回复: Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

[size=+2]HE WAS lying on something that feltlike a camp bed, except that it was higher off the ground and that hewas fixed down in some way so that he could not move. Light that seemedstronger than usual was falling on his face. O’Brien was standing athis side, looking down at him intently. At the other side of him stooda man in a white coat, holding a hypodermic syringe.Even after his eyes were open he took in his surroundings onlygradually. He had the impression of swimming up into this room fromsome quite different world, a sort of underwater world far beneath it.How long he had been down there he did not know. Since the moment whenthey arrested him he had not seen darkness or daylight. Besides, hismemories were not continuous. There had been times when consciousness,even the sort of consciousness that one has in sleep, had stopped deadand started again after a blank interval. But whether the intervalswere of days or weeks or only seconds, there was no way of knowing.
With that first blow on the elbow the nightmare had started.Later he was to realize that all that then happened was merely apreliminary, a routine interrogation to which nearly all prisoners weresubjected. There was a long range of crimes—espionage, sabotage, andthe like—to which everyone had to confess as a matter of course. Theconfession was a formality, though the torture was real. How many timeshe had been beaten, how long the beatings had continued, he could notremember. Always there were five or six men in black uniforms at himsimultaneously. Sometimes it was fists, sometimes it was truncheons,sometimes it was steel rods, sometimes it was boots. There were timeswhen he rolled about the floor, as shameless as an animal, writhing hisbody this way and that in an endless, hopeless effort to dodge thekicks, and simply inviting more and yet more kicks, in his ribs, in hisbelly, on his elbows, on his shins, in his groin, in his testicles, onthe bone at the base of his spine. There were times when it went on andon until the cruel, wicked, unforgivable thing seemed to him not thatthe guards continued to beat him but that he could not force hirnselfinto losing consciousness. There were times when his nerve so forsookhim that he began shouting for mercy even before the beating began,when the mere sight of a fist drawn back for a blow was enough to makehim pour forth a confession of real and imaginary crimes. There wereother times when he started out with the resolve of confessing nothing,when every word had to be forced out of him between gasps of pain, andthere were times when he feebly tried to compromise, when he said tohimself: ‘I will confess, but not yet. I must hold out till the painbecomes unbearable. Three more kicks, two more kicks, and then I willtell them what they want.’ Sometimes he was beaten till he could hardlystand, then flung like a sack of potatoes on to the stone floor of acell, left to recuperate for a few hours, and then taken out and beatenagain. There were also longer periods of recovery. He remembered themdimly, because they were spent chiefly in sleep or stupor. Heremembered a cell with a plank bed, a sort of shelf sticking out fromthe wall, and a tin wash-basin, and meals of hot soup and bread andsometimes coffee. He remembered a surly barber arriving to scrape hischin and crop his hair, and businesslike, unsympathetic men in whitecoats feeling his pulse, tapping his reflexes, turning up his eyelids,running harsh fingers over him in search for broken bones, and shootingneedles into his arm to make him sleep.
The beatings grew less frequent, and became mainly a threat, ahorror to which he could be sent back at any moment when his answerswere unsatisfactory. His questioners now were not ruffians in blackuniforms but Party intellectuals, little rotund men with quickmovements and flashing spectacles, who worked on him in relays overperiods which lasted—he thought, he could not be sure—ten or twelvehours at a stretch. These other questioners saw to it that he was inconstant slight pain, but it was not chiefly pain that they relied on.They slapped his face, wrung his ears. pulled his hair, made him standon one leg, refused him leave to urinate, shone glaring lights in hisface until his eyes ran with water; but the aim of this was simply tohumiliate him and destroy his power of arguing and reasoning. Theirreal weapon was the merciless questioning that went on and on, hourafter hour, tripping him up, laying traps for him, twisting everythingthat he said, convicting him at every step of lies andself-contradiction until he began weeping as much from shame as fromnervous fatigue Sometimes he would weep half a dozen times in a singlesession. Most of the time they screamed abuse at him and threatened atevery hesitation to deliver him over to the guards again; but sometimesthey would suddenly change their tune, call him comrade, appeal to himin the name of Ingsoc and Big Brother, and ask him sorrowfully whethereven now he had not enough loyalty to the Party left to make him wishto undo the evil he had done. When his nerves were in rags after hoursof questioning, even this appeal could reduce him to snivelling tears.In the end the nagging voices broke him down more completely than theboots and fists of the guards. He became simply a mouth that uttered, ahand that signed, whatever was demanded of him. His sole concern was tofind out what they wanted him to confess, and then confess it quickly,before the bullying started anew. He confessed to the assassination ofeminent Party members, the distribution of seditious pamphlets,embezzlement of public funds, sale of military secrets, sabotage ofevery kind. He confessed that he had been a spy in the pay of theEastasian government as far back as 1968. He confessed that he was areligious believer, an admirer of capitalism, and a sexual pervert. Heconfessed that he had murdered his wife, although he knew, and hisquestioners must have known, that his wife was still alive. Heconfessed that for years he had been in personal touch with Goldsteinand had been a member of an underground organization which had includedalmost every human being he had ever known. It was easier to confesseverything and implicate everybody. Besides, in a sense it was alltrue. It was true that he had been the enemy of the Party, and in theeyes of the Party there was no distinction between the thought and thedeed.
There were also memories of another kind. They stood out in hismind disconnectedly, like pictures with blackness all round them.
He was in a cell which might have been either dark or light,because he could see nothing except a pair of eyes. Near at hand somekind of instrument was ticking slowly and regularly. The eyes grewlarger and more luminous. Suddenly he floated out of his seat, divedinto the eyes, and was swallowed up.
He was strapped into a chair surrounded by dials, underdazzling lights. A man in a white coat was reading the dials. There wasa tramp of heavy boots outside. The door clanged open. The waxed-facedofficer marched in, followed by two guards.
‘Room 101,’ said the officer.
The man in the white coat did not turn round. He did not look at Winston either; he was looking only at the dials.
He was rolling down a mighty corridor, a kilometre wide, full ofglorious, golden light, roaring with laughter and shouting outconfessions at the top of his voice. He was confessing everything, eventhe things he had succeeded in holding back under the torture. He wasrelating the entire history of his life to an audience who knew italready. With him were the guards, the other questioners, the men inwhite coats, O’Brien, Julia, Mr Charrington, all rolling down thecorridor together and shouting with laughter. Some dreadful thing whichhad lain embedded in the future had somehow been skipped over and hadnot happened. Everything was all right, there was no more pain, thelast detail of his life was laid bare, understood, forgiven.
He was starting up from the plank bed in the half- certaintythat he had heard O’Brien’s voice. All through his interrogation,although he had never seen him, he had had the feeling that O’Brien wasat his elbow, just out of sight. It was O’Brien who was directingeverything. It was he who set the guards on to Winston and whoprevented them from killing him. It was he who decided when Winstonshould scream with pain, when he should have a respite, when he shouldbe fed, when he should sleep, when the drugs should be pumped into hisarm. It was he who asked the questions and suggested the answers. Hewas the tormentor, he was the protector, he was the inquisitor, he wasthe friend. And once—Winston could not remember whether it was indrugged sleep, or in normal sleep, or even in a moment of wakefulness—avoice murmured in his ear: ‘Don’t worry, Winston; you are in mykeeping. For seven years I have watched over you. Now the turning-pointhas come. I shall save you, I shall make you perfect.’ He was not surewhether it was O’Brien’s voice; but it was the same voice that had saidto him, ‘We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,’ inthat other dream, seven years ago.
He did not remember any ending to his interrogation. There wasa period of blackness and then the cell, or room, in which he now washad gradually materialized round him. He was almost flat on his back,and unable to move. His body was held down at every essential point.Even the back of his head was gripped in some manner. O’Brien waslooking down at him gravely and rather sadly. His face, seen frombelow, looked coarse and worn, with pouches under the eyes and tiredlines from nose to chin. He was older than Winston had thought him; hewas perhaps forty-eight or fifty. Under his hand there was a dial witha lever on top and figures running round the face.
‘I told you,’ said O’Brien, ‘that if we met again it would be here.’
‘Yes,’ said Winston.
