The chapter

In London, on a bright, cold April day, the clocks strike thirteen. Winston Smith, a thin, tired man of thirty-nine, comes home for lunch to Victory Mansions, a shabby block of flats. The lift is broken, so he climbs seven flights slowly, resting because of a sore ulcer above his ankle. On every landing a huge poster shows a man's face with a black mustache. The caption warns that Big Brother is watching you. Inside his flat a telescreen talks about factory figures. It is a metal screen on the wall that both sends and receives. It can see and hear him, and it can be turned down but never off.

From his window Winston sees a grey, bombed, rotting city. Posters are everywhere. A police helicopter peers into windows, but the real danger is the Thought Police. He can't remember if London was always like this. In the distance stands his workplace, the Ministry of Truth, a giant white pyramid. Its face shows the Party's three slogans, which pair opposites: war with peace, freedom with slavery, ignorance with strength. Three other huge ministries run the country, which is called Oceania. The worst is the Ministry of Love, which has no windows and is ringed by guards and wire.

Winston gulps a cup of harsh Victory Gin. Then he sits in an alcove where the telescreen can hear him but can't see him. He takes out a beautiful old blank book he bought secretly in a junk shop. He is about to start a diary. Nothing is technically illegal, since there are no laws. But if he is caught, he will probably be killed or sent to a labour camp for twenty-five years. He writes the date, April 4th, 1984, then realises he isn't even sure of the year. He wonders who he is writing for. At first he scribbles a messy account of a war film where an audience laughed at refugees being killed.

As he writes, a memory from that morning comes back. At work, everyone gathered for the Two Minutes Hate. Two people came in. One was a bold, dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department, wearing the red sash of the Junior Anti-Sex League. Winston dislikes and fears her. The other was O'Brien, a powerful member of the Inner Party, whom Winston feels drawn to. On the screen appeared Emmanuel Goldstein, the Party's great traitor and enemy, said to lead a secret group called the Brotherhood. The crowd went wild with rage. Winston found himself shouting too, though his hatred kept swinging between Goldstein, the girl and Big Brother himself. The girl threw a dictionary at the screen. At the end, everyone chanted for Big Brother.

Then, for a split second, Winston's eyes met O'Brien's. He felt sure O'Brien thought exactly as he did and was on his side. Back in the present, Winston looks down and finds he has written a forbidden line against Big Brother, over and over, filling half a page. He knows the Thought Police will get him anyway. His real crime is in his head, called thoughtcrime. People who are caught simply vanish in the night. He scrawls that he doesn't care if they shoot him. Then someone knocks at the door.

The chapter

Back in Winston's flat in Victory Mansions, the knocking continues. As he reaches the door, Winston realises he has left the diary lying open. His forbidden words are big enough to read across the room. He opens the door, terrified. But it is only Mrs. Parsons, a tired, faded neighbour from his floor. Her kitchen sink is blocked and her husband, Tom, is out. Winston feels a wave of relief and follows her down the passage. The building is old and falling apart, and repairs take years, so neighbours often fix things themselves.

The Parsons' flat is messy and smells of sweat. Tom Parsons works with Winston at the Ministry of Truth. He is cheerful, keen and very stupid. He loves committees, hikes and Party activities, and he never questions anything. Winston thinks people like him keep the Party strong. While Winston pulls a clump of hair out of the pipe, the two Parsons children burst in. Both wear the uniform of the Spies, a Party youth group. The boy, about nine, points a toy gun at Winston. He calls him a traitor and a thought-criminal and threatens to vaporize him. His little sister copies him. They are angry because they can't go to see some enemy prisoners being hanged in the park that evening. As Winston leaves, the boy hits him hard on the neck with a catapult shot. Winston notices how frightened Mrs. Parsons looks.

At home again, Winston thinks the poor woman must live in terror of her own children. The Party trains children to adore it and to spy on adults. The Times newspaper often praises a child who reports their own parents to the Thought Police. Then Winston thinks of O'Brien again. About seven years ago he dreamed he was walking through a dark room. Someone said, quietly, that they would meet one day in a place with no darkness. Winston has come to believe the voice was O'Brien's. He still can't tell if O'Brien is friend or enemy, but feels a bond between them anyway.

The telescreen announces a great victory against the Eurasian army in South India. Winston expects bad news to follow, and it does: next week the chocolate ration will drop from thirty grams to twenty. A rocket bomb explodes somewhere far away. Winston feels completely alone. The Party's slogans and Big Brother's face are everywhere, even on coins. The only private space left is inside your own head. He wonders again who will ever read his diary. Probably only the Thought Police, before they erase it and him.

Still, he takes heart. Staying sane, he decides, matters even if nobody hears him. He writes a greeting to a future or past time when thought is free and truth exists. He also writes that thoughtcrime doesn't lead to death; it already is death. Since he now counts himself a dead man, he wants to stay alive as long as he can. He scrubs the ink off his fingers in case someone at work notices. Then he puts the diary away and places a tiny grain of dust on its cover. If anyone moves the book, the dust will fall off and he will know.

The chapter

The next morning, in his flat in London, Winston is dreaming of his mother. She disappeared when he was ten or eleven. His father vanished too, probably in one of the first great purges, or mass arrests, of the Fifties. In the dream his mother holds his baby sister. They are deep below him, as if in a sinking ship, looking up at him through dark green water. He knows they are dying so that he can live, and they know it too, without blaming him. He can't remember what really happened. But he feels his mother died loving him while he was too young and selfish to love her back. He thinks this kind of deep, private sorrow is no longer possible. Today there is only fear, hatred and pain.

The dream changes. He stands in a sunny old meadow he often dreams of and calls the Golden Country. The dark-haired girl from work walks toward him and throws off her clothes in one careless movement. What moves him is not her body but the freedom of the gesture. It seems to sweep away Big Brother and the whole Party. He wakes saying the word Shakespeare.

At 7:15 a loud whistle from the telescreen wakes the office workers. Winston, who sleeps naked because pyjamas cost too many clothing coupons, has a terrible coughing fit. Then a fit, bossy woman on the screen leads the morning exercises, called the Physical Jerks. As he swings his arms, Winston tries to remember his childhood. It's very hard, because there are no records to check. Back then the country was called England or Britain, not Airstrip One. He remembers an air raid, his father hurrying him down a deep spiral stair into a Tube station. There a drunk old man wept for someone he had lost and kept saying they should never have trusted someone. Winston can't remember who.

Since then, war has never stopped, but the enemy has changed. Right now Oceania is at war with Eurasia and allied with Eastasia. Winston knows that only four years ago it was the other way round. Officially, though, that never happened. The enemy now has always been the enemy. What frightens Winston most is that the Party can reach into the past and simply declare that something never happened. If all records agree and everyone accepts the lie, the lie becomes the truth. A Party slogan says that whoever controls the past controls the future, and whoever controls the present controls the past. The trick of believing this is called doublethink. It means holding two opposite ideas at once, believing both, and forgetting that you have done so.

Winston also can't remember when he first heard of Big Brother. Party history now says Big Brother led the Revolution from the start. It also claims the Party invented aeroplanes, which Winston knows is false. He recalls that once in his life he held real proof that history had been faked. Then the instructor shouts his name and number, 6079 Smith W, and tells him to bend lower. He breaks into a hot sweat but keeps his face blank. She reminds them of the soldiers at the front. With a huge effort, Winston touches his toes for the first time in years.

