1984: The State of Repression against the Freedom to Remember

 By: Marco Roncagliolo

George Orwell, a British author, who wrote a novel called Nineteen Eight-four was published in 1949 as a warning against the apearance of the Totalitarian Systems of Government. The dystopian world of 1984 enfacises the concepts such as newspeak, a way of decreasing the amount of words in the English language; Big Brother, the representation of the powerful state with the famous phrase “Big Brother is Watching You”; the Thought Police, the main instrument of impossing the precepts of the Party; and Room 101, the chamber of torture where all of your fears imposse the will of the government.

My essay is the product of reading the novel Nineteen Eighty-four, the first part are the representation of the State like Big Brother or the ministries, and his elements of repression by invoking newspeak, thoughtcrime, doublethink, and other ways of thinking the citizen should follow.

The second part, enfacises the fight for the freedom to think, mainly represented by the memories of Winston Smith; the Brotherhood; and the fight in Room No. 101 against the turture applied in the turture chamber by O´Brian, one of the party member.

The State of Repression

Institutions of the State

Big Brother

The blackmoustachio’d face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston’s own.

Then the face of Big Brother faded away again, and instead the three slogans of the Party stood out

in bold capitals:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

In the Party histories, of course, Big Brother figured as the leader and guardian of the Revolution since its very earliest days. His exploits had been gradually pushed backwards in time until already they extended into the fabulous world of the forties and the thirties, when the capitalists in their strange cylin-drical hats still rode through the streets of London in great gleaming motor-cars or horse carriages with glass sides. There was no knowing how much of this legend was true

Big Brother is the “blackmoustachio´d face down from every commanding corner”, always looking at people from different parts of the city through his famous say “Big Brother is Watching You”. Since the old times, the Party histories mention him as the “leader and guardian” of the Revolution, but there is not much knowledge if his legendary past is true.

·      Ministries of the State

The Ministry of Truth—Minitrue, in Newspeak [New-speak was the official language of Oceania. For an account of its structure and etymology see Appendix.]—was star-tlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white con-crete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air.

Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order. And the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty.

The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There were no windows in it at all. Winston had never been inside the Ministry of Love, nor within half a kilometre of it. It was a place impossible to enter except on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests.

Subsections of the Ministry of Truth: There was even a whole sub-section—Pornosec, it was called in Newspeak—engaged in producing the lowest kind of pornography, which was sent out in sealed packets and which no Party member, other than those who worked on it, was permitted to look at.

Everyday work of Winston in the Ministry for internal purposes: Each contained a message of only one or two lines, in the abbreviated jargon—not actually Newspeak, but con-sisting largely of Newspeak words—which was used in the Ministry for internal purposes. They ran:

times 17.3.84 bb speech malreported africa rectify

times 19.12.83 forecasts 3 yp 4th quarter 83 misprints verify current issue

times 14.2.84 miniplenty malquoted chocolate rectify

times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling

With a faint feeling of satisfaction Winston laid the fourth message aside. It was an intricate and responsible job and had better be dealt with last. The other three were rou-tine matters, though the second one would probably mean some tedious wading through lists of figures.

Winston dialled ‘back numbers’ on the telescreen and called for the appropriate issues of ‘The Times’, which slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes’ delay. The messages he had received referred to articles or news items which for one reason or another it was thought neces-sary to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify. For example, it appeared from ‘The Times’ of the seventeenth of March that Big Brother, in his speech of the previous day, had predicted that the South Indian front would re-main quiet but that a Eurasian offensive would shortly be

·         Ingsoc

Down in the street the wind flapped the torn poster to and fro, and the word INGSOC fitfully appeared and van-ished. Ingsoc. The sacred principles of Ingsoc. Newspeak, doublethink, the mutability of the past. He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable. What certainty had he that a single human creature now living was on his side? And what way of knowing that the dominion of the Party would not endure FOR EVER? Like an answer, the three slogans on the white face of the Minis-try of Truth came back to him:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

He took a twenty-five cent piece out of his pocket. There, too, in tiny clear lettering, the same slogans were inscribed, and on the other face of the coin the head of Big Broth-er. Even from the coin the eyes pursued you. On coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters, and on the wrappings of a cigarette packet—everywhere. Al-ways the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed—no escape. Nothing was your own ex-cept the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.