Without any warning except a slight movement of O’Brien’s hand,a wave of pain flooded his body. It was a frightening pain, because hecould not see what was happening, and he had the feeling that somemortal injury was being done to him. He did not know whether the thingwas really happening, or whether the effect was electrically produced ;but his body was being wrenched out of shape, the joints were beingslowly torn apart. Although the pain had brought the sweat out on hisforehead, the worst of all was the fear that his backbone was about tosnap. He set his teeth and breathed hard through his nose, trying tokeep silent as long as possible.
‘You are afraid,’ said O’Brien, watching his face, ‘that inanother moment something is going to break. Your especial fear is thatit will be your backbone. You have a vivid mental picture of thevertebrae snapping apart and the spinal fluid dripping out of them.That is what you are thinking, is it not, Winston?’
Winston did not answer. O’Brien drew back the lever on the dial. The wave of pain receded almost as quickly as it had come.
‘That was forty,’ said O’Brien. ‘You can see that the numbers onthis dial run up to a hundred. Will you please remember, throughout ourconversation, that I have it in my power to inflict pain on you at anymoment and to whatever degree I choose? If you tell me any lies, orattempt to prevaricate in any way, or even fall below your usual levelof intelligence, you will cry out with pain, instantly. Do youunderstand that?’
‘Yes,’ said Winston.
O’Brien’s manner became less severe. He resettled his spectaclesthoughtfully, and took a pace or two up and down. When he spoke hisvoice was gentle and patient. He had the air of a doctor, a teacher,even a priest, anxious to explain and persuade rather than to punish.
‘I am taking trouble with you, Winston,’ he said, ‘because youare worth trouble. You know perfectly well what is the matter with you.You have known it for years, though you have fought against theknowledge. You are mentally deranged. You suffer from a defectivememory. You are unable to remember real events and you persuadeyourself that you remember other events which never happened.Fortunately it is curable. You have never cured yourself of it, becauseyou did not choose to. There was a small effort of the will that youwere not ready to make. Even now, I am well aware, you are clinging toyour disease under the impression that it is a virtue. Now we will takean example. At this moment, which power is Oceania at war with?’
‘When I was arrested, Oceania was at war with Eastasia.
‘With Eastasia. Good. And Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, has it not?’
Winston drew in his breath. He opened his mouth to speak and then did not speak. He could not take his eyes away from the dial.
‘The truth, please, Winston. Your truth. Tell me what you think you remember.’
‘I remember that until only a week before I was arrested, wewere not at war with Eastasia at all. We were in alliance with them.The war was against Eurasia. That had lasted for four years. Beforethat—‘
O’Brien stopped him with a movement of the hand.
‘Another example,’ he said. ‘Some years ago you had a veryserious delusion indeed. You believed that three men, three onetimeParty members named Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford—men who wereexecuted for treachery and sabotage after making the fullest possibleconfession—were not guilty of the crimes they were charged with. Youbelieved that you had seen unmistakable documentary evidence provingthat their confessions were false. There was a certain photograph aboutwhich you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually heldit in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.’
An oblong slip of newspaper had appeared between O’Brien’sfingers. For perhaps five seconds it was within the angle of Winston’svision. It was a photograph, and there was no question of its identity.It was thephotograph. It was another copy of the photograph of Jones, Aaronson,and Rutherford at the party function in New York, which he had chancedupon eleven years ago and promptly destroyed. For only an instant itwas before his eyes, then it was out of sight again. But he had seenit, unquestionably he had seen it! He made a desperate, agonizingeffort to wrench the top half of his body free. It was impossible tomove so much as a centimetre in any direction. For the moment he hadeven forgotten the dial. All he wanted was to hold the photograph inhis fingers again, or at least to see it.
‘It exists!’ he cried.
‘No,’ said O’Brien.
He stepped across the room. There was a memory hole in theopposite wall. O’Brien lifted the grating. Unseen, the frail slip ofpaper was whirling away on the current of warm air; it was vanishing ina flash of flame. O’Brien turned away from the wall.
‘Ashes,’ he said. ‘Not even identifiable ashes. Dust. It does not exist. It never existed.’
‘But it did exist! It does exist! It exists in memory. I remember it. You remember it.’
‘I do not remember it,’ said O’Brien.
Winston’s heart sank. That was doublethink. He had a feeling ofdeadly helplessness. If he could have been certain that O’Brien waslying, it would not have seemed to matter. But it was perfectlypossible that O’Brien had really forgotten the photograph. And if so,then already he would have forgotten his denial of remembering it, andforgotten the act of forgetting. How could one be sure that it wassimple trickery? Perhaps that lunatic dislocation in the mind couldreally happen: that was the thought that defeated him.
O’Brien was looking down at him speculatively. More than everhe had the air of a teacher taking pains with a wayward but promisingchild.
‘There is a Party slogan dealing with the control of the past,’ he said. ‘Repeat it, if you please.’
“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,” repeated Winston obediently.
“Who controls the present controls the past,” said O’Brien,nodding his head with slow approval. ‘Is it your opinion, Winston, thatthe past has real existence?’
Again the feeling of helplessness descended upon Winston. Hiseyes flitted towards the dial. He not only did not know whether ‘yes’or ‘no’ was the answer that would save him from pain; he did not evenknow which answer he believed to be the true one.
O’Brien smiled faintly. ‘You are no metaphysician, Winston,’ hesaid. ‘Until this moment you had never considered what is meant byexistence. I will put it more precisely. Does the past existconcretely, in space? Is there somewhere or other a place, a world ofsolid objects, where the past is still happening?’
‘No.’
‘Then where does the past exist, if at all?’
‘In records. It is written down.’
‘In records. And——?’
‘In the mind. In human memories.
‘In memory. Very well, then. We, the Party, control all records,and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?’
‘But how can you stop people remembering things?’ cried Winstonagain momentarily forgetting the dial. ‘It is involuntary. It isoutside oneself. How can you control memory? You have not controlledmine!’
O’Brien’s manner grew stern again. He laid his hand on the dial.
‘On the contrary,’ he said, ‘you have not controlledit. That is what has brought you here. You are here because you havefailed in humility, in self- discipline. You would not make the act ofsubmission which is the price of sanity. You preferred to be a lunatic,a minority of one. Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston.You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing inits own right. You also believe that the nature of reality isself-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you seesomething, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you.But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality existsin the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, whichcan make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind ofthe Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holdsto be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see realityexcept by looking through the eyes of the Party. That is the fact thatyou have got to relearn, Winston. It needs an act of self- destruction,an effort of the will. You must humble yourself before you can becomesane.’
He paused for a few moments, as though to allow what he had been saying to sink in.
‘Do you remember,’ he went on, ‘ writing in your diary, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four”?’
‘Yes,’ said Winston.
O’Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended.
‘How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?
‘Four.’
‘And if the party says that it is not four but five—then how many?’
‘Four.’
The word ended in a gasp of pain. The needle of the dial hadshot up to fifty-five. The sweat had sprung out all over Winston’sbody. The air tore into his lungs and issued again in deep groans whicheven by clenching his teeth he could not stop. O’Brien watched him, thefour fingers still extended. He drew back the lever. This time the painwas only slightly eased.
‘How many fingers, Winston?’
‘Four.’
The needle went up to sixty.
‘How many fingers, Winston?’
‘Four! Four! What else can I say? Four!’
The needle must have risen again, but he did not look at it. Theheavy, stern face and the four fingers filled his vision. The fingersstood up before his eyes like pillars, enormous, blurry, and seeming tovibrate, but unmistakably four.
‘How many fingers, Winston?’
‘Four! Stop it, stop it! How can you go on? Four! Four!’
‘How many fingers, Winston?’
‘Five! Five! Five!’
‘No, Winston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are four. How many fingers, please?’
‘Four! five! Four! Anything you like. Only stop it, stop the pain!
Abruptly he was sitting up with O’Brien’s arm round hisshoulders. He had perhaps lost consciousness for a few seconds. Thebonds that had held his body down were loosened. He felt very cold, hewas shaking uncontrollably, his teeth were chattering, the tears wererolling down his cheeks. For a moment he clung to O’Brien like a baby,curiously comforted by the heavy arm round his shoulders. He had thefeeling that O’Brien was his protector, that the pain was somethingthat came from outside, from some other source, and that it was O’Brienwho would save him from it.