The chapter

This chapter shows Winston at his job in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth. He sits in a small cubicle with a speakwrite and three openings in the walls. Two are tubes that bring him messages and newspapers. The third is a slot called a memory hole. Anything dropped into a memory hole is blown away to hidden furnaces and burned. There are thousands of these slots all over the building.

This morning Winston gets four short messages written in office shorthand. Each tells him to correct an old issue of the Times newspaper. In one, Big Brother predicted the wrong place for an enemy attack, so Winston rewrites the speech to make him predict the right one. In another, he changes old production forecasts to match the real figures. In a third, the Ministry of Plenty had promised the chocolate ration would not be cut in 1984. Winston replaces the promise with a warning that a cut may come in April. He sends off his corrections and burns his notes. Once all the changes are in, the paper is reprinted and the original destroyed. The same thing happens to books, films, photos and posters. The past is rewritten again and again, so the Party is always right and no proof of the changes survives.

Winston thinks it isn't even really forgery, just swapping one piece of nonsense for another. The figures were invented in the first place. On paper, millions of boots are made each quarter, while perhaps half the people of Oceania go barefoot. Across the hall, a small, secretive man named Tillotson works on something and glares at Winston. Nobody talks about their work. The sandy-haired woman next door spends her days deleting the names of vaporized people from the records. Her own husband was vaporized two years ago. A dreamy man named Ampleforth rewrites old poems the Party dislikes. Beyond them, huge departments fake photos, make cheap newspapers, novels and songs for the proles, and even produce pornography by machine.

After the Two Minutes Hate, Winston turns to his favourite kind of task: a tricky, skilled forgery. An old article praised a Comrade Withers, an Inner Party member, for his work with a group that sent comforts to sailors. Since then, the group has been shut down with no reason given. The message says the article mentions unpersons. That tells Winston that Withers is dead and must now never have existed. Winston doesn't know why. About thirty people he knew personally have disappeared over the years.

Winston decides to change the speech to a completely different subject. He invents Comrade Ogilvy, a perfect young Party hero who died bravely in battle. In Big Brother's familiar style, he writes Ogilvy's life story. As a child he wanted only war toys and reported his own uncle to the Thought Police. As a young man he designed a deadly grenade and lived a pure, joyless life. He died leaping into the sea with secret papers to keep them from the enemy. Winston suspects Tillotson is writing a rival version, but feels sure his own will be chosen. He finds it strange that you can create dead men, but not living ones. Ogilvy now exists in the past as firmly as any real person.

The chapter

At lunchtime, in the crowded underground canteen of the Ministry of Truth, Winston queues for food. His acquaintance Syme finds him. Syme is a tiny man with big, mocking eyes who works on the new Newspeak dictionary. He asks for razor blades, which are impossible to find. Winston lies and says he has none, though he is secretly saving two. Syme asks if Winston saw the prisoners hanged yesterday. Winston says he was working. Syme happily describes the hanging in gruesome detail. They collect their grey stew, bread, cheese, bitter coffee and a mug of gin, and sit under a telescreen.

Winston gets Syme talking about his work. Syme explains, with real passion, that Newspeak is not mainly about inventing words. It is about destroying them. Why have bad when you can say ungood? Why have excellent when plusgood or doubleplusgood will do? The aim is to shrink the language until disloyal thoughts become impossible, because no words will exist to think them. By 2050, he says, nobody will understand the kind of conversation they are having now. Winston nearly says the proles will, but stops himself. Syme says the proles aren't really human anyway. Old writers like Shakespeare will survive only in twisted Newspeak versions. Winston silently feels sure Syme will one day be vaporized. He is too clever and says things too plainly.

At the next table a man from the Fiction Department talks nonstop, his glasses turning his eyes into blank discs. His words blur into a stream of loyal noise. Syme says Newspeak has a word for this, duckspeak, meaning to quack like a duck. It is praise for a friend and an insult for an enemy. Then Tom Parsons arrives, sweaty and cheerful. He collects two dollars from Winston for Hate Week flags. He proudly reports that his seven-year-old daughter followed a stranger for two hours and handed him to the patrols, just because his shoes looked odd. He mimes the man being shot.

The telescreen announces that living standards have risen by twenty per cent. People are said to be thanking Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grams. Winston knows that only yesterday it was cut to twenty from thirty. Everyone else seems to swallow it. He wonders if he is the only one who remembers. He looks around at the dirty canteen, the ugly food and the shabby people. He feels that life wasn't always meant to be like this. He even thinks he can tell who will be vaporized: Syme, Mrs. Parsons, O'Brien and himself. Parsons, the quacking man and the dark-haired girl will survive.

Suddenly Winston sees the dark-haired girl at the next table, staring at him. She looks away at once. Terror runs through him. She sat behind him at the Hate too, and he wonders if she is spying on him. Even a wrong look on your face can be a crime, called facecrime. Parsons chats on about how his children set fire to an old woman's skirt for wrapping sausages in a Big Brother poster. A whistle sends everyone back to work, and the last tobacco falls out of Winston's cigarette.

The chapter

This short chapter takes place at Winston's diary, in his flat. He is forcing himself to write down a shameful memory from three years ago. One dark evening, near a big railway station, he met a prostitute standing in a doorway. Her face was thickly painted white, with bright red lips. Party women never wear make-up, and that was what drew him. There were no telescreens in the street. She asked for two dollars. Winston stops, unable to go on. He wants to shout filthy words or smash something to blot the memory out.

He reminds himself that your own body can betray you. He remembers a stranger in the street, a Party member, whose face kept twitching. Winston thought the man was doomed. The worst danger of all is talking in your sleep, which nobody can guard against. He keeps writing. The woman led him down into a basement kitchen with a bed and a dim lamp. The cheap perfume and dirt of the room bring his wife to mind.

Winston is married to Katharine, or was. As far as he knows, she isn't dead. They split up about eleven years ago after about fifteen months together. The Party doesn't allow divorce but encourages couples without children to separate. Going with prostitutes is against the rules and could mean five years in a labour camp. But the Party quietly puts up with it, as long as it is secret, joyless and involves only prole women. What it truly forbids is love or desire between Party members. Marriages need a committee's approval, which is refused if the couple seem attracted to each other. Marriage exists only to make children for the Party. The Junior Anti-Sex League even says nobody should have sex at all. Winston believes the Party is trying to kill or spoil people's natural desire, and that with women it has mostly succeeded.

Katharine was tall and fair, with a fine face but, Winston felt, nothing behind it. Every thought she had was a slogan, so he privately nicknamed her the human sound track. Worse, she went stiff as wood whenever he touched her. Yet she insisted they keep trying for a baby, once a week, as their duty to the Party. She would even remind him in the morning. Winston came to dread it. No child came, and in the end they parted.

Winston returns to the diary. He wonders why he can't have a woman of his own instead of these rare, dirty, secret meetings. He thinks Party women have all been trained since childhood to be cold and pure. What he longs for, more than love, is to break that wall just once. To him, desire itself is a kind of rebellion, a thoughtcrime. Then he writes the end of the story. When he turned up the lamp, he saw that the woman was old, at least fifty, with streaks of grey hair. Her mouth hung open and she had no teeth at all. He went ahead anyway. Having finally written it down brings no relief. He still wants to shout.