Elements of Repression

·        Thought Police

the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time.

A few agents of the Thought Police moved always among them, spreading false rumours and marking down and eliminating the few individuals who were judged capable of becoming dangerous; but no attempt was made to indoctri-nate them with the ideology of the Party.

The children, on the other hand, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately.

Proletarians, in practice, are not allowed to graduate into the Party. The most gifted among them, who might possibly become nu-clei of discontent, are simply marked down by the Thought Police and eliminated.

He knew now that for seven years the Thought Police had watched him like a bee-tle under a magnifying glass. There was no physical act, no word spoken aloud, that they had not noticed, no train of thought that they had not been able to infer. Even the speck of whitish dust on the cover of his diary they had careful-ly replaced.

The Thought Police have the responsibility to “watch everyone all the time”, a few agents are responsable for spreading false rumours and marking down and eliminating the few individuals who were capable of becoming dangerous”. Also children, like the Anders´children and family becomes parte of the Thought Police.

·         Thoughtcrime

Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed for ever. You might dodge success-fully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.

But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there’s no reason or ex-cuse for committing thoughtcrime. It’s merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control.

‘Are you guilty?’ said Winston.

‘Of course I’m guilty!’ cried Parsons with a servile glance at the telescreen. ‘You don’t think the Party would arrest an innocent man, do you?’ His frog-like face grew calm-er, and even took on a slightly sanctimonious expression. ‘Thoughtcrime is a dreadful thing, old man,’ he said senten-tiously. ‘It’s insidious. It can get hold of you without your even knowing it.

·         Telescreen

The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vi-sion which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard.

From the telescreen a brassy fe-male voice was squalling a patriotic song. He sat staring at the marbled cover of the book, trying without success to shut the voice out of his consciousness.

The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one’s teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one’s neck. The Hate had started.

The Voice of the Telescreen: The voice from the telescreen paused. A trumpet call, clear and beautiful, floated into the stagnant air. The voice continued raspingly:

’Attention! Your attention, please! A newsflash has this moment arrived from the Malabar front. Our forces in South India have won a glorious victory. I am authorized to say that the action we are now reporting may well bring the war within measurable distance of its end. Here is the newsflash— —’

‘Victory Square, near the monument.’ ‘It’s full of telescreens.’

‘It doesn’t matter if there’s a crowd.’ ‘Any signal?’

But you could share in that future if you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the body, and passed on the secret doctrine that two plus two make four.

‘We are the dead,’ he said.

‘We are the dead,’ echoed Julia dutifully.

‘You are the dead,’ said an iron voice behind them. They sprang apart. Winston’s entrails seemed to have

turned into ice. He could see the white all round the irises of

Julia’s eyes. Her face had turned a milky yellow. The smear of rouge that was still on each cheekbone stood out sharply, almost as though unconnected with the skin beneath.

‘You are the dead,’ repeated the iron voice.

‘It was behind the picture,’ breathed Julia.

‘It was behind the picture,’ said the voice. ‘Remain exactly where you are. Make no movement until you are ordered.’

·         Hate Week

The preparations for Hate Week were in full swing, and the staffs of all the Ministries were working overtime. Pro-cessions, meetings, military parades, lectures, waxworks, displays, film shows, telescreen programmes all had to be organized; stands had to be erected, effigies built, slogans coined, songs written, rumours circulated, photographs faked. Julia’s unit in the Fiction Department had been tak-en off the production of novels and was rushing out a series of atrocity pamphlets.

In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the mad-dening bleating voice that came from the screen. The little sandy-haired woman had turned bright pink, and her mouth was opening and shutting like that of a landed fish. Even O’Brien’s heavy face was flushed. He was sitting very straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling and quivering as though he were standing up to the assault of a wave. The dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun cry-ing out ‘Swine! Swine! Swine!’ and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen. It struck Goldstein’s nose and bounced off; the voice contin-ued inexorably. In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violent-ly against the rung of his chair. The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act

·         Reality Control

Reality Control : He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed— if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature al-terable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control’, they called it: in New-speak, ‘doublethink’.