‘You are a slow learner, Winston,’ said O’Brien gently.
‘How can I help it?’ he blubbered. ‘How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.
Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they arethree. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. Itis not easy to become sane.’
He laid Winston down on the bed. The grip of his limbstightened again, but the pain had ebbed away and the trembling hadstopped, leaving him merely weak and cold. O’Brien motioned with hishead to the man in the white coat, who had stood immobile throughoutthe proceedings. The man in the white coat bent down and looked closelyinto Winston’s eyes, felt his pulse, laid an ear against his chest,tapped here and there, then he nodded to O’Brien.
‘Again,’ said O’Brien.
The pain flowed into Winston’s body. The needle must be atseventy, seventy-five. He had shut his eyes this time. He knew that thefingers were still there, and still four. All that mattered was somehowto stay alive until the spasm was over. He had ceased to notice whetherhe was crying out or not. The pain lessened again. He opened his eyes.O’Brien had drawn back the lever.
‘How many fingers, Winston?’
‘Four. I suppose there are four. I would see five if I could. I am trying to see five.’
‘Which do you wish: to persuade me that you see five, or really to see them?’
‘Really to see them.’
‘Again,’ said O’Brien.
Perhaps the needle was eighty—ninety. Winston could notintermittently remember why the pain was happening. Behind hisscrewed-up eyelids a forest of fingers seemed to be moving in a sort ofdance, weaving in and out, disappearing behind one another andreappearing again. He was trying to count them, he could not rememberwhy. He knew only that it was impossible to count them, and that thiswas somehow due to the mysterious identity between five and four. Thepain died down again. When he opened his eyes it was to find that hewas still seeing the same thing. Innumerable fingers, like movingtrees, were still streaming past in either direction, crossing andrecrossing. He shut his eyes again.
‘How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know. You will kill me if you do that again. Four, five, six—in all honesty I don’t know.’
‘Better,’ said O’Brien.
A needle slid into Winston’s arm. Almost in the same instant ablissful, healing warmth spread all through his body. The pain wasalready half-forgotten. He opened his eyes and looked up gratefully atO’Brien. At sight of the heavy, lined face, so ugly and so intelligent,his heart seemed to turn over. If he could have moved he would havestretched out a hand and laid it on O’Brien arm. He had never loved himso deeply as at this moment, and not merely because he had stopped thepain. The old feeling, that it bottom it did not matter whether O’Brienwas a friend or an enemy, had come back. O’Brien was a person who couldbe talked to. Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to beunderstood. O’Brien had tortured him to the edge of lunacy, and in alittle while, it was certain, he would send him to his death. It madeno difference. In some sense that went deeper than friendship, theywere intimates: somewhere or other, although the actual words mightnever be spoken, there was a place where they could meet and talk.O’Brien was looking down at him with an expression which suggested thatthe same thought might be in his own mind. When he spoke it was in aneasy, conversational tone.
‘Do you know where you are, Winston?’ he said.
‘I don’t know. I can guess. In the Ministry of Love.’
‘Do you know how long you have been here?’
‘I don’t know. Days, weeks, months—I think it is months.’
‘And why do you imagine that we bring people to this place?’
‘To make them confess.’
‘No, that is not the reason. Try again.’
‘To punish them.’
‘No!’ exclaimed O’Brien. His voice had changed extraordinarily,and his face had suddenly become both stern and animated. ‘No! Notmerely to extract your confession, not to punish you. Shall I tell youwhy we have brought you here? To cure you ! To make you sane ! Will youunderstand, Winston, that no one whom we bring to this place everleaves our hands uncured? We are not interested in those stupid crimesthat you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act:the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies,we change them. Do you understand what I mean by that?’
He was bending over Winston. His face looked enormous becauseof its nearness, and hideously ugly because it was seen from below.Moreover it was filled with a sort of exaltation, a lunatic intensity.Again Winston’s heart shrank. If it had been possible he would havecowered deeper into the bed. He felt certain that O’Brien was about totwist the dial out of sheer wantonness. At this moment, however,O’Brien turned away. He took a pace or two up and down. Then hecontinued less vehemently:
‘The first thing for you to understand is that in this placethere are no martyrdoms. You have read of the religious persecutions ofthe past. In the Middle Ages there was the Inquisitlon. It was afailure. It set out to eradicate heresy, and ended by perpetuating it.For every heretic it burned at the stake, thousands of others rose up.Why was that? Because the Inquisition killed its enemies in the open,and killed them while they were still unrepentant: in fact, it killedthem because they were unrepentant. Men were dying because they wouldnot abandon their true beliefs. Naturally all the glory belonged to thevictim and all the shame to the Inquisitor who burned him. Later, inthe twentieth century, there were the totalitarians, as they werecalled. There were the German Nazis and the Russian Communists. TheRussians persecuted heresy more cruelly than the Inquisition had done.And they imagined that they had learned from the mistakes of the past;they knew, at any rate, that one must not make martyrs. Before theyexposed their victims to public trial, they deliberately set themselvesto destroy their dignity. They wore them down by torture and solitudeuntil they were despicable, cringing wretches, confessing whatever wasput into their mouths, covering themselves with abuse, accusing andsheltering behind one another, whimpering for mercy. And yet after onlya few years the same thing had happened over again. The dead men hadbecome martyrs and their degradation was forgotten. Once again, why wasit? In the first place, because the confessions that they had made wereobviously extorted and untrue. We do not make mistakes of that kind.All the confessions that are uttered here are true. We make them true.And above all we do not allow the dead to rise up against us. You muststop imagining that posterity will vindicate you, Winston. Posteritywill never hear of you. You will be lifted clean out from the stream ofhistory. We shall turn you into gas and pour you into the stratosphere.Nothing will remain of you, not a name in a register, not a memory in aliving brain. You will be annihilated in the past as well as in thefuture. You will never have existed.’
Then why bother to torture me? thought Winston, with amomentary bitterness. O’Brien checked his step as though Winston haduttered the thought aloud. His large ugly face came nearer, with theeyes a little narrowed.
‘You are thinking,’ he said, ‘that since we intend to destroyyou utterly, so that nothing that you say or do can make the smallestdifference—in that case, why do we go to the trouble of interrogatingyou first? That is what you were thinking, was it not?’
‘Yes,’ said Winston.
O’Brien smiled slightly. ‘You are a flaw in the pattern,Winston. You are a stain that must be wiped out. Did I not tell youjust now that we are different from the persecutors of the past? We arenot content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abjectsubmission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your ownfree will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us: so longas he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture hisinner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out ofhim; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely,heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill him. It isintolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere inthe world, however secret and powerless it may be. Even in the instantof death we cannot permit any deviation. In the old days the hereticwalked to the stake still a heretic, proclaiming his heresy, exultingin it. Even the victim of the Russian purges could carry rebellionlocked up in his skull as he walked down the passage waiting for thebullet. But we make the brain perfect before we blow it out. Thecommand of the old despotisms was “Thou shalt not”. The command of thetotalitarians was “Thou shalt”. Our command is “Thou art”.No one whom we bring to this place ever stands out against us. Everyoneis washed clean. Even those three miserable traitors in whose innocenceyou once believed—Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford—in the end we brokethem down. I took part in their interrogation myself. I saw themgradually worn down, whimpering, grovelling, weeping—and in the end itwas not with pain or fear, only with penitence. By the time we hadfinished with them they were only the shells of men. There was nothingleft in them except sorrow for what they had done, and love of BigBrother. It was touching to see how they loved him. They begged to beshot quickly, so that they could die while their minds were stillclean.’
His voice had grown almost dreamy. The exaltation, the lunaticenthusiasm, was still in his face. He is not pretending, thoughtWinston, he is not a hypocrite, he believes every word he says. Whatmost oppressed him was the consciousness of his own intellectualinferiority. He watched the heavy yet graceful form strolling to andfro, in and out of the range of his vision. O’Brien was a being in allways larger than himself. There was no idea that he had ever had, orcould have, that O’Brien had not long ago known, examined, andrejected. His mind containedWinston’s mind. But in that case how could it be true that O’Brien wasmad? It must be he, Winston, who was mad. O’Brien halted and lookeddown at him. His voice had grown stern again.