The chapter

Back at his diary in his flat, Winston writes that any hope must lie with the proles. They make up eighty-five per cent of Oceania's people. Rebels inside the Party can't even find each other. But the proles, if they ever realised their strength, could simply rise up and crush the Party. Yet they never do. Winston remembers hearing hundreds of women let out a huge, angry cry in a street. He thought a riot had begun. It turned out a market stall had run out of tin saucepans. Two women fought over one pan until its handle came off. Why, he wonders, can't they shout like that about something that matters?

The Party says it freed the proles from cruel rich bosses before the Revolution. At the same time it treats them like animals to be kept in line. Proles work young, marry at twenty, age by thirty and fill their lives with work, football, beer and gambling. Most have no telescreens. The Thought Police quietly remove any prole who seems dangerous. Otherwise they are left alone and allowed freedoms Party members don't have, such as divorce. Winston copies out part of a children's history book borrowed from Mrs. Parsons. It describes old London as a miserable place ruled by fat capitalists in top hats. Winston can't tell how much is true. Life now is mostly drab, shabby and empty, nothing like the shining world the Party claims.

Winston then remembers the one time he held real proof of a lie. In the mid-Sixties, the Party's original leaders were wiped out in great purges. Among the last were three men, Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford. They were arrested around 1965, confessed to terrible crimes, including meeting the enemy, and were then released. Winston once saw them sitting silently in the Chestnut Tree Café. Rutherford, once a famous cartoonist, now looked like a crumbling mountain. A strange, mocking song played on the telescreen about people selling each other out under a chestnut tree. Rutherford's eyes filled with tears. Winston noticed that two of the men had broken noses. Soon after, all three were rearrested, confessed again and were executed.

About five years later, in 1973, a torn half-page of an old Times slid onto Winston's desk by mistake. It showed the three men at a Party event in New York on the very day they had confessed to being in Siberia meeting the enemy. The confessions were lies. Terrified, Winston covered the photo, waited about ten minutes, then dropped it into the memory hole. Today, he thinks, he would probably have kept it.

Even so, the past keeps changing, and the photo might no longer prove anything. Winston writes that he understands how the Party rewrites the past, but not why. He wonders if he is mad, since he may be alone in believing the past can't be changed. He fears the Party will one day declare that two and two make five, and people will have to believe it. Worse, they might be right. Then O'Brien's face comes to mind. Winston feels surer than ever that O'Brien is on his side, and decides he is writing the diary to him. Holding on to simple truths, he writes that freedom means being able to say two plus two make four.

The chapter

On a warm April evening, Winston skips the Community Center for the second time in three weeks. That is risky, because attendance is checked and wanting to be alone is suspicious. Newspeak even has a word for it, ownlife. He wanders into the prole slums of north London. The streets are crowded with people, and nobody there wears Party overalls. Suddenly people shout a warning and dive into doorways. A rocket bomb, which the proles call a steamer, explodes nearby. Winston, covered in glass, finds a severed hand in the rubble and kicks it into the gutter. A few streets on, life carries on as if nothing happened. Two men argue fiercely about the Lottery, the one thing the proles really care about. Winston knows the big prizes are mostly fake.

Near the junk shop where he bought his diary, Winston sees a very old man go into a pub. He realises the man must remember life before the Revolution. On a wild impulse he follows him in. The room goes quiet at the sight of his blue overalls. The old man is complaining that the barman won't serve him a pint, an old measure nobody uses now. Winston buys him beer and asks him questions. Was life better or worse back then? Did rich men in top hats rule everyone? The old man remembers only scraps. He wore a hired top hat to a funeral, a drunk gentleman once shoved him, and beer used to be cheaper. Winston realises that soon no one will be able to say whether life has improved. Without real memories or honest records, the Party's claims can never be tested.

Soon Winston is outside the junk shop, though he swore never to return. He goes in. The owner, a gentle old man in a velvet jacket, remembers him. Winston buys a heavy glass paperweight with a piece of pink coral inside, for four dollars. He loves it because it seems to come from another age. The owner shows him an upstairs room with a big bed, an old clock and a fireplace. There is no telescreen. Winston imagines how safe it would feel to sit there alone. The owner points out an old picture of a ruined church and teaches him part of a children's rhyme about the bells of London churches. His name is Mr. Charrington, a sixty-three-year-old widower. Winston decides he will come back in a month or so.

Humming the rhyme, Winston steps out carelessly. There, a few metres away, is the dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department. She looks straight at him, then walks on. Now he is sure she is spying on him. He even thinks of chasing her and killing her with a cobblestone or the paperweight, but he is too weak and sick with fear.

At home after ten, he drinks gin and sits with his closed diary. They always come at night, he thinks. In a crisis, he believes, your own body fails you. He pictures the beatings and confessions that come before death. He tries to think of O'Brien and the place with no darkness, which he now takes to mean an imagined future. But Big Brother's face pushes O'Brien aside. Winston looks at a coin, and the Party's three slogans come back to him.

The chapter

At the Ministry of Truth, four days after the evening outside the junk shop, Winston walks down a long corridor in the middle of the morning. The dark-haired girl comes toward him. Her right arm is in a sling. A few metres away she trips and falls on the hurt arm with a cry. Winston feels her pain as if it were his own and helps her up. In those few seconds she presses a small folded paper into his hand. They are standing right in front of a telescreen, so he keeps his face blank. She thanks him and walks off.

Back at his desk, he waits eight agonising minutes before reading it. He expects a threat or a trap from the Thought Police. Secretly he hopes it comes from an underground group, maybe the Brotherhood. The note says simply "I love you." He is stunned. He drops it in the memory hole, but only after reading it twice. For the rest of the day he struggles to hide his excitement. Parsons chatters at lunch about a huge paper model of Big Brother's head for Hate Week. That evening Winston goes to the Community Center without complaint, because he suddenly wants very much to stay alive.

In bed, in the dark, he plans. He no longer thinks she is setting a trap, because she was so plainly frightened. He cannot visit her department, follow her home or write, since all letters are opened. The canteen is the only chance. For a week it goes badly. She comes late, then sits under a telescreen, then vanishes for three days. Winston is in agony, imagining she has been vaporized or has changed her mind. When she returns, a silly young man named Wilsher calls him over just as he reaches her table. The next day a beetle-like little man heads for her table, but trips and spills his tray. Winston sits down with her.

Without looking up, eating thin bean stew, they whisper. She leaves work at eighteen-thirty. They will meet at nineteen hours in Victory Square, near Big Brother's monument, but only once there is a crowd. Ampleforth, the poet, wanders past without noticing them.

In the square she arrives late. Then a convoy of Eurasian prisoners rolls through, and everyone rushes to look. Winston pushes through the crowd until he stands shoulder to shoulder with her. Staring straight ahead, she whispers precise directions: a train from Paddington Station on Sunday afternoon, then a road, a gate with no top bar, fields, and a dead tree with moss on it. She will get there by another route, at about fifteen hours. The prisoners in the trucks wear leg irons. Most of the crowd is simply curious. As the last truck passes, she squeezes his hand. For a few seconds he learns every detail of it. He realises he does not even know the colour of her eyes. Instead, an old prisoner's sad eyes stare back at him.