·         Doublethink

.... world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling care-fully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again

·         Purges of the Party

Original leaders of the Revolution: The story really began in the middle sixties, the period of the great purges in which the original leaders of the Revolution were wiped out once and for all. By 1970 none of them was left, except Big Brother himself. All the rest had by that time been exposed as traitors and counter-revolutionar-ies. Goldstein had fled and was hiding no one knew where, and of the others, a few had simply disappeared, while the majority had been executed after spectacular public trials at which they made confession of their crimes. Among the last survivors were three men named Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford. It must have been in 1965 that these three had been arrested.

As often happened, they had vanished for a year or more, so that one did not know whether they were alive or dead, and then had suddenly been brought forth to incriminate themselves in the usual way. They had con-fessed to intelligence with the enemy (at that date, too, the enemy was Eurasia), embezzlement of public funds, the murder of various trusted Party members, intrigues against the leadership of Big Brother which had started long before the Revolution happened, and acts of sabotage causing the death of hundreds of thousands of people. After confess-ing to these things they had been pardoned, reinstated in the Party, and given posts which were in fact sinecures but which sounded important. All three had written long, ab- ject articles in ‘The Times’, analysing the reasons for their defection and promising to make amends.

Some time after their release Winston had actually seen all three of them in the Chestnut Tree Cafe. He remembered the sort of terrified fascination with which he had watched them out of the corner of his eye. They were men far old-er than himself, relics of the ancient world, almost the last great figures left over from the heroic days of the Party. The glamour of the underground struggle and the civil war still faintly clung to them. He had the feeling, though already at that time facts and dates were growing blurry, that he had known their names years earlier than he had known that of Big Brother. But also they were outlaws, enemies, untouch-ables, doomed with absolute certainty to extinction within a year or two. No one who had once fallen into the hands of the Thought Police ever escaped in the end. They were corpses waiting to be sent back to the grave.

Withers the Unperson: Withers, however, was already an UNPERSON. He did not exist: he had never existed. Win-ston decided that it would not be enough simply to reverse the tendency of Big Brother’s speech. It was better to make it deal with something totally unconnected with its origi-nal subject.

What was needed was a piece of pure fantasy. Suddenly there sprang into his mind, ready made as it were, the image of a certain Comrade Ogil-vy, who had recently died in battle, in heroic circumstances.

Today he should commemorate Comrade Ogilvy. It was true that there was no such person as Comrade Ogilvy, but a few lines of print and a couple of faked photographs would soon bring him into existence.

Winston thought for a moment, then pulled the speak-write towards him and began dictating in Big Brother’s familiar style: a style at once military and pedantic, and, because of a trick of asking questions and then promptly answering them (’What lessons do we learn from this fact, comrades? The lesson—which is also one of the fundamen-tal principles of Ingsoc—that,’ etc., etc.), easy to imitate.

At the age of three Comrade Ogilvy had refused all toys except a drum, a sub-machine gun, and a model helicopter. At six—a year early, by a special relaxation of the rules—he had joined the Spies, at nine he had been a troop leader. At eleven he had denounced his uncle to the Thought Police after overhearing a conversation which appeared to him to have criminal tendencies. At seventeen he had been a dis-trict organizer of the Junior Anti-Sex League. At nineteen he had designed a hand-grenade which had been adopted by the Ministry of Peace and which, at its first trial, had killed thirty-one Eurasian prisoners in one burst.

·         Room No. 101

The door opened. The cold-faced young officer stepped into the cell. With a brief movement of the hand he indi-cated Ampleforth.

‘Room 101,’ he said.

Ampleforth marched clumsily out between the guards, his face vaguely perturbed, but uncomprehending.

What seemed like a long time passed. The pain in Win-ston’s belly had revived. His mind sagged round and round on the same trick, like a ball falling again and again into the same series of slots. He had only six thoughts. The pain in his belly; a piece of bread; the blood and the screaming; O’Brien; Julia; the razor blade. There was another spasm in his entrails, the heavy boots were approaching. As the door opened, the wave of air that it created brought in a power-ful smell of cold sweat. Parsons walked into the cell. He was wearing khaki shorts and a sports-shirt.