‘Do not imagine that you will save yourself, Winston, howevercompletely you surrender to us. No one who has once gone astray is everspared. And even if we chose to let you live out the natural term ofyour life, still you would never escape from us. What happens to youhere is for ever. Understand that in advance. We shall crush you downto the point from which there is no coming back. Things will happen toyou from which you could not recover, if you lived a thousand years.Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everythingwill be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, orfriendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, orintegrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then weshall fill you with ourselves.’
He paused and signed to the man in the white coat. Winston wasaware of some heavy piece of apparatus being pushed into place behindhis head. O’Brien had sat down beside the bed, so that his face wasalmost on a level with Winston’s.
‘Three thousand,’ he said, speaking over Winston’s head to the man in the white coat.
Two soft pads, which felt slightly moist, clamped themselvesagainst Winston’s temples. He quailed. There was pain coming, a newkind of pain. O’Brien laid a hand reassuringly, almost kindly, on his.
‘This time it will not hurt,’ he said. ‘Keep your eyes fixed on mine.’
At this moment there was a devastating explosion, or what seemedlike an explosion, though it was not certain whether there was anynoise. There was undoubtedly a blinding flash of light. Winston was nothurt, only prostrated. Although he had already been lying on his backwhen the thing happened, he had a curious feeling that he had beenknocked into that position. A terrific painless blow had flattened himout. Also something had happened inside his head. As his eyes regainedtheir focus he remembered who he was, and where he was, and recognizedthe face that was gazing into his own; but somewhere or other there wasa large patch of emptiness, as though a piece had been taken out of hisbrain.
‘It will not last,’ said O’Brien. ‘Look me in the eyes. What country is Oceania at war with?’
Winston thought. He knew what was meant by Oceania and that hehimself was a citizen of Oceania. He also remembered Eurasia andEastasia; but who was at war with whom he did not know. In fact he hadnot been aware that there was any war.
‘I don’t remember.’
‘Oceania is at war with Eastasia. Do you remember that now?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Since thebeginning of your life, since the beginning of the Party, since thebeginning of history, the war has continued without a break, always thesame war. Do you remember that?’
‘Yes.’
‘ Eleven years ago you created a legend about three men who hadbeen condemned to death for treachery. You pretended that you had seena piece of paper which proved them innocent. No such piece of paperever existed. You invented it, and later you grew to believe in it. Youremember now the very moment at which you first invented it. Do youremember that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Just now I held up the fingers of my hand to you. You saw five fingers. Do you remember that?’
‘Yes.’
O’Brien held up the fingers of his left hand, with the thumb concealed.
‘There are five fingers there. Do you see five fingers?’
‘Yes.’
And he did see them, for a fleeting instant, before the sceneryof his mind changed. He saw five fingers, and there was no deformity.Then everything was normal again, and the old fear, the hatred, and thebewilderment came crowding back again. But there had been a moment—hedid not know how long, thirty seconds, perhaps—of luminous certainty,when each new suggestion of O’Brien’s had filled up a patch ofemptiness and become absolute truth, and when two and two could havebeen three as easily as five, if that were what was needed. It hadfaded but before O’Brien had dropped his hand; but though he could notrecapture it, he could remember it, as one remembers a vivid experienceat some period of one’s life when one was in effect a different person.
‘You see now,’ said O’Brien, ‘that it is at any rate possible.’
‘Yes,’ said Winston.
O’Brien stood up with a satisfied air. Over to his left Winstonsaw the man in the white coat break an ampoule and draw back theplunger of a syringe. O’Brien turned to Winston with a smile. In almostthe old manner he resettled his spectacles on his nose.
‘Do you remember writing in your diary,’ he said, ‘that it didnot matter whether I was a friend or an enemy, since I was at least aperson who understood you and could be talked to? You were right. Ienjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mindexcept that you happen to be insane. Before we bring the session to anend you can ask me a few questions, if you choose.’
‘Any question I like?’
‘Anything.’ He saw that Winston’s eyes were upon the dial. ‘It is switched off. What is your first question?’
‘What have you done with Julia?’ said Winston.
O’Brien smiled again. ‘She betrayed you, Winston.Immediately—unreservedly. I have seldom seen anyone come over to us sopromptly. You would hardly recognize her if you saw her. All herrebelliousness, her deceit, her folly, her dirty-mindedness—everythinghas been burned out of her. It was a perfect conversion, a textbookcase.’
‘You tortured her?’
O’Brien left this unanswered. ‘Next question,’ he said.
‘Does Big Brother exist?’
‘Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of the Party.’
‘Does he exist in the same way as I exist?
‘You do not exist,’ said O’Brien.
Once again the sense of helplessness assailed him. He knew, orhe could imagine, the arguments which proved his own nonexistence; butthey were nonsense, they were only a play on words. Did not thestatement, ‘You do not exist’, contain a logical absurdity? But whatuse was it to say so? His mind shrivelled as he thought of theunanswerable, mad arguments with which O’Brien would demolish him.
‘I think I exist,’ he said wearily. ‘I am conscious of my ownidentity. I was born and I shall die. I have arms and legs. I occupy aparticular point in space. No other solid object can occupy the samepoint simultaneously. In that sense, does Big Brother exist?’
‘It is of no importance. He exists.’
‘Will Big Brother ever die?’
‘Of course not. How could he die? Next question.’
‘Does the Brotherhood exist?’
‘That, Winston, you will never know. If we choose to set youfree when we have finished with you, and if you live to be ninety yearsold, still you will never learn whether the answer to that question isYes or No. As long as you live it will be an unsolved riddle in yourmind.’
Winston lay silent. His breast rose and fell a little faster.He still had not asked the question that had come into his mind thefirst. He had got to ask it, and yet it was as though his tongue wouldnot utter it. There was a trace of amusement in O’Brien’s face. Evenhis spectacles seemed to wear an ironical gleam. He knows, thoughtWinston suddenly, he knows what I am going to ask! At the thought thewords burst out of him:
‘What is in Room 101?’
The expression on O’Brien’s face did not change. He answered drily:
‘You know what is in Room 101, Winston. Everyone knows what is in Room 101.’
He raised a finger to the man in the white coat. Evidently thesession was at an end. A needle jerked into Winston’s arm. He sankalmost instantly into deep sleep.

[size=+2]‘THERE are three stages in yourreintegration,’ said O’Brien. ‘There is learning, there isunderstanding, and there is acceptance. It is time for you to enterupon the second stage.’As always, Winston was lying flat on his back. But of late hisbonds were looser. They still held him to the bed, but he could movehis knees a little and could turn his head from side to side and raisehis arms from the elbow. The dial, also, had grown to be less of aterror. He could evade its pangs if he was quick-witted enough: it waschiefly when he showed stupidity that O’Brien pulled the lever.Sometimes they got through a whole session without use of the dial. Hecould not remember how many sessions there had been. The whole processseemed to stretch out over a long, indefinite time—weeks, possibly—andthe intervals between the sessions might sometimes have been days,sometimes only an hour or two.
‘As you lie there,’ said O’Brien, ‘you have often wondered youhave even asked me—why the Ministry of Love should expend so much timeand trouble on you. And when you were free you were puzzled by what wasessentially the same question. You could grasp the mechanics of theSociety you lived in, but not its underlying motives. Do you rememberwriting in your diary, “I understand how: I do not understand why”? It was when you thought about “why” that you doubted your own sanity. You have read the book, Goldstein’s book, or parts of it, at least. Did it tell you anything that you did not know already?’
‘You have read it?’ said Winston.
‘I wrote it. That is to say, I collaborated in writing it. No book is produced individually, as you know.’
‘Is it true, what it says?’
‘A description, yes. The programme it sets forth is nonsense. Thesecret accumulation of knowledge—a gradual spread ofenlightenment—ultimately a proletarian rebellion—the overthrow of theParty. You foresaw yourself that that was what it would say. It is allnonsense. The proletarians will never revolt, not in a thousand yearsor a million. They cannot. I do not have to tell you the reason: youknow it already. If you have ever cherished any dreams of violentinsurrection, you must abandon them. There is no way in which the Partycan be overthrown. The rule of the Party is for ever. Make that thestarting-point of your thoughts.’