The chapter

On Sunday, the second of May, Winston walks up a country lane full of sunlight and bluebells. He has followed the girl's directions out of London by train. The carriage was packed with a cheerful prole family off to buy black-market butter. Nobody seems to have followed him. Still, the country is not truly safe, because hidden microphones could pick up a voice. While he waits, he picks a bunch of bluebells for her. A twig cracks behind him. He keeps picking, so as not to look guilty. Then a hand touches his shoulder. It is the girl.

She leads him silently through the wood to a tiny clearing ringed by thin young trees. The trees are too slim to hide a microphone, she explains. She found the spot when she got lost on a community hike. Winston feels old, dirty and pale beside her. He tells her the worst: he is thirty-nine, has a wife he cannot get rid of, bad veins and five false teeth. She does not care. They kiss, but at first he feels only disbelief. She tells him there is no hurry. Her name is Julia, and she already knows his. He admits he once hated her and thought she worked for the Thought Police. She laughs, pleased that her disguise works so well.

Julia rips off her Anti-Sex League sash and shares a piece of real, dark chocolate from the black market. Its smell stirs a painful memory in Winston that he cannot quite catch. It feels like something he did and wishes he could undo. Julia explains her act. She was a troop leader in the Spies and works for the Anti-Sex League. She always shouts with the crowd, because that is the safest way to live. She noticed something in Winston's face and knew he was against the Party. She swears freely about the Party, which surprises Winston, though he likes it.

At the edge of the wood, Winston sees a field he recognises. It is almost exactly the Golden Country from his dreams, even down to a nearby stream with fish. A thrush lands close by and sings for minutes on end. For once Winston stops thinking and simply feels. Back in the clearing, Julia throws off her clothes in one bold gesture, just as in his dream. She tells him she has done this many times with Party members. That thrills him, because any sign that the Party is rotten underneath gives him hope. She says she loves it, and that is what he wants most to hear. Plain desire, he thinks, is a force that could tear the Party apart. They make love among the fallen bluebells and then sleep for about half an hour.

Winston wakes first and watches her sleep. He still does not know her surname or where she lives. He feels tender and protective. But he reflects that no feeling can be pure any more, because everything is mixed with fear and hatred. Their lovemaking was a blow against the Party, a political act.

The chapter

Still in the clearing in the wood, Julia wakes up brisk and businesslike. They can use this spot again, she says, but not for a month or two. She gives Winston a different route home, because you should never return the way you came. She names their next meeting place, a crowded street market four evenings later. If it is safe, she will blow her nose. Then she must rush back for two hours of Anti-Sex League work. She kisses him and slips away. He still does not know her surname or address.

They never go back to the clearing. In all of May they make love only once more, in the bell tower of a ruined church out in country where an atomic bomb fell thirty years ago. Otherwise they meet in crowded streets for half an hour at most. They talk in broken bits, falling silent whenever a uniform or telescreen comes near. Julia calls this talking in instalments. Once a rocket bomb lands nearby. Winston sees her face chalk-white and thinks she is dead, but it is only plaster dust, and they kiss. Time is scarce too. Winston works sixty hours a week, Julia even more. She fills her evenings with Party activities as camouflage. Keep the small rules, she says, and you can break the big ones. She even persuades Winston to sign up for a dull weekly evening of munitions work.

In the hot, pigeon-smelly church tower, he learns about her. She is twenty-six and lives in a hostel with thirty other girls. She services the machines that write novels in the Fiction Department, and she does not care for reading. She has a spotless record, and once worked in Pornosec, which makes cheap dirty booklets for the proles. Her first affair, at sixteen, was with a sixty-year-old Party member who killed himself before he could be arrested. Her view of life is simple. You want fun, the Party wants to stop you, so you break the rules and stay alive. She does not believe the Brotherhood exists and thinks organised revolt is stupid.

Winston tells her about Katharine, and Julia guesses her phrase about duty to the Party at once. Julia explains why the Party hates sex. Happy, satisfied people do not get excited about Big Brother and hate rallies. The marching and flag-waving, she says, are just desire gone sour. Winston agrees. The Party uses families the same way, turning children into spies on their parents.

Then Winston tells a story from eleven years ago. On a community hike in Kent, he and Katharine got lost at the edge of a deep chalk quarry. Totally alone, his hand on her waist as she leaned over the cliff, a thought struck him. Julia asks why he did not push her. She would have. He says he is sorry he did not, though it would have changed nothing. In this game, he says, we cannot win, and they are already dead. Julia refuses to accept that. She feels alive and wants to stay that way. Then she scratches a map in the dust to plan their next trip to the wood.

The chapter

On a June evening, Winston waits in the shabby room above Mr. Charrington's junk shop. He has rented it. The big bed is made up, the old clock ticks, and the coral paperweight glows on the table. He boils water for Victory Coffee while he waits for Julia. He knows this is madness. A love affair is the hardest crime to hide. Mr. Charrington agreed to rent the room without fuss and seemed glad of the money. Privacy is precious, he said, and anyone who knows about it should keep quiet. He even mentioned a second, back entrance through an alley.

Below the window, a huge prole woman pegs out nappies and sings a soppy love song. Such songs are churned out for the proles by a machine, but she makes it sound lovely. Winston remembers how the room came about. Work hours grew longer before Hate Week. When the lovers finally had a free afternoon, Julia cancelled because her period had started early. Winston was angry for a moment. Then she squeezed his fingers, and he felt a new, deep tenderness. He wished they were an ordinary married couple who could walk about openly. Next day he thought of the room, and Julia agreed at once. Both know it brings them nearer to capture in the Ministry of Love.

Julia bursts in with a tool bag. Under the spanners are treasures from the Inner Party, stolen by servants: real sugar, white bread, jam, milk, tea, and a whole kilo of real coffee. She asks Winston to turn his back for three minutes. When he turns round, she has painted her face with make-up bought in a prole shop. He has never seen a Party woman wear make-up. She looks far prettier and more feminine. She is wearing scent too, the same cheap violet smell as the prostitute from his past, though now he does not care. In this room, she says, she will be a woman, not a Party comrade. They make love in the big bed, which neither has had before, and then doze.

When they wake, Julia spots a rat poking out of a hole in the skirting board and throws a shoe at it. She starts to describe rats attacking babies, and Winston begs her to stop. He goes pale. He has a recurring nightmare of standing before a wall of darkness with something unbearable behind it. Deep down he knows what it is, but he always wakes before facing it. Somehow it is linked to what Julia was saying. Julia promises to block the hole.

They drink the real coffee with sugar. Julia looks round the room and picks up the paperweight. Winston says he loves it because it is a piece of history the Party forgot to change. He recites the first line of the church-bells rhyme, and to his amazement Julia continues it. Her grandfather, who vanished when she was eight, taught her. She too knows the ending about the chopper, but not one missing line. As the room darkens, Winston gazes into the glass. It seems like a tiny world of its own, holding the room and the two of them, fixed forever.

The chapter

In London, in a baking-hot summer, Syme disappears. One morning he is missing from work. The next day nobody mentions him. On the third day Winston checks the Chess Committee list on a notice board. Nothing has been crossed out, but the list is one name shorter. Syme has ceased to exist. As far as the records go, he never existed at all.

Hate Week is coming, and everyone works overtime on parades, posters, songs and faked photographs. Julia's unit stops making novels and writes pamphlets about enemy atrocities. A savage, drum-like Hate Song plays on every telescreen. Parsons is in heaven, organising volunteers to hang banners and boasting about four hundred metres of flags. A huge new poster of a Eurasian soldier, gun pointed straight at you, covers every wall. More rocket bombs fall than usual. One kills hundreds in a cinema, another kills dozens of children in a playground. Angry crowds burn Goldstein in effigy and loot shops. A rumour spreads that spies are guiding the bombs, and an elderly couple thought to be foreign die when their house is set on fire.

