Outcome of 1984 Erica Yoshida

Winston and Julia join a group against the party led by Emmanuel Goldstein. They think they are safe at Mr. Charrington’s secret place, but instead they end up in the hands of the thoughtpolice. Mr. Charrington was a member of the thoughtpolice all along. Winston and Julia are sent separately to the Ministry of Love, where Winston meets friends who had already vanished, and also meets an old lady, possibly his mother, who had disappeared when he was only a little child. He is starved, beaten, and tortured. But even so, Winston’s spirit at least does not break, and he becomes determined not to betray Julia.

Winston’s final hope is O’Brien, the one who introduced the brotherhood to him. Ironically, O’Brien is his torturer. As a loyal member of the party, O’Brien believes he can “cure” Winston by brainwashing. Although Winston begins with a strong spirit against the party, he is subjected to electroshock treatment, until he is willing to subscribe to any party dogma, even “2+2=5,” if so directed. He now sees his happy childhood as a false memory, because the party erases that kind of record. The party’s slogan is: “Who controls the present controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” The past can be controlled because the party rules all records and people’s minds.

At the final stage of his “cure,” Winston is taken away into the notorious Room 101, where unknown numbers of resisters have emerged as party sheep. The strategy practiced upon them there is to locate a person’s weakest spot and bear down until he breaks. Winston is deathly afraid of rats, and in Room 101 he trampled by herds of them. He betrays Julia.

Soon, he is released. He is free now, but he will never be the same. He turns into an alcoholic, but more importantly, he becomes loyal to the party. “He loved Big Brother,” that is the last sentence of this novel.

It is clear that this is a warning against totalitarianism. During the torture scene, there is explicit mention of German Nazis and Russian communists. O’Brien explains the reason that these two, Nazis and Communists, have fallen: they never had the courage to recognize their own motive, brute power itself. They pretended or even believed that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. O’Brien emphasizes that Oceania is superior just because the party is concerned only with power, especially the power over the mind. Since the party controls the mind and the record, reality itself has become the party’s possession.

As we read through 1984, we cannot help but think, “what then is reality?” Under totalitarian state control, even reality can be controlled, and that is what Orwell wanted to tell us. How scary it is that the party can control even the law of gravity, forcing people to “think” that it is unimportant and it can be ignored!

“God is power, and we are the priests,” O’Brien says. It reminds us that totalitarianism is like a religion, because both of these systems ignore science. It has something to do with the human spirit. Among all kinds of animals, only mankind has spirit, so that human beings can have not only political thoughts but also a religion. The one who overcomes physical pain of torture by a strong spirit is a “saint,” from a religious point of view. Then, what would it be from political point of view? Winston tried to overcome the pain, but he couldn’t. All these conflicts with body, mind, and spirit happen only to humankind. The human is such a weak animal; we don’t have a fang to protect ourselves, we can’t run fast to escape from a lion. But we rule the earth because we “think.” The human is a thinking reed, as Pascal says. We think. Therefore, we believe in God, we are against the party, we suffer, and we have our lives. We think, therefore we are the human.