He came closer to the bed. ‘For ever!’ he repeated. ‘And nowlet us get back to the question of “how” and “why”. You understand wellenough how the Party maintains itself in power. Now tell me why we cling to power. What is our motive? Why should we want power? Go on, speak,’ he added as Winston remained silent.
Nevertheless Winston did not speak for another moment or two. A feelingof weariness had overwhelmed him. The faint, mad gleam of enthusiasmhad come back into O’Brien’s face. He knew in advance what O’Brienwould say. That the Party did not seek power for its own ends, but onlyfor the good of the majority. That it sought power because men in themass were frail cowardly creatures who could not endure liberty or facethe truth, and must be ruled over and systematically deceived by otherswho were stronger than themselves. That the choice for mankind laybetween freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind,happiness was better. That the party was the eternal guardian of theweak, a dedicated sect doing evil that good might come, sacrificing itsown happiness to that of others. The terrible thing, thought Winston,the terrible thing was that when O’Brien said this he would believe it.You could see it in his face. O’Brien knew everything. A thousand timesbetter than Winston he knew what the world was really like, in whatdegradation the mass of human beings lived and by what lies andbarbarities the Party kept them there. He had understood it all,weighed it all, and it made no difference: all was justified by theultimate purpose. What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunaticwho is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fairhearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
‘You are ruling over us for our own good,’ he said feebly. ‘Youbelieve that human beings are not fit to govern themselves, andtherefore——’
He started and almost cried out. A pang of pain had shotthrough his body. O’Brien had pushed the lever of the dial up tothirty-five.
‘That was stupid, Winston, stupid!’ he said. ‘You should know better than to say a thing like that.’
He pulled the lever back and continued:
‘Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. TheParty seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested inthe good of others ; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth orluxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What purepower means you will understand presently. We are different from allthe oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All theothers, even those who resembled ourselves, were- cowards andhypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very closeto us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognizetheir own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, thatthey had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that justround the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be freeand equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes powerwith the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is anend. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard arevolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish thedictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object oftorture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin tounderstand me?’
Winston was struck, as he had been struck before, by thetiredness of O’Brien’s face. It was strong and fleshy and brutal, itwas full of intelligence and a sort of controlled passion before whichhe felt himself helpless; but it was tired. There were pouches underthe eyes, the skin sagged from the cheekbones. O’Brien leaned over him,deliberately bringing the worn face nearer.
‘You are thinking,’ he said, ‘that my face is old and tired.You are thinking that I talk of power, and yet I am not even able toprevent the decay of my own body. Can you not understand, Winston, thatthe individual is only a cell? The weariness of the cell is the vigourof the organism. Do you die when you cut your fingernails?’
He turned away from the bed and began strolling up and down again, one hand in his pocket.
‘We are the priests of power,’ he said. ‘God is power. But atpresent power is only a word so far as you are concerned. It is timefor you to gather some idea of what power means. The first thing youmust realize is that power is collective. The individual only has powerin so far as he ceases to be an individual. You know the Party slogan:“Freedom is Slavery”. Has it ever occurred to you that it isreversible? Slavery is freedom. Alone—free—the human being is alwaysdefeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die,which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete,utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can mergehimself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerfuland immortal. The second thing for you to realize is that power ispower over human beings. Over the body but, above all, over the mind.Power over matter—external reality, as you would call it—is notimportant. Already our control over matter is absolute.’
For a moment Winston ignored the dial. He made a violent effortto raise himself into a sitting position, and merely succeeded inwrenching his body painfully.
‘But how can you control matter?’ he burst out. ‘You don’t evencontrol the climate or the law of gravity. And there are disease, pain,death——’
O’Brien silenced him by a movement of his hand. ‘We controlmatter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. Youwill learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do.Invisibility, levitation—anything. I could float off this floor like asoap bubble if I wish to. I do not wish to, because the Party does notwish it. You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about thelaws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature.’
‘But you do not! You are not even masters of this planet. What about Eurasia and Eastasia? You have not conquered them yet.’
‘Unimportant. We shall conquer them when it suits us. And if wedid not, what difference would it make? We can shut them out ofexistence. Oceania is the world.’
‘But the world itself is only a speck of dust. And man is tinyhelpless! How long has he been in existence? For millions of years theearth was uninhabited.’
‘Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness.’
‘But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals—mammothsand mastodons and enormous reptiles which lived here long before manwas ever heard of.’
‘Have you ever seen those bones, Winston? Of course not.Nineteenth-century biologists invented them. Before man there wasnothing. After man, if he could come to an end, there would be nothing.Outside man there is nothing.’
‘But the whole universe is outside us. Look at the stars ! Someof them are a million light-years away. They are out of our reach forever.’
‘What are the stars?’ said O’Brien indifferently. ‘They arebits of fire a few kilometres away. We could reach them if we wantedto. Or we could blot them out. The earth is the centre of the universe.The sun and the stars go round it.’
Winston made another convulsive movement. This time he did notsay anything. O’Brien continued as though answering a spoken objection:
‘For certain purposes, of course, that is not true. When wenavigate the ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find itconvenient to assume that the earth goes round the sun and that thestars are millions upon millions of kilometres away. But what of it? Doyou suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy? Thestars can be near or distant, according as we need them. Do you supposeour mathematicians are unequal to that? Have you forgottendoublethink?’
Winston shrank back upon the bed. Whatever he said, the swift answer crushed him like a bludgeon. And yet he knew, he knew,that he was in the right. The belief that nothing exists outside yourown mind—surely there must be some way of demonstrating that it wasfalse? Had it not been exposed long ago as a fallacy? There was even aname for it, which he had forgotten. A faint smile twitched the cornersof O’Brien’s mouth as he looked down at him.
‘I told you, Winston,’ he said, ‘that metaphysics is not yourstrong point. The word you are trying to think of is solipsism. But youare mistaken. This is not solipsism. Collective solipsism, if you like.But that is a different thing: in fact, the opposite thing. All this isa digression,’ he added in a different tone. ‘The real power, the powerwe have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but overmen.’ He paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of aschoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: ‘How does one man asserthis power over another, Winston?’
Winston thought. ‘By making him suffer,’ he said.
‘Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unlesshe is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will andnot his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is intearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in newshapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind ofworld we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupidhedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear andtreachery is torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, aworld which will grow not less but moremerciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progresstowards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were foundedon love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world therewill be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement.Everything else we shall destroy—everything. Already we are breakingdown the habits of thought which have survived from before theRevolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and betweenman and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or achild or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wivesand no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, asone takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated.Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a rationcard. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon itnow. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. Therewill be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be nolaughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There willbe no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shallhave no more need of science. There will be no distinction betweenbeauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of theprocess of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. Butalways—do not forget this, Winston—always there will be theintoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growingsubtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory,the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want apicture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.’
He paused as though he expected Winston to speak. Winston hadtried to shrink back into the surface of the bed again. He could notsay anything. His heart seemed to be frozen. O’Brien went on:
‘And remember that it is for ever. The face will always bethere to be stamped upon. The heretic, the enemy of society, willalways be there, so that he can be defeated and humiliated over again.Everything that you have undergone since you have been in our hands—allthat will continue, and worse. The espionage, the betrayals, thearrests, the tortures, the executions, the disappearances will nevercease. It will be a world of terror as much as a world of triumph. Themore the Party is powerful, the less it will be tolerant: the weakerthe opposition, the tighter the despotism. Goldstein and his heresieswill live for ever. Every day, at every moment, they will be defeated,discredited, ridiculed, spat upon and yet they will always survive.This drama that I have played out with you during seven years will beplayed out over and over again generation after generation, always insubtler forms. Always we shall have the heretic here at our mercy,screaming with pain, broken up, contemptible—and in the end utterlypenitent, saved from himself, crawling to our feet of his own accord.That is the world that we are preparing, Winston. A world of victoryafter victory, triumph after triumph after triumph: an endlesspressing, pressing, pressing upon the nerve of power. You arebeginning, I can see, to realize what that world will be like. But inthe end you will do more than understand it. You will accept it,welcome it, become part of it.’
Winston had recovered himself sufficiently to speak. ‘You can’t!’ he said weakly.
‘What do you mean by that remark, Winston?’
‘You could not create such a world as you have just described. It is a dream. It is impossible.’