The room above the shop becomes a paradise, bugs and all. Julia and Winston meet there seven times in June. Winston stops drinking gin all day. He puts on weight, his ankle ulcer heals and his morning cough stops. Just knowing the room exists is almost enough. He chats with Mr. Charrington, a ghostly old collector who shows off worthless trinkets and remembers scraps of other old rhymes. The lovers know this cannot last. Sometimes death feels close. At other times they feel safe and even permanent, as if they had climbed inside the paperweight. They daydream about escape, marriage or living as proles, but they know it is nonsense.

Sometimes they talk about rebelling. Winston tells Julia about his strange bond with O'Brien and his urge to walk up and ask for help. Julia does not find this crazy, since she judges people by their faces. But she thinks the Brotherhood and Goldstein are inventions of the Party. She has screamed for the deaths of people she never heard of, and she struggles not to laugh during the Two Minutes Hate. She even suggests the war may not be real, and that the government fires the rocket bombs itself to keep people frightened. Winston had never thought of that.

Yet she happily swallows other lies. She believes the Party invented airplanes. She has not even noticed that the enemy changed from Eastasia to Eurasia four years ago, and she does not care. When Winston tells her about the photograph of Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford, she misses the point. He explains that the past has been abolished and only an endless present remains, where the Party is always right. He dreams of small groups of resisters leaving records for the next generation. Julia says she cares only about the two of them. He teases her that she is a rebel only from the waist down, and she loves it. He realises that people who never understand the Party's ideas can accept them without harm.

The chapter

At the Ministry of Truth, the message Winston has waited for all his life finally comes. He is walking down the long corridor, close to the spot where Julia once slipped him her note. Someone larger is walking just behind him and gives a small cough. Winston turns. It is O'Brien.

Winston's first wish is to run away. His heart pounds and he cannot speak. But O'Brien rests a friendly hand on his arm and walks beside him, talking with his usual grave politeness. He says he has read one of Winston's Newspeak articles in the Times and admires how elegantly he writes it. Winston says he is only an amateur. O'Brien adds that a friend of Winston's, a real expert, agrees with him, though he cannot recall the man's name.

Winston's heart jolts. This can only mean Syme. But Syme has been erased and is now an unperson, so even hinting at him is deeply dangerous. Winston takes the remark as a deliberate signal. By sharing this small thoughtcrime, O'Brien has made the two of them partners in guilt.

O'Brien stops, resettles his spectacles in his familiar friendly way, and goes on. Winston's article used two words that have very recently gone out of use. Has he seen the tenth edition of the Newspeak dictionary? Winston says the Records Department still uses the ninth. O'Brien says a few advance copies exist and he has one. Winston could collect it from his flat. Standing right under a telescreen, where anyone watching could read it, O'Brien writes his address in a small notebook, tears out the page and hands it over. He is usually home in the evenings, he says, and if not, his servant will hand over the dictionary. Then he is gone.

The whole talk lasted two minutes at most. Winston memorises the address and later drops the paper into the memory hole. He is sure there is only one meaning. Nobody can find out where anyone lives, since there are no directories, so O'Brien has found a safe way to tell him. In effect he has said, come and see me. Perhaps there is even a hidden message in the dictionary. Winston now feels certain that the secret conspiracy he dreamed of is real, and that he has reached its outer edge.

He knows he will go, sooner or later. It feels like the next step in a journey that began years ago. First came a secret thought, then the diary. He has moved from thoughts to words, and now from words to actions. The final step, he believes, will happen in the Ministry of Love. He has accepted that. Still, he feels a chill, as if he were stepping into a damp grave that has always been waiting for him.

The chapter

In the room above Mr. Charrington's shop, Winston wakes with tears in his eyes. He has had a vast, glowing dream that took place inside the glass paperweight. At its heart was a protective gesture of his mother's arm. It was the same gesture made by a woman in a war film he once saw, shielding a little boy from bullets. He tells Julia that until now he believed he had murdered his mother. Not literally, he adds.

The dream has brought back a memory he buried for years. He was ten or twelve. His father had already vanished. Times were chaotic: air raids, rubble, gangs of youths in matching shirts, long bread queues, and never enough food. Winston scavenged in rubbish heaps with other boys. After his father disappeared, his mother became slow and spiritless, as if waiting for something she knew must happen. She spent hours nursing his tiny, sickly sister, who was two or three.

Winston was always starving and selfish. He fought for food at every meal, demanded more than his share, grabbed from his sister's plate and stole from the shelf. His mother begged him to remember his sick sister, but it was no use. One day a rare chocolate ration came, one small slab for the three of them. Winston loudly demanded all of it. After a long row, his mother gave him three quarters and his sister one quarter. Then Winston snatched his sister's piece and ran for the door. His mother called after him. She wrapped her arm round the wailing child, and something in that gesture told him his sister was dying. He fled. When hunger drove him home hours later, his mother and sister were gone. Nothing else was missing, not even her coat. He still does not know whether they are dead. Later he was sent to a home for homeless children.

Julia, half asleep, says all children are little swine, and dozes off. Winston keeps thinking. His mother was not special, but she had a kind of nobility, because her feelings were her own. Holding the dying child changed nothing, yet she did it anyway. The Party, he thinks, has taught people that feelings do not matter while taking away all power over the world. The proles have stayed loyal to each other, not to ideas. For the first time he respects them. They have stayed human. He remembers kicking the severed hand into the gutter, and says aloud that the proles are human and he and Julia are not.

He suggests they part now, to save her life. Julia refuses. Whatever he does, she will do. He warns her that once caught, they will be utterly alone and helpless. The one thing that matters is not betraying each other. Julia says everyone confesses under torture. Winston says confessing is not betrayal. The real betrayal would be if they made him stop loving her. Julia says that is the one thing they cannot do. They cannot get inside you. Winston takes comfort in this. Facts can be squeezed out of a person, he thinks, but the inner heart stays safe.

The chapter

Winston and Julia have done it. They are standing in O'Brien's long, softly lit flat, in the rich part of London where the Inner Party lives. They came by different routes and met at his door. Everything is intimidating: thick carpets, clean walls, good food smells, silent lifts and servants in white jackets. A small servant with a blank face lets them in. O'Brien, at his desk, dictates a message in Ministry jargon and looks annoyed at being disturbed. Winston suddenly fears he has made a stupid mistake. Then O'Brien flicks a switch, and the telescreen goes silent. Inner Party members, he says, have that privilege.

O'Brien asks whether he should speak first or Winston. Winston says it. They believe a secret organisation fights the Party, and that O'Brien belongs to it. They want to join. They are thought-criminals and lovers, and they put themselves at his mercy. The servant comes in with drinks. O'Brien says Martin is one of them and invites him to sit. He pours wine, which the lovers have only read about, and toasts Goldstein as their leader. Winston finds the wine disappointing. O'Brien says Goldstein is real and alive, and so is the Brotherhood.