This time Winston was startled into self-forgetfulness.

‘YOU here!’ he said.

The door opened. With a small gesture the officer indi-cated the skull-faced man.

‘Room 101,’ he said.

There was a gasp and a flurry at Winston’s side. The man had actually flung himself on his knees on the floor, with his hand clasped together.

‘Comrade! Officer!’ he cried. ‘You don’t have to take me to that place! Haven’t I told you everything already? What else is it you want to know? There’s nothing I wouldn’t confess, nothing! Just tell me what it is and I’ll confess straight off. Write it down and I’ll sign it—anything! Not room 101!’

‘Room 101,’ said the officer.

‘What is in Room 101?’

The expression on O’Brien’s face did not change. He an-swered 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 the session was at an end. A needle jerked into Winston’s arm. He sank almost instantly into deep sleep.

‘The worst thing in the world,’ said O’Brien, ‘varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal.’

‘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 of the cage. But at this moment the meaning of the mask-like attachment in front 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 pan-ic that used to occur in your dreams? There was a wall of blackness in front of you, and a roaring sound in your ears.

‘Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you do 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 the rats. He was still strapped in the chair, but he had fallen through the floor, through the walls of the build-ing, through the earth, through the oceans, through the atmosphere, into outer space, into the gulfs between the stars—always away, away, away from the rats.

‘There are three stages in your reintegration,’ said O’Brien. ‘There is learning, there is understanding, and there is ac-ceptance. It is time for you to enter upon the second stage.’ As always, Winston was lying flat on his back. But of late his bonds were looser. They still held him to the bed, but he could move his knees a little and could turn his head from side to side and raise his arms from the elbow. The dial, also, had grown to be less of a terror. He could evade its pangs if he was quick-witted enough: it was chiefly when he showed stupidity that O’Brien pulled the lever. Sometimes they got through a whole session without use of the dial. He could not remember how many sessions there had been. The whole process seemed to stretch out over a long, indefi-nite time—weeks, possibly—and the intervals between the sessions might sometimes have been days, sometimes only an hour or two.

Liberty of the People

Writting Memories

Winston Writting in his Diary: Curiously, the chiming of the hour seemed to have put new heart into him. He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage. He went back to the table, dipped his pen, and wrote:

To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone—to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink—greetings!

·         Fighting the Minutes of Hate

Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp. Thus, at one moment Winston’s hatred was not turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at such moments his heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen, sole guardian of truth and sanity in a world of lies. And yet the very next instant he was at one with the people about him, and all that was said of Goldstein seemed to him to be true.

·         Fighting in Room No. 1

‘You are ruling over us for our own good,’ he said feebly. ‘You believe that human beings are not fit to govern them-selves, and therefore——’

He started and almost cried out. A pang of pain had shot through his body. O’Brien had pushed the lever of the dial up to thirty-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. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power.

The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human be-ings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relin-quishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end.

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictator-ship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?’

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 at present power is only a word so far as you are concerned. It is time for you to gather some idea of what power means. The first thing you must realize is that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual. You know the Party slogan: ‘Freedom is Slavery”.

For a moment Winston ignored the dial. He made a vio-lent effort to raise himself into a sitting position, and merely succeeded in wrenching his body painfully.

‘But how can you control matter?’ he burst out. ‘You don’t even control the climate or the law of gravity. And there are disease, pain, death——’

O’Brien silenced him by a movement of his hand. ‘We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is in-side the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation—any-thing. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to. I do not wish to, because the Party does not wish it. You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature.’

But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loy-alty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, ex-cept the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science.

The espionage, the betrayals, the arrests, the tor-tures, the executions, the disappearances will never cease. It will be a world of terror as much as a world of triumph. The more the Party is powerful, the less it will be tolerant: the weaker the opposition, the tighter the despotism. Gold-stein and his heresies will 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 be played out over and over again generation after generation, always in subtler forms. Always we shall have the heretic here at our mercy, screaming with pain, broken up, contemptible—and in the end utterly penitent, saved from himself, crawling to our feet of his own accord.