‘Why?’
‘It is impossible to found a civilization on fear and hatred and cruelty. It would never endure.’
‘Why not?’
‘It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide.’
‘Nonsense. You are under the impression that hatred is moreexhausting than love. Why should it be? And if it were, what differencewould that make? Suppose that we choose to wear ourselves out faster.Suppose that we quicken the tempo of human life till men are senile atthirty. Still what difference would it make? Can you not understandthat the death of the individual is not death? The Party is immortal.’
As usual, the voice had battered Winston into helplessness.Moreover he was in dread that if he persisted in his disagreementO’Brien would twist the dial again. And yet he could not keep silent.Feebly, without arguments, with nothing to support him except hisinarticulate horror of what O’Brien had said, he returned to theattack.
‘I don’t know—I don’t care. Somehow you will fail. Something will defeat you. Life will defeat you.’
‘We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are imaginingthat there is something called human nature which will be outraged bywhat we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Menare infinitely malleable. Or perhaps you have returned to your old ideathat the proletarians or the slaves will arise and overthrow us. Put itout of your mind. They are helpless, like the animals. Humanity is theParty. The others are outside—irrelevant.’
‘I don’t care. In the end they will beat you. Sooner or laterthey will see you for what you are, and then they will tear you topieces.’
‘Do you see any evidence that that is happening? Or any reason why it should?’
‘No. I believe it. I know that you will fail. There is something in the universe—I don’t know, some spirit, some principle—that you will never overcome.’
‘Do you believe in God, Winston?’
‘No.’
‘Then what is it, this principle that will defeat us?’
‘I don’t know. The spirit of Man.’
‘And do you consider yourself a man?.’
‘Yes.’
‘If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct; we are the inheritors. Do you understand that you are alone?You are outside history, you are non-existent.’ His manner changed andhe said more harshly: ‘And you consider yourself morally superior tous, with our lies and our cruelty?’
‘Yes, I consider myself superior.’
O’Brien did not speak. Two other voices were speaking. After amoment Winston recognized one of them as his own. It was a sound-trackof the conversation he had had with O’Brien, on the night when he hadenrolled himself in the Brotherhood. He heard himself promising to lie,to steal, to forge, to murder, to encourage drug-taking andprostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases, to throw vitriol in achild’s face. O’Brien made a small impatient gesture, as though to saythat the demonstration was hardly worth making. Then he turned a switchand the voices stopped.
‘Get up from that bed,’ he said.
The bonds had loosened themselves. Winston lowered himself to the floor and stood up unsteadily.
‘You are the last man,’ said O’Brien. ‘You are the guardian ofthe human spirit. You shall see yourself as you are. Take off yourclothes.’
Winston undid the bit of string that held his overallstogether. The zip fastener had long since been wrenched out of them. Hecould not remember whether at any time since his arrest he had takenoff all his clothes at one time. Beneath the overalls his body waslooped with filthy yellowish rags, just recognizable as the remnants ofunderclothes. As he slid them to the ground he saw that there was athree-sided mirror at the far end of the room. He approached it, thenstopped short. An involuntary cry had broken out of him.
‘Go on,’ said O’Brien. ‘Stand between the wings of the mirror. You shall see the side view as well.’
He had stopped because he was frightened. A bowed, greycoloured,skeleton-like thing was coming towards him. Its actual appearance wasfrightening, and not merely the fact that he knew it to be himself. Hemoved closer to the glass. The creature’s face seemed to be protruded,because of its bent carriage. A forlorn, jailbird’s face with a nobbyforehead running back into a bald scalp, a crooked nose, andbattered-looking cheekbones above which his eyes were fierce andwatchful. The cheeks were seamed, the mouth had a drawn-in look.Certainly it was his own face, but it seemed to him that it had changedmore than he had changed inside. The emotions it registered would bedifferent from the ones he felt. He had gone partially bald. For thefirst moment he had thought that he had gone grey as well, but it wasonly the scalp that was grey. Except for his hands and a circle of hisface, his body was grey all over with ancient, ingrained dirt. Here andthere under the dirt there were the red scars of wounds, and near theankle the varicose ulcer was an inflamed mass with flakes of skinpeeling off it. But the truly frightening thing was the emaciation ofhis body. The barrel of the ribs was as narrow as that of a skeleton:the legs had shrunk so that the knees were thicker than the thighs. Hesaw now what O’Brien had meant about seeing the side view. Thecurvature of the spine was astonishing. The thin shoulders were hunchedforward so as to make a cavity of the chest, the scraggy neck seemed tobe bending double under the weight of the skull. At a guess he wouldhave said that it was the body of a man of sixty, suffering from somemalignant disease.
‘You have thought sometimes,’ said O’Brien, ‘that my face—theface of a member of the Inner Party—looks old and worn. What do youthink of your own face?’
He seized Winston’s shoulder and spun him round so that he was facing him.
‘Look at the condition you are in!’ he said. ‘Look at thisfilthy grime all over your body. Look at the dirt between your toes.Look at that disgusting running sore on your leg. Do you know that youstink like a goat? Probably you have ceased to notice it. Look at youremaciation. Do you see? I can make my thumb and forefinger meet roundyour bicep. I could snap your neck like a carrot. Do you know that youhave lost twenty-five kilograms since you have been in our hands? Evenyour hair is coming out in handfuls. Look!’ He plucked at Winston’shead and brought away a tuft of hair. ‘Open your mouth. Nine, ten,eleven teeth left. How many had you when you came to us? And the fewyou have left are dropping out of your head. Look here!’
He seized one of Winston’s remaining front teeth between hispowerful thumb and forefinger. A twinge of pain shot through Winston’sjaw. O’Brien had wrenched the loose tooth out by the roots. He tossedit across the cell.
‘You are rotting away,’ he said; ‘you are falling to pieces.What are you? A bag of filth. Now turn around and look into that mirroragain. Do you see that thing facing you? That is the last man. If youare human, that is humanity. Now put your clothes on again.’
Winston began to dress himself with slow stiff movements. Untilnow he had not seemed to notice how thin and weak he was. Only onethought stirred in his mind: that he must have been in this placelonger than he had imagined. Then suddenly as he fixed the miserablerags round himself a feeling of pity for his ruined body overcame him.Before he knew what he was doing he had collapsed on to a small stoolthat stood beside the bed and burst into tears. He was aware of hisugliness, his gracelessness, a bundle of bones in filthy underclothessitting weeping in the harsh white light: but he could not stophimself. O’Brien laid a hand on his shoulder, almost kindly.
‘It will not last for ever,’ he said. ‘You can escape from it whenever you choose. Everything depends on yourself.’
‘You did it!’ sobbed Winston. ‘You reduced me to this state.’
‘No, Winston, you reduced yourself to it. This is what youaccepted when you set yourself up against the Party. It was allcontained in that first act. Nothing has happened that you did notforesee.’
He paused, and then went on:
‘We have beaten you, Winston. We have broken you up. You haveseen what your body is like. Your mind is in the same state. I do notthink there can be much pride left in you. You have been kicked andflogged and insulted, you have screamed with pain, you have rolled onthe floor in your own blood and vomit. You have whimpered for mercy,you have betrayed everybody and everything. Can you think of a singledegradation that has not happened to you?’
Winston had stopped weeping, though the tears were still oozing out of his eyes. He looked up at O’Brien.
‘I have not betrayed Julia,’ he said.
O’Brien looked down at him thoughtfully. ‘No,’ he said; ‘no; that is perfectly true. You have not betrayed Julia.’
The peculiar reverence for O’Brien, which nothing seemed able todestroy, flooded Winston’s heart again. How intelligent, he thought,how intelligent! Never did O’Brien fail to understand what was said tohim. Anyone else on earth would have answered promptly that he hadbetrayed Julia. For what was there that they had not screwed out of himunder the torture? He had told them everything he knew about her, herhabits, her character, her past life; he had confessed in the mosttrivial detail everything that had happened at their meetings, all thathe had said to her and she to him, their black-market meals, theiradulteries, their vague plottings against the Party—everything. Andyet, in the sense in which he intended the word, he had not betrayedher. He had not stopped loving her; his feelings towards her hadremained the same. O’Brien had seen what he meant without the need forexplanation.
‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘how soon will they shoot me?’
‘It might be a long time,’ said O’Brien. ‘You are a difficultcase. But don’t give up hope. Everyone is cured sooner or later. In theend we shall shoot you.’

[size=+2]HE WAS much better. He was growing fatter and stronger every day, if it was proper to speak of days.The white light and the humming sound were the same as ever, but thecell was a little more comfortable than the others he had been in.There was a pillow and a mattress on the plank bed, and a stool to siton. They had given him a bath, and they allowed him to wash himselffairly frequently in a tin basin. They even gave him warm water to washwith. They had given him new underclothes and a clean suit of overalls.They had dressed his varicose ulcer with soothing ointment. They hadpulled out the remnants of his teeth and given him a new set ofdentures.
Weeks or months must have passed. It would have been possiblenow to keep count of the passage of time, if he had felt any interestin doing so, since he was being fed at what appeared to be regularintervals. He was getting, he judged, three meals in the twenty-fourhours; sometimes he wondered dimly whether he was getting them by nightor by day. The food was surprisingly good, with meat at every thirdmeal. Once there was even a packet of cigarettes. He had no matches,but the never-speaking guard who brought his food would give him alight. The first time he tried to smoke it made him sick, but hepersevered, and spun the packet out for a long time, smoking half acigarette after each meal.
They had given him a white slate with a stump of pencil tied tothe corner. At first he made no use of it. Even when he was awake hewas completely torpid. Often he would lie from one meal to the nextalmost without stirring, sometimes asleep, sometimes waking into vaguereveries in which it was too much trouble to open his eyes. He had longgrown used to sleeping with a strong light on his face. It seemed tomake no difference, except that one’s dreams were more coherent. Hedreamed a great deal all through this time, and they were always happydreams. He was in the Golden Country, or he was sitting among enormousglorious, sunlit ruins, with his mother, with Julia, with O’Brien—notdoing anything, merely sitting in the sun, talking of peaceful things.Such thoughts as he had when he was awake were mostly about his dreams.He seemed to have lost the power of intellectual effort, now that thestimulus of pain had been removed. He was not bored, he had no desirefor conversation or distraction. Merely to be alone, not to be beatenor questioned, to have enough to eat, and to be clean all over, wascompletely satisfying.
By degrees he came to spend less time in sleep, but he stillfelt no impulse to get off the bed. All he cared for was to lie quietand feel the strength gathering in his body. He would finger himselfhere and there, trying to make sure that it was not an illusion thathis muscles were growing rounder and his skin tauter. Finally it wasestablished beyond a doubt that he was growing fatter; his thighs werenow definitely thicker than his knees. After that, reluctantly atfirst, he began exercising himself regularly. In a little while hecould walk three kilometres, measured by pacing the cell, and his bowedshoulders were growing straighter. He attempted more elaborateexercises, and was astonished and humiliated to find what things hecould not do. He could not move out of a walk, he could not hold hisstool out at arm’s length, he could not stand on one leg withoutfalling over. He squatted down on his heels, and found that withagonizing pains in thigh and calf he could just lift himself to astanding position. He lay flat on his belly and tried to lift hisweight by his hands. It was hopeless, he could not raise himself acentimetre. But after a few more days—a few more mealtimes—even thatfeat was accomplished. A time came when he could do it six timesrunning. He began to grow actually proud of his body, and to cherish anintermittent belief that his face also was growing back to normal. Onlywhen he chanced to put his hand on his bald scalp did he remember theseamed, ruined face that had looked back at him out of the mirror.
His mind grew more active. He sat down on the plank bed, hisback against the wall and the slate on his knees, and set to workdeliberately at the task of re-educating himself.
He had capitulated, that was agreed. In reality, as he saw now,he had been ready to capitulate long before he had taken the decision.From the moment when he was inside the Ministry of Love—and yes, evenduring those minutes when he and Julia had stood helpless while theiron voice from the telescreen told them what to do—he had grasped thefrivolity, the shallowness of his attempt to set himself up against thepower of the Party. He knew now that for seven years the Thought policehad watched him like a beetle under a magnifying glass. There was nophysical act, no word spoken aloud, that they had not noticed, no trainof thought that they had not been able to infer. Even the speck ofwhitish dust on the cover of his diary they had carefully replaced.They had played sound-tracks to him, shown him photographs. Some ofthem were photographs of Julia and himself. Yes, even . . . He couldnot fight against the Party any longer. Besides, the Party was in theright. It must be so; how could the immortal, collective brain bemistaken? By what external standard could you check its judgements?Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to thinkas they thought. Only——!
The pencil felt thick and awkward in his fingers. He began towrite down the thoughts that came into his head. He wrote first inlarge clumsy capitals:

[size=+2]AT EACH stage of his imprisonment hehad known, or seemed to know, whereabouts he was in the windowlessbuilding. Possibly there were slight differences in the air pressure.The cells where the guards had beaten him were below ground level. Theroom where he had been interrogated by O’Brien was high up near theroof. This place was many metres underground, as deep down as it waspossible to go.It was bigger than most of the cells he had been in. But hehardly noticed his surroundings. All he noticed was that there were twosmall tables straight in front of him, each covered with green baize.One was only a metre or two from him, the other was further away, nearthe door. He was strapped upright in a chair, so tightly that he couldmove nothing, not even his head. A sort of pad gripped his head frombehind, forcing him to look straight in front of him.
For a moment he was alone, then the door opened and O’Brien came in.
‘You asked me once,’ said O’Brien, ‘what was in Room 101. I toldyou that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing thatis in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.’
The door opened again. A guard came in, carrying something madeof wire, a box or basket of some kind. He set it down on the furthertable. Because of the position in which O’Brien was standing. Winstoncould not see what the thing was.
‘The worst thing in the world,’ said O’Brien, ‘varies fromindividual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, orby drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are caseswhere it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal.’
He had moved a little to one side, so that Winston had a betterview of the thing on the table. It was an oblong wire cage with ahandle on top for carrying it by. Fixed to the front of it wassomething that looked like a fencing mask, with the concave sideoutwards. Although it was three or four metres away from him, he couldsee that the cage was divided lengthways into two compart ments, andthat there was some kind of creature in each. They were rats.
‘In your case, said O’Brien, ‘the worst thing in the world happens to be rats.’
A sort of premonitory tremor, a fear of he was not certain what,had passed through Winston as soon as he caught his first glimpse ofthe cage. But at this moment the meaning of the mask-like attachment infront of it suddenly sank into him. His bowels seemed to turn to water.
‘You can’t do that!’ he cried out in a high cracked voice. ‘You couldn’t, you couldn’t! It’s impossible.’
‘Do you remember,’ said O’Brien, ‘the moment of panic that usedto occur in your dreams? There was a wall of blackness in front of you,and a roaring sound in your ears. There was something terrible on theother side of the wall. You knew that you knew what it was, but youdared not drag it into the open. It was the rats that were on the otherside of the wall.’
‘O’Brien!’ said Winston, making an effort to control his voice.‘You know this is not necessary. What is it that you want me to do?’
O’Brien made no direct answer. When he spoke it was in theschoolmasterish manner that he sometimes affected. He lookedthoughtfully into the distance, as though he were addressing anaudience somewhere behind Winston’s back.
‘By itself,’ he said, ‘pain is not always enough. There areoccasions when a human being will stand out against pain, even to thepoint of death. But for everyone there is somethingunendurable—something that cannot be contemplated. Courage andcowardice are not involved. If you are falling from a height it is notcowardly to clutch at a rope. If you have come up from deep water it isnot cowardly to fill your lungs with air. It is merely an instinctwhich cannot be destroyed. It is the same with the rats. For you, theyare unendurable. They are a form of pressure that you cannot withstand.even if you wished to. You will do what is required of you.
‘But what is it, what is it? How can I do it if I don’t know what it is?’
O’Brien picked up the cage and brought it across to the nearertable. He set it down carefully on the baize cloth. Winston could hearthe blood singing in his ears. He had the feeling of sitting in utterloneliness. He was in the middle of a great empty plain, a flat desertdrenched with sunlight, across which all sounds came to him out ofimmense distances. Yet the cage with the rats was not two metres awayfrom him. They were enormous rats. They were at the age when a rat’smuzzle grows blunt and fierce and his fur brown instead of grey.