Then O'Brien asks a list of questions. Are they ready to give their lives? To murder? To cause the deaths of innocent people, betray their country, spread disease, corrupt children, even throw acid in a child's face? To kill themselves if ordered? Winston says yes to everything. But when asked whether they would agree to part forever, Julia cries no. After a long struggle, Winston also says no. O'Brien says it is good to know. He warns Julia that surgeons might change Winston beyond recognition. Martin studies their faces so he will know them again, and leaves.

O'Brien explains how the Brotherhood works. Members fight in the dark. They obey orders without knowing why, and they know only a few other members. There are no lists, so it cannot be destroyed. It is held together only by an idea. When caught, they will confess and die, and get no help. Change may take a thousand years. They are the dead, he says, and their only real life is in the future. Winston feels something close to worship for him. O'Brien pours a second toast. Winston chooses to drink to the past. Julia leaves first, after taking a tablet to hide the wine on her breath.

Alone with Winston, O'Brien approves the room above the shop for now. He will send Goldstein's book, a rare copy the Thought Police hunt down. A message at work will contain a misprint. The next day, Winston must leave his shabby black briefcase at home. A stranger will hand him one in the street, with the book inside. He must return it within fourteen days. Winston hesitantly says they may meet again in the place where there is no darkness. O'Brien repeats the phrase as if he recognises it. Winston asks about the church-bells rhyme, and O'Brien completes it, including the missing line. As Winston leaves, O'Brien waits by the telescreen switch, ready to return to his work.

The chapter

In London, on a mild afternoon, Winston walks to Mr. Charrington's shop, weak as jelly from exhaustion. He has worked over ninety hours in five days. Here is why. On the sixth day of Hate Week, a speaker was screaming about Eurasian crimes to a huge crowd. A note was passed to him. Without stopping, he carried on in mid-sentence, but now the enemy was Eastasia. Eurasia was suddenly an ally. The crowd decided the banners showing the old enemy were sabotage by Goldstein's agents and tore them down. Then the hate went on, aimed at a new target. In the chaos a stranger handed Winston a briefcase, saying he had dropped it. Goldstein's book was inside.

The whole Ministry then rewrote years of records so the war with Eurasia had never happened. Workers slept on mattresses in the corridors. Winston worked eighteen hours a day, eager to make the forgery perfect. Now, at last, he has free time. In the room above the shop, he opens the book. It is a worn, homemade-looking volume by Emmanuel Goldstein. Its title speaks of rule by a small group that owns everything in common.

He dips into its third chapter, named after the slogan about war and peace. It says three superstates divide the world. None can conquer the others, and they barely differ. The war is fought on distant borders by few people. Its real purpose is to use up goods so ordinary people stay poor, and poor people stay ignorant and easy to rule. Scarcity also makes small privileges feel huge. A constant state of war keeps Party members fearful and full of hate. So the war is really waged by each ruling group against its own people. A permanent war, the book says, is the same as a permanent peace. Winston feels reassured. The book says what he already thought, only better.

Julia arrives after more than a week apart and shows little interest in the book. In bed, she asks him to read it aloud. He reads from Chapter 1, named after the slogan about ignorance and strength. Throughout history there have been three groups: High, Middle and Low. The Middle overthrow the High by promising the Low freedom, then become the new High. Machines made equality possible, so the new rulers set out to stop history for good. The Party owns everything as a group. Big Brother is just the face the Party shows, someone to love and fear. Below come the Inner Party, the Outer Party, and the proles, who are watched little because they are not seen as a threat. Party members are watched constantly.

The book explains the mental tricks that keep members loyal. Crimestop means stopping yourself before a dangerous thought. Blackwhite means truly believing black is white when told. Doublethink means holding two opposite beliefs and accepting both. The Party rewrites the past so it can never be wrong. Its contradictions are deliberate, such as ministries whose names mean the opposite of what they do. The book is about to explain why the Party wants all this when Winston notices that Julia is asleep. He stops. He still knows how, but not why. Yet he feels sure he is not mad. Holding on to the truth, even alone, is not madness. He falls asleep feeling safe.

The chapter

In the room above Mr. Charrington's shop, Winston wakes feeling he has slept a long time, though the clock says only half past eight in the evening. The washerwoman is singing her old song in the yard. Julia wants coffee, but the stove has run out of oil, though she was sure it was full. The room seems colder. They both get dressed.

At the window they watch the big prole woman pegging out washing. For the first time Winston thinks she is beautiful. Her body, worn by years of work and many children, seems to him like fruit after the flower. He and Julia will never have children. They can only pass on ideas, mind to mind. He thinks of people like her all over the world, kept apart by hatred and lies but all much the same. They do not think, but they store up a strength that might one day change everything. Hope lies with the proles, he decides. Without reading to the end, he feels sure that must be the book's final message. He reminds Julia of the thrush. She says it was simply singing. Birds sing, proles sing, the Party does not. Winston says they are the dead, and Julia repeats it.

A hard, iron voice behind them says that they are the dead. They spring apart, terrified. Julia whispers that it was behind the picture. The voice repeats her words and orders them not to move. The old engraving crashes to the floor, revealing a telescreen hidden behind it. The voice tells them to stand back to back with hands behind their heads. Boots trample below. The woman's singing stops. Something clangs across the yard, and someone yells in pain. Julia says they may as well say goodbye. Then a different, thin, educated voice recites the last two lines of the church-bells rhyme, the ones about a candle and a chopper.

A ladder smashes through the window. Men in black uniforms with truncheons pour into the room. Winston keeps perfectly still. One of them picks up the glass paperweight and smashes it on the hearth. The tiny piece of coral rolls across the mat, and Winston thinks how small it always was. Someone kicks his ankle. A man punches Julia in the stomach, and she doubles over, fighting for breath. Two men carry her out like a sack. Her upside-down face, still smeared with rouge, is the last he sees of her.

Winston stands frozen. Small, dull thoughts drift by. Have they caught Mr. Charrington? What happened to the woman in the yard? The clock says nine, but the light seems too bright for an August evening. Maybe they slept all night and it is really morning. Then Mr. Charrington walks in, and the men grow respectful. He sharply orders them to pick up the broken glass. His old accent is gone, and Winston realises his was the voice that recited the rhyme. His white hair is now black, his spectacles are gone, and he stands straighter. He looks about thirty-five, alert and cold. For the first time, Winston knows he is looking at a member of the Thought Police.

The chapter

Winston is in a prison cell, probably inside the Ministry of Love, though he cannot be sure. The cell is tall, with no windows, white porcelain walls and bright lights that never go off. A narrow bench runs round the walls. There is a toilet with no seat and a telescreen in each wall. His belly aches, and he has not been fed since his arrest. When he reaches into his pocket for a crumb of bread, the telescreen shouts his number at him.

Before this, he spent some hours in an ordinary, filthy lock-up. It was packed with common criminals and a few Party prisoners. The criminals shouted at the guards and did not care. The Party prisoners sat silent and terrified. A huge drunk woman, about sixty, was dumped on his lap. Her name was Smith too, and she joked that she might be his mother. Winston thought she really might be. He also overheard two women whisper about something called room one-oh-one.

Now, alone, he hardly thinks of Julia. He knows he will not betray her, but he cannot feel his love. He hopes O'Brien will send the razor blade, yet he is not sure he would use it. He realises that this lit, windowless building is the place with no darkness. That is why O'Brien seemed to recognise the phrase.

A cold-faced young officer brings in Ampleforth, the dreamy poet from Winston's department. He thinks he was arrested because he left the word God at the end of a line in a poem. He could not find another rhyme. Soon the officer comes back and says "Room 101." Ampleforth is led away, puzzled. Next comes Parsons, Winston's loud, loyal neighbour, shaking with fear. He was heard saying "Down with Big Brother" in his sleep. His seven-year-old daughter listened at the keyhole and reported him. He says he is proud of her. He hopes to get away with five or ten years in a labour camp.

More prisoners come and go. A woman turns pale at the words Room 101. A chinless man sits opposite a new prisoner whose face is like a skull, because he is starving. The chinless man, Bumstead, offers him a crust. The telescreen roars. A guard smashes Bumstead in the mouth, and his false teeth fall out. Then the officer calls the skull-faced man to Room 101. The man begs and screams. He offers to confess anything. He says they can kill his wife and children in front of him instead. He accuses Bumstead. He clings to the bench until a guard's kick breaks his fingers, then he is dragged out.

Hours later, Winston wonders whether he would double his own pain to save Julia. He decides yes, but only in his head. Then the door opens and O'Brien walks in. Winston cries out that they have got him too. O'Brien says they got him long ago, and that Winston always knew it. A guard's truncheon smashes Winston's elbow. In that pain Winston learns that you can only ever wish for pain to stop. In the face of pain, he thinks, there are no heroes.

The chapter

Winston wakes strapped flat on a high bed in the Ministry of Love. He cannot move at all, even his head. O'Brien stands over him, and a man in a white coat holds a needle. Winston has lost track of time. His memories come in broken pieces. First there were endless beatings by guards in black, until he confessed to anything. Then came Party intellectuals who questioned him for hours, twisting his words until he wept. He confessed to murders, spying for Eastasia, and even killing his wife, who is alive. In a way, he felt it was all true, because the Party sees no difference between a thought and a deed.

Through it all, he sensed O'Brien directing everything: the pain, the rest, the food, the drugs. Once a voice in his ear said O'Brien had watched over him for seven years and would make him perfect. Now O'Brien stands beside a dial numbered up to a hundred. A small move of the lever sends terrible pain through Winston's body. O'Brien explains, calmly like a teacher, that Winston is mentally ill. His memory is faulty, and he remembers things that never happened.

O'Brien shows him the photograph of Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford, the proof Winston destroyed years ago. Winston cries out that it exists. O'Brien drops it into a memory hole and says it never existed, and that he does not remember it. Winston fears O'Brien may truly have forgotten. O'Brien argues that the past lives only in records and memories, and the Party controls both. Reality exists only in the Party's mind. To be sane, Winston must humble himself and see through the Party's eyes.

Then O'Brien holds up four fingers and asks how many there are. Winston says four. The pain climbs with each answer. He shouts five, but O'Brien knows he is lying. At last Winston admits he honestly does not know, and O'Brien calls that better. A drug stops the pain, and Winston feels a deep love for O'Brien, the one person who understands him. O'Brien says the Party does not want confessions or punishment. It wants to cure him and change his mind completely. Unlike persecutors in the past, it makes no martyrs. It will reshape him, make him love Big Brother, and only then kill him. He will be erased from history and from every memory, and he will come out hollow.

A machine is clamped to Winston's head, and a painless flash blanks part of his memory. O'Brien fills the gaps with the Party's version, and for about half a minute Winston truly sees five fingers. Then O'Brien lets him ask questions. O'Brien says Julia betrayed him at once and has been completely changed. Big Brother exists and will never die. Whether the Brotherhood exists, Winston will never know. Last, Winston asks what is in Room 101. O'Brien says that everyone already knows. A needle sends Winston to sleep.

The chapter

Winston is still in the Ministry of Love, strapped to the bed, though the straps are looser now. Sessions with O'Brien have gone on for weeks, maybe. O'Brien says there are three stages to his recovery: learning, understanding and accepting. Now comes understanding. He reminds Winston of his diary line: he knew how the Party works, but not why. Then he reveals something shocking. He helped write Goldstein's book. Its description of the Party is true, he says, but its hope is nonsense. The proles will never rise up. The Party will rule forever.

So why does the Party want power? Winston guesses the answer O'Brien will give: the Party rules for the good of weak people who cannot handle freedom. Winston says this, and O'Brien punishes him with the dial for being stupid. The real answer, O'Brien says, is power for its own sake. Not money, comfort or happiness. Earlier rulers pretended they would hand power back one day. The Party knows nobody ever does. Torture exists for torture. Power exists for power.

O'Brien explains more. One person alone always dies and fails. But a person who melts completely into the Party shares its endless life and strength. Real power is power over minds. When Winston objects that the Party cannot control nature, stars or ancient fossils, O'Brien says reality exists only in the mind, and the Party controls minds. It can believe the stars are near or far, whichever suits it, by doublethink. Power means making people suffer. The Party is building a world of fear, hatred and betrayal that grows crueller over time. Love, friendship, art, science and family bonds will be destroyed. His picture of the future is a boot stamping on a human face, with no end.

Winston insists such a world cannot last, and that the spirit of humanity will defeat it. O'Brien asks whether he thinks himself a man. If so, he is the last one. He asks if Winston feels morally better than the Party. Winston says yes. O'Brien plays a recording of Winston's own voice from the night he joined the Brotherhood, promising to lie, murder and throw acid in a child's face.

Then O'Brien makes him undress before a three-sided mirror. Winston sees a bent, grey, filthy skeleton that looks sixty and sick. He has lost twenty-five kilograms. His hair falls out in tufts, and O'Brien pulls out one of his few remaining teeth. This is the last man, O'Brien says. Winston sits and weeps. O'Brien says Winston did this to himself, and that he has betrayed everyone and everything. Winston replies that he has not betrayed Julia. O'Brien agrees. Winston told them every fact about her, but he has not stopped loving her. Winston asks when they will shoot him. O'Brien says it may take a long time, but in the end they will.

The chapter

Winston is still a prisoner in the Ministry of Love, but life in his cell has become gentler. He has a mattress, a pillow and a stool. He is allowed to wash, and he has clean clothes. His leg ulcer has been treated, and his ruined teeth have been replaced with false ones. He gets three good meals a day, sometimes with meat, and even some cigarettes. Weeks or months pass. At first he just lies still and dreams happy dreams of the Golden Country, his mother, Julia and O'Brien, all sitting together in the sun.

Slowly he grows fatter and stronger. He starts to exercise by pacing the cell. He is ashamed at first that he cannot even stand on one leg, but he keeps at it until he can push himself up from the floor six times. Then his mind wakes up. With a slate and pencil he sets out to re-educate himself. He has given in. He now knows the Thought Police watched him for seven years, like a beetle under a magnifying glass. They even put back the speck of dust on his diary. They showed him photographs of himself and Julia. The Party must be right, he tells himself.

He writes Party ideas on the slate: freedom is slavery, two and two make five, and O'Brien's idea that God is power. He accepts that the past can change, that the war was always with Eastasia, and that the photograph never existed. Giving in feels easy, like turning to swim with a current instead of against it. When a sensible thought pops up, such as that O'Brien floating would only be imagined, he pushes it down. He practises crimestop: training his mind to go blank whenever a dangerous thought appears. This takes clever logic and deliberate stupidity at the same time.

He also wonders when they will shoot him. It always happens without warning, a bullet in the back of the head in a corridor. One day he drifts into a happy daydream of walking toward that bullet. The corridor turns into the Golden Country. Suddenly he hears himself crying Julia's name over and over. For a moment he feels she is inside him, and he loves her more than ever.

He is horrified. That cry shows he still hates the Party. He obeyed with his mind but kept his heart. Now he decides to hide his hatred even from himself, like a lump buried inside him. When they finally shoot him, he hopes it will burst out in the last seconds, too late for them to fix. Dying while hating them would be his freedom. He asks himself what he truly feels about Big Brother. Then O'Brien arrives with the guards. He knows Winston has been trying to deceive him. He asks what Winston feels for Big Brother. Winston says he hates him. O'Brien says obeying is not enough. Winston must love Big Brother. He sends him to Room 101.

The chapter

Winston has been taken to Room 101, deep underground in the Ministry of Love. He has always sensed roughly where he was in the building. The beatings happened below ground. His talks with O'Brien happened high up near the roof. This room is as deep as it is possible to go. It is bigger than his cells. He is strapped upright in a chair so tightly that he cannot move at all. A pad grips the back of his head and forces him to look straight ahead. In front of him are two small tables covered with green cloth.

O'Brien comes in. He reminds Winston that he once asked what is in Room 101. The answer, O'Brien says, is the worst thing in the world. It is different for each person. For some it is being buried alive, burned or drowned. For others it is something small that would not even kill them. A guard brings in a wire cage and puts it on the far table. It has a handle on top and a mask shaped like a fencing mask fixed to the front. Inside are two huge rats, kept in separate halves of the cage. For Winston, O'Brien says, the worst thing in the world is rats.

Winston understands at once what the mask is for, and he is filled with terror. He cries out that they cannot do it. O'Brien reminds him of his old nightmare: a wall of darkness with something dreadful behind it that he never dared face. It was rats. Winston begs to know what O'Brien wants him to do. O'Brien does not answer directly. He says pain alone is not always enough, but everyone has one thing they cannot endure. Giving in to it is not cowardice. It is pure instinct, like grabbing a rope when you fall.

O'Brien carries the cage to the nearer table. Winston feels utterly alone, as if in an empty sunlit desert. O'Brien explains, like a teacher, that rats eat flesh. In the poor parts of town they attack babies and dying people. He presses one lever. The mask will close over Winston's face, and a second lever will open the door. The starving rats will leap out and eat into his face. As the cage comes closer, Winston smells the rats and blacks out for a moment in panic. He comes back gripping one idea. The only way to save himself is to put another person's body between himself and the rats.

The mask is nearly on him. The wire touches his cheek, and he can see one old rat's yellow teeth. Then he understands that there is one person he can hand his punishment to. He screams over and over for them to do it to Julia instead. They can tear her face off. He does not care, as long as it is not him. He feels himself falling away into endless space, far from the rats. Then he hears a click. The cage door has shut, not opened.

The chapter

It is three in the afternoon in the Chestnut Tree Café, the café where Winston once saw Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford. Winston has been released. He sits alone at his usual corner table under a huge poster of Big Brother. Waiters fill his glass with clove-flavoured gin without being asked. They bring the chessboard and the Times. Nobody sits near him. He is fatter now, with a red, coarse face. He has plenty of money and an easy, well-paid job that means almost nothing. He listens anxiously for news from the war. Oceania is at war with Eurasia again, and the official story is that it always has been. A Eurasian army is racing south through Africa, and Oceania itself may be in danger.

He cannot keep his mind on anything for long. The smell of gin is tangled up with the smell of the rats, which he never names, even in his thoughts. He sets up a chess problem and thinks that white always wins, as if it shows good always beating evil. The telescreen warns of an important announcement at half past three. With his finger, he writes in the dust on the table that two and two make five. He thinks Julia was wrong. They could get inside you.

He remembers meeting her by chance in the Park on a bitter March day. Nobody cared about them any more. Her face was paler and she had a long scar on her forehead. Her waist was thicker and stiff. When he put his arm round her, her body felt like a corpse he once pulled from rubble. She looked at him with dislike. Then she said she had betrayed him, and he said he had betrayed her. She explained that when they threaten you with the unbearable thing, you beg them to do it to someone else, and you truly mean it. Afterwards you no longer feel the same about that person. He agreed. They said they must meet again, then drifted apart. He let a crowd separate them and hurried back to the warm café.

Now the telescreen plays a jeering note, and he seems to hear the old song about selling each other under the chestnut tree. He cries. Gin rules his days. Twice a week he sits on a pointless committee for the Newspeak dictionary, arguing about commas. A happy memory floats up: playing Snakes and Ladders with his mother and baby sister by candlelight, a month before she vanished. He pushes it away as a false memory.

A trumpet sounds. Victory! A secret fleet has struck the Eurasian army from behind, just as Winston imagined. Crowds roar outside. Winston feels a final change happen inside him. In a blissful daydream he is back in the Ministry, confessing everything, forgiven, walking down the white corridor as the long-awaited bullet enters his head. He looks up at Big Brother's face and weeps tears that smell of gin. The struggle is over. He has won the victory over himself. He loves Big Brother.

The chapter

After the story ends, the book adds a short essay called The Principles of Newspeak. It is not a story. It explains how Newspeak, the official language of Oceania, works. In 1984 nobody yet speaks only Newspeak. The Times writes its main articles in it, and Party members use more of its words every year. The plan is for Newspeak to replace ordinary English, called Oldspeak, by about 2050. The essay describes the final version, in the Eleventh Edition of the dictionary.

The purpose of Newspeak is to make rebellious thoughts impossible. If there is no word for an idea, the essay argues, people cannot think it. So the language mostly works by cutting words, not adding them. The word free still exists, but only in phrases like a dog being free from fleas. It cannot mean politically free, because that idea is meant to vanish. The vocabulary shrinks every year, and each cut counts as a success.

Newspeak words fall into three groups. The A vocabulary holds plain everyday words such as hit, run, dog and house, each with one fixed meaning. The grammar is very regular. Any word can be a noun or a verb, so think replaces thought. Adding -ful makes an adjective and -wise makes an adverb. Un- makes an opposite, so bad becomes ungood. Plus- and doubleplus- make words stronger. All past tenses end in -ed and all plurals in -s, so you get stealed and mans.

The B vocabulary holds political words, built to push the speaker toward the right attitude. They are short compounds, like goodthink, meaning loyal thinking, and crimethink, meaning thoughtcrime. A few broad words swallow whole families of ideas. Crimethink covers liberty and equality. Oldthink covers reason and objectivity. Many B words mean the opposite of what they seem: a joycamp is a forced-labour camp. Long names are clipped into short ones, like Minitrue or Recdep, Winston's Records Department. Short words carry fewer memories, so people can say them without thinking. The goal is duckspeak: correct opinions quacked out automatically, like a machine gun firing. The C vocabulary holds narrow technical words for scientists. There is no word for science itself.

Finally, the essay says that in Newspeak you could only say very crude heresy, such as Big Brother is ungood, but you could never argue for it. When Oldspeak is gone, the last link to the past will be cut. Old books could not be translated honestly. A famous passage about equal rights and the right to change a bad government could only become the single word crimethink. Great writers such as Shakespeare and Dickens are being rewritten to fit the Party's ideas. Once that work is done, the originals will be destroyed. That slow job is why the deadline for Newspeak is set as late as 2050.