A world of victory after victory, triumph after triumph after triumph: an endless pressing, pressing, pressing upon the nerve of power. You are beginning, I can see, to realize what that world will be like. But in the end you will do more than understand it. You will accept it, wel-come 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 de-scribed. 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?’

‘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 and he said more harshly: ‘And you consider yourself morally superior to us, with our lies and our cruelty?’

‘Yes, I consider myself superior.’

‘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, grey- coloured, skeleton-like thing was coming towards him. Its actual appearance was frightening, and not merely the fact that he knew it to be himself. He moved closer to the glass. The creature’s face seemed to be protruded, be-cause of its bent carriage. A forlorn, jailbird’s face with a nobby forehead running back into a bald scalp, a crooked nose, and battered-looking cheekbones above which his eyes were fierce and watchful.

He seized one of Winston’s remaining front teeth be-tween his powerful thumb and forefinger. A twinge of pain shot through Winston’s jaw. O’Brien had wrenched the loose tooth out by the roots. He tossed it 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 mirror again. Do you see that thing facing you? That is the last man. If you are human, that is humanity. Now put your clothes on again.’

He was aware of his ugliness, his gracelessness, a bundle of bones in filthy underclothes sitting weeping in the harsh white light: but he could not stop himself. O’Brien laid a hand on his shoulder, almost kindly.

‘You did it!’ sobbed Winston. ‘You reduced me to this

state.’

‘No, Winston, you reduced yourself to it. This is what you accepted when you set yourself up against the Party. It was all contained in that first act. Nothing has happened that you did not foresee.’

O’Brien had seen what he meant without the need for explanation.

‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘how soon will they shoot me?’

‘It might be a long time,’ said O’Brien. ‘You are a difficult case. But don’t give up hope. Everyone is cured sooner or later. In the end we shall shoot you.’

Weeks or months must have passed. It would have been possible now to keep count of the passage of time, if he had felt any interest in doing so, since he was being fed at what appeared to be regular intervals. He was getting, he judged, three meals in the twenty-four hours; sometimes he won-dered dimly whether he was getting them by night or by day. The food was surprisingly good, with meat at every third meal. Once there was even a packet of cigarettes. He had no matches, but the never-speaking guard who brought his food would give him a light. The first time he tried to smoke it made him sick, but he persevered, and spun the packet out for a long time, smoking half a cigarette after each meal.

They had played sound-tracks to him, shown him photographs. Some of them were photographs of Julia and himself. Yes, even... He could not fight against the Party any longer. Besides, the Party was in the right. It must be so; how could the immortal, collective brain be mistaken? By what external standard could you check its judgements? Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think as they thought. Only——!

The pencil felt thick and awkward in his fingers. He be-gan to write down the thoughts that came into his head. He wrote first in large clumsy capitals:

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

Then almost without a pause he wrote beneath it:

TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE

But then there came a sort of check. His mind, as though shying away from something, seemed unable to concen-trate.

He accepted everything. The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. Jones, Aar-onson, and Rutherford were guilty of the crimes they were charged with. How easy it all was! Only surrender, and everything else followed. It was like swimming against a current that swept you backwards however hard you struggled, and then suddenly deciding to turn round and go with the current instead of opposing it.

‘You have had thoughts of deceiving me,’ he said. ‘That was stupid. Stand up straighter. Look me in the face.’

He paused, and went on in a gentler tone:

‘You are improving. Intellectually there is very little wrong with you. It is only emotionally that you have failed to make progress. Tell me, Winston—and remember, no lies: you know that I am always able to detect a lie—tell me, what are your true feelings towards Big Brother?’

‘I hate him.’

‘You hate him. Good. Then the time has come for you to take the last step. You must love Big Brother. It is not enough to obey him: you must love him.’

Room No. 101 is a torture room, where people who want to rebel against the party are taken to make them believe they are wrong through fear. Even though, Winston is trying to fight the fear, he sometimes cedes, like when he said to punish Julia, the woman whom he loved and passed many nights together.

Another episode, when O´Brian, his torturer, asked him if he considers himself a man, Winston answers “Yes”. This part is important, because he is trying to fight the inhumanity of the torturer by saying you are not making me believe of what the Party wants me to believe.

O´Brian admits that the state is a dictatorship, established  to safeguard a revolution, and to form the object of the dictatorship to be power.

At the end, Winston is overwelmed by O´Brian torture chamber in room 101, that he begins to understand and believe and love Big Brother.

Conclusions

The Party is represented by Big Brother, a legend of the revolution that became the symbol of the Party. Another institutions are the ministries, places of great imponence and were each ministry is responsable for distorting the information, like the work everyday done by Winston. The secret police is represented by the Thought Police, responsable for following any person and watching his every move. Everyone is seen through the Telescreen, screens showing the face of Big Brother, to give instructions or to follow every move a person does.

The elements of repression, the thoughtcrime is the crime commited by a person, who doesn´t follow the predicaments of the Party. Hate Week is another way of repression to see the patriotism of the citizen, and measure his reaction to the information shown in the telescreen. A third way is the reality control, as the way to control the time while also controlling the future. And the application of the doublethink, a system to know what the Party wants you to think, for example is there is gravity in double think there is gravity is the Party tells you there is. A way the Party clean itself are the purges of important leaders of the revolution by naming them Unperson.

The fight for freedom is shown in every part of the novel, for example Winston Smith is writting a diary of his opinion, against the repression, and ideas taken from the book Goldstein wrote. In the minute of hate, there is contradiction when the telescreen shows the face of Goldstein and people scream like lunatics, Winston is thinking of his anger against Big Brother. Finally, in Room No. 101, Winston is arguing against his torturer named O´Brian about the repression by the Party, the Spirit of Man, and ends being convinced by O´Brian of the truth given by the Party

This is the representation of Totalitarian World, where there is a leader, a Party, a Doctrine, and paramilitary forces to enforce the will of the government. The elements of repression are the personality cult created by a totalitarian regime, while disension is repressed through purges within the Party or innocent citizen. The fredoom to think, to express, and to remember is an important element in the fight against repression, usually the opposition by intellectuals and any member tired of being told what to do.

Analysis of the book 1984

The State 

Big Brother represents the state watching your every move in life, controlling the way you should be born and the way where to put your pensions. But also, the Party histories represent the legends created by the state as the heroes of war to increase the patriotism or identification of the country and the person.

The ministries are places where the magnificence and the appearance of fright came to the mind as you pass them. It has subdepartments, like the Pornsec, engaged in producing the lowest pornography. Inside one of the ministries, Winston is responsable for changing the information he receives from a tube.

Ingsoc is composed of his sacred principles: Newspeak, doublethink, the mutability of the past. For Winston the “past was dead, the future was unimaginable”. The control of the past is fundamental in the novel, but also important in a totalitarian state, which always wants to distort the truth, and make his truth the irrefutable truth.

The Thought Police represents the National Intelligence Service or the Secret Police responsable for observing the people dangerous for the state, because those people have the freedom to think and express it. Not always in favor of the state´s will.

 Elements of Repression

The Thoughtcrime represents the idea that a person have to follow the way the State have predestine to your life, the way you think should be repressed, and the idea of self-discipline is the example of a great citizen.

The Telescreen is “received and transmitted simultaneously”, sometimes is the voice of a woman in the morning in the morning exercise. Other times is the face of Big Brother saying “Big Brother is Watching You”, and sometimes is a screen behind the portrait to catch you doing a Thoughtcrime or any other improper action that becomes a crime, like having sex or sexcrime.

The Hate Week is a series of days dedicated to fulfilling many activities, like processions, meetings, military parades, lectures, waxworks, displays, film shows, telescreen programmes, all organized to see the attitude of the people toward the telescreen showing actions of glory on the front agains the enemy. Sometimes, the Party can see you scream louder than others, so this will help them assess the attitude of the person in favor or against the doctrine of the State.

Reality control is the control of knowledge, “Who controls the past, controls the future”, means the ultimate control of the knowledge. This dictaminates what knowledge should be shared by the state to the citizen, while other information erased because can be dangerous for the Party.

Doublethink is “To know and not to know”, to hold simultaneously two opinion which cancelled out. This process is called doublethink, have the possibility of knowing something that can be change or make you change it by the will of the Party and the application of fear.

The differents ways of purging Party members