‘The rat,’ said O’Brien, still addressing his invisibleaudience, ‘although a rodent, is carnivorous. You are aware of that.You will have heard of the things that happen in the poor quarters ofthis town. In some streets a woman dare not leave her baby alone in thehouse, even for five minutes. The rats are certain to attack it. Withinquite a small time they will strip it to the bones. They also attacksick or dying people. They show astonishing intelligence in knowingwhen a human being is helpless.’
There was an outburst of squeals from the cage. It seemed toreach Winston from far away. The rats were fighting; they were tryingto get at each other through the partition. He heard also a deep groanof despair. That, too, seemed to come from outside himself.
O’Brien picked up the cage, and, as he did so, pressedsomething in it. There was a sharp click. Winston made a frantic effortto tear himself loose from the chair. It was hopeless; every part ofhim, even his head, was held immovably. O’Brien moved the cage nearer.It was less than a metre from Winston’s face.
‘I have pressed the first lever,’ said O’Brien. ‘You understandthe construction of this cage. The mask will fit over your head,leaving no exit. When I press this other lever, the door of the cagewill slide up. These starving brutes will shoot out of it like bullets.Have you ever seen a rat leap through the air? They will leap on toyour face and bore straight into it. Sometimes they attack the eyesfirst. Sometimes they burrow through the cheeks and devour the tongue.’
The cage was nearer; it was closing in. Winston heard asuccession of shrill cries which appeared to be occurring in the airabove his head. But he fought furiously against his panic. To think, tothink, even with a split second left—to think was the only hope.Suddenly the foul musty odour of the brutes struck his nostrils. Therewas a violent convulsion of nausea inside him, and he almost lostconsciousness. Everything had gone black. For an instant he was insane,a screaming animal. Yet he came out of the blackness clutching an idea.There was one and only one way to save himself. He must interposeanother human being, the body of another human being, between himself and the rats.
The circle of the mask was large enough now to shut out the vision ofanything else. The wire door was a couple of hand-spans from his face.The rats knew what was coming now. One of them was leaping up and down,the other, an old scaly grandfather of the sewers, stood up, with hispink hands against the bars, and fiercely sniffed the air. Winstoncould see the whiskers and the yellow teeth. Again the black panic tookhold of him. He was blind, helpless, mindless.
‘It was a common punishment in Imperial China,’ said O’Brien as didactically as ever.
The mask was closing on his face. The wire brushed his cheek.And then—no, it was not relief, only hope, a tiny fragment of hope. Toolate, perhaps too late. But he had suddenly understood that in thewhole world there was just one person to whom he could transfer his punishment—one body that he could thrust between himself and the rats. And he was shouting frantically, over and over.
‘Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what youdo to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia!Not me!’
He was falling backwards, into enormous depths, away from therats. He was still strapped in the chair, but he had fallen through thefloor, through the walls of the building, through the earth, throughthe oceans, through the atmosphere, into outer space, into the gulfsbetween the stars—always away, away, away from the rats. He was lightyears distant, but O’Brien was still standing at his side. There wasstill the cold touch of wire against his cheek. But through thedarkness that enveloped him he heard another metallic click, and knewthat the cage door had clicked shut and not open.

[size=+2]THE CHESTNUT TREE was almost empty. Aray of sunlight slanting through a window fell on dusty table-tops. Itwas the lonely hour of fifteen. A tinny music trickled from thetelescreens.Winston sat in his usual corner, gazing into an empty glass.Now and again he glanced up at a vast face which eyed him from theopposite wall. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said. Unbidden,a waiter came and filled his glass up with Victory Gin, shaking into ita few drops from another bottle with a quill through the cork. It wassaccharine flavoured with cloves, the speciality of the café.
Winston was listening to the telescreen. At present only musicwas coming out of it, but there was a possibility that at any momentthere might be a special bulletin from the Ministry of Peace. The newsfrom the African front was disquieting in the extreme. On and off hehad been worrying about it all day. A Eurasian army (Oceania was at warwith Eurasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia) was movingsouthward at terrifying speed. The mid-day bulletin had not mentionedany definite area, but it was probable that already the mouth of theCongo was a battlefield. Brazzaville and Leopoldville were in danger.One did not have to look at the map to see what it meant. It was notmerely a question of losing Central Africa: for the first time in thewhole war, the territory of Oceania itself was menaced.
A violent emotion, not fear exactly but a sort ofundifferentiated excitement, flared up in him, then faded again. Hestopped thinking about the war. In these days he could never fix hismind on any one subject for more than a few moments at a time. Hepicked up his glass and drained it at a gulp. As always, the gin madehim shudder and even retch slightly. The stuff was horrible. The clovesand saccharine, themselves disgusting enough in their sickly way, couldnot disguise the flat oily smell; and what was worst of all was thatthe smell of gin, which dwelt with him night and day, was inextricablymixed up in his mind with the smell of those——
He never named them, even in his thoughts, and so far as it waspossible he never visualized them. They were something that he washalf-aware of, hovering close to his face, a smell that clung to hisnostrils. As the gin rose in him he belched through purple lips. He hadgrown fatter since they released him, and had regained his oldcolour—indeed, more than regained it. His features had thickened, theskin on nose and cheekbones was coarsely red, even the bald scalp wastoo deep a pink. A waiter, again unbidden, brought the chessboard andthe current issue of the Times,with the page turned down at the chess problem. Then, seeing thatWinston’s glass was empty, he brought the gin bottle and filled it.There was no need to give orders. They knew his habits. The chessboardwas always waiting for him, his corner table was always reserved; evenwhen the place was full he had it to himself, since nobody cared to beseen sitting too close to him. He never even bothered to count hisdrinks. At irregular intervals they presented him with a dirty slip ofpaper which they said was the bill, but he had the impression that theyalways undercharged him. It would have made no difference if it hadbeen the other way about. He had always plenty of money nowadays. Heeven had a job, a sinecure, more highly-paid than his old job had been.
The music from the telescreen stopped and a voice took over.Winston raised his head to listen. No bulletins from the front,however. It was merely a brief announcement from the Ministry ofPlenty. In the preceding quarter, it appeared, the Tenth ThreeYearPlan’s quota for bootlaces had been overfulfilled by 98 per cent.
He examined the chess problem and set out the pieces. It was atricky ending, involving a couple of knights. ‘White to play and matein two moves.’ Winston looked up at the portrait of Big Brother. Whitealways mates, he thought with a sort of cloudy mysticism. Always,without exception, it is so arranged. In no chess problem since thebeginning of the world has black ever won. Did it not symbolize theeternal, unvarying triumph of Good over Evil? The huge face gazed backat him, full of calm power. White always mates.
The voice from the telescreen paused and added in a differentand much graver tone: ‘You are warned to stand by for an importantannouncement at fifteen-thirty. Fifteen- thirty! This is news of thehighest importance. Take care not to miss it. Fifteen-thirty !’ Thetinking music struck up again.
Winston’s heart stirred. That was the bulletin from the front;instinct told him that it was bad news that was coming. All day, withlittle spurts of excitement, the thought of a smashing defeat in Africahad been in and out of his mind. He seemed actually to see the Eurasianarmy swarming across the never-broken frontier and pouring down intothe tip of Africa like a column of ants. Why had it not been possibleto outflank them in some way? The outline of the West African coaststood out vividly in his mind. He picked up the white knight and movedit across the board. Therewas the proper spot. Even while he saw the black horde racing southwardhe saw another force, mysteriously assembled, suddenly planted in theirrear, cutting their comunications by land and sea. He felt that bywilling it he was bringing that other force into existence. But it wasnecessary to act quickly. If they could get control of the whole ofAfrica, if they had airfields and submarine bases at the Cape, it wouldcut Oceania in two. It might mean anything: defeat, breakdown, theredivision of the world, the destruction of the Party! He drew a deepbreath. An extraordinary medley of feeling—but it was not a medley,exactly; rather it was successive layers of feeling, in which one couldnot say which layer was undermost—struggled inside him.
The spasm passed. He put the white knight back in its place,but for the moment he could not settle down to serious study of thechess problem. His thoughts wandered again. Almost unconsciously hetraced with his finger in the dust on the table: