itself. Even a single individual rebelling against the Party cannot be tolerated. That individual must be brought back into line before being destroyed, even after you have already made sure that he can never influence anybody else.
For all its evilness, 1948’s brand of totalitarianism really is an ideology, and its leaders believe in that ideology just as fanatically, and as sincerely, as any other ideologue. That’s the really scary part of the novel, even scarier than the rats.
To me Winston Smith isn’t a coward at all, he’s a nice, friendly, gentle, boy (I think he would have allowed me to call him a boy, cause I am now almost 40 and I still see myself pretty much as a girl), I hate it when people try to portray him as a coward, he really was not, yes is’t true he suffered enormously from the truncheon, but one must carry in mind that he also suffered from a bad health (varicose ulcer, easily tired), from the moment he started with the thoughtcrime, he knew he was dead, he carried on, he wanted his society to change for the better, but couldn’t achieve that (nobody in that state could have achieved that!), he was honest with his thoughts, . . .
Smith is not a hero or a villain, Smith is the everyman. Smith is what everyone really is behind internet tough guy bluster, sitting in their Mansion pontificating about how they wouldn’t steal the chocolate or turn their back on their family.
Have you seen Brazil? It is an adaptation to film that really nails Smith’s character.
In my opinion, Winston Smith is a hero, the best that that society could produce. Its a cautionary tale that once totalitarianism takes hold there’s no way to escape it. It grinds everyone down. So a weak ineffectual hero is all we get.
And, what is more, the governmental control is so extensive that even weak ineffectual heroes are perceived as threats and removed. Living a life of quiet desperation isn’t even safe, if someone (possibly your own child) reports you to the Thought Police because they think desperation is thoughtcrime.
Of course, I figure in time Oceania will rot and collapse, because they’ll have killed off all the intelligent people needed to maintain the surveillance and weapons, and the infrastructure will crumble away with nobody capable of rebuilding it.
Wishful thinking. Orwell was a committed socialist till his dying day. He was warning against totalitarianism, whether rightist/fascist or leftist/communist.
That was Orwell’s big mistake - he thought that the enemy of totalitarianism was human strength. Subsequent history has taught us that these regimes are brought down by human weakness - corruption, apathy, inefficiency and good old fasioned incompetance.
Of course, he had no way of knowing that at the time.
Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. … The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. … How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?
Winston thought. ‘By making him suffer,’ he said.
'Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.
Or environmental degradation will destroy them, or they’ll run out of resources without discovering alternatives and everything will collapse from that. A society like theirs is good at control but bad at problem solving; people don’t dare point problems out, much less try to solve them. Nor is it good at science. And a leadership that thinks that they can just declare reality to be what they want is going to refuse to acknowledge all sorts of problems until disaster is upon them.
I read 1984 only recently, sort of glad I didn’t pick it up when I was 18 - a mesmerising and depressing read. I was wondering what do people make of the sequence where Smith is being tortured by O’Brien and it is clear that O’Brien can read his thoughts? I don’t have a copy to hand, but I’m sure there were a few examples where O’Brien explicitly reacts to things Smith is thinking / or has knowledge that cannot be easily explained (like the photo or newspaper cutting Smith destroyed years ago).
I wondered if Orwell meant it as a more metaphorical piece illustrating the party’s total and absolute control, or if it was written literally and illustrates Smith being drugged / not lucid and not thinking straight.
