Summary: 1984

The GIST

1984 by George Orwell, published in 1949 as Nineteen Eighty-Four, is the novel that gave the modern world its vocabulary for tyranny. Big Brother, the Thought Police, Newspeak, doublethink, thoughtcrime, Room 101: every one of those phrases comes from this book, and the author's own name became an adjective because of it. One reviewer calls it, without much exaggeration, a candidate for the most important book of the twentieth century.

Orwell was born Eric Blair in India in 1903, a child of the British Empire. He went to Eton, served in the police in Burma, walked away from that career, and lived among the poor of Paris and London before he began to write under the name the world knows. He was a democratic socialist who fought in the Spanish Civil War, worked for the BBC during the Second World War, and published Animal Farm in 1945, the same year his wife died. To write this last book he withdrew to a remote farmhouse on the Scottish island of Jura. He was already seriously ill and was raising a young son alone. He wrote most of it in 1948 and died of tuberculosis in 1950, less than a year after it appeared.

He modeled the regime of the novel on Stalin's Russia and Nazi Germany and set it only a few decades ahead, close enough to feel possible. It is less a prediction than a warning, and more than seventy years on, readers keep finding their own times in it.

The Story

The world of Oceania

The year is 1984, or something like it; nobody can be quite sure of dates anymore. The world is divided among three vast powers, Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, locked in a war that never ends and whose alliances keep shifting. What used to be Great Britain now belongs to Oceania, and London is a shabby, half-ruined city that looks as if the Blitz never stopped. Everything is rationed, everything is badly made, and things are quietly getting worse.

Above the rotting streets rise four enormous buildings that dwarf everything around them, so large that all four can be seen at once from the roof of an ordinary block of flats. The Ministry of Truth, said to hold three thousand rooms above ground, handles news, entertainment, education and the arts, which is to say it manufactures lies. The Ministry of Peace runs the war. The Ministry of Plenty manages the economy, which means managing shortages. The Ministry of Love maintains law and order through torture.

Oceania is ruled by the Party, whose face is Big Brother and whose three slogans are everywhere: "War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength." In every room hangs a telescreen, a device that pours out propaganda and watches you at the same time, and that cannot be switched off. The Thought Police are listening. Citizens are encouraged to watch one another. Each day they gather for the Two Minutes Hate, where the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the supposed arch-traitor and leader of a shadowy resistance called the Brotherhood, is put up on the screens, and for two minutes everyone screams at it in a frenzy.

Society has three layers. At the top is the small Inner Party. Beneath it is the Outer Party, the clerks and functionaries. At the bottom are the proles, the poor majority, whom the Party scarcely bothers to watch.

Winston Smith

Winston Smith is a middle-aged member of the Outer Party, a small cog in this machine. He works in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, where his job is to rewrite the past: altering old newspaper articles, photographs and public records so that whatever the Party says today has always been true. The Party's reasoning is spelled out in another slogan: "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." Winston is good at the work. He also hates it, and hates the Party, and cannot stop noticing that his own memories do not match the official record. He believes, for instance, that the Party took power in a revolution sometime in the 1960s, but there is no longer any way to check.

So he commits a crime. He buys a blank book and starts a diary. In Oceania there are no laws as such, only acts for or against the Party, and this is one that can get a person killed. Winston hides from the telescreen's view to write, and afterward has to scrub a telltale ink stain from his fingers. From the first sentence he thinks of himself as already dead. Still, the diary is his: a place where he can set down what he actually sees and thinks. It is the opposite of his day job, where he uses the written word to erase the truth.

Julia and O'Brien

Two people begin to occupy his mind. One is O'Brien, a powerful member of the Inner Party. Something in the man's manner convinces Winston that O'Brien secretly shares his doubts. The other is a dark-haired young woman from the Fiction Department, where novels are produced by machine. Winston distrusts her, until the day she slips him a note that says she loves him. He has to destroy it at once.

Her name is Julia, and with her the book changes key. They meet in secret, and then in a room Winston rents above an antique shop in a prole district. The room has no telescreen, or so they believe. There Winston keeps a glass paperweight he bought for no reason except that it is beautiful and useless. For a while the two of them have something like a life. They talk about their half-buried memories, about whether the war is even real (Julia suspects the Party stages it), and about what a better world might look like. Their affair is itself a rebellion, because the Party treats private desire and private loyalty as crimes. Both of them know it cannot last. They tell each other honestly that under torture each would end up giving the other away. The dread of what goes on in the Ministry of Love, and in the place called Room 101, hangs over everything they do.

Winston's larger hope lies with the proles, who outnumber the Party many times over and are still capable of thinking and feeling for themselves, if poverty has not ground the fight out of them. His nearer hope is O'Brien. At last O'Brien makes contact and invites them to his home, where Winston declares himself an enemy of Big Brother. O'Brien tells them he belongs to the Brotherhood, warns them that nothing waits ahead except struggle and death, and arranges for Winston to receive the book: Goldstein's forbidden account of how Oceania really works.

Winston carries it back to the room above the shop and, with Julia beside him, begins to read. Orwell lets us read over his shoulder for many pages. The book explains that the three superstates are too evenly matched for any of them to win, and that the war is not meant to be won. Its purpose is to use up what the people produce and to keep them poor, frightened and obedient. What happens to Winston and Julia after that is for readers of the novel to find out.

What It's Really About

Power for its own sake. Orwell imagines the most complete tyranny he can: a government that wants obedience and belief as well. The novel states its ambition plainly: "The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought." Shortage is policy too. Even favored groups are kept near hardship, because scarcity makes small privileges matter more.

Language as a cage. Newspeak is the Party's rebuilt version of English, and unlike any other language its dictionary gets shorter every year. The opposite of "good" is "ungood." Synonyms and shades of meaning are stripped out. The aim is to make rebellious thoughts impossible by removing the words needed to think them. Even Shakespeare and Kipling are being translated into it. An appendix to the novel sets out how Newspeak works, and careful readers have noticed that it describes the language in the past tense, a hint that the project may not have succeeded.

The destruction of truth. If every record can be changed, memory has nothing to stand on. Doublethink is how citizens cope: the ability, as the book puts it, "to tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient." The slogan "War is Peace" turns out to be literally true inside this system, since a war that never ends keeps society frozen in place.

The written word. Orwell had trouble finding a publisher for Animal Farm, and he makes writing itself the heart of the struggle. Winston's diary and Julia's note are acts of resistance, his job is an act of censorship, and Goldstein's book is treated almost as scripture. Orwell even leaves room to doubt whether that book is genuine or a trap laid by the Party.

What makes us human. Against the machine Orwell sets small things: a private sentence, a pretty object, one person loved. The question underneath the whole novel is whether people can be changed so thoroughly that they forget their longing for freedom, dignity and love.

Readers are divided on the book as a novel. It is bleak, and some reviewers find its political passages stronger than its plot, and complain that the story stops dead for the long extract from Goldstein. One sums it up as a great book that is not always good fiction. Hardly anyone disputes its force. It has served as a touchstone against totalitarian thinking on both the right and the left, and readers of every persuasion keep reaching for it to describe surveillance, propaganda and mob outrage in their own day.

Who Should Read It

Anyone who has used the word "Orwellian" and wants to know where it came from. If you care about politics, privacy, propaganda or how language shapes thought, this is essential reading, and it rewards a return visit if you last met it in a classroom. Be warned that it is a dark, unsparing book; you read it less for comfort than for the clarity it leaves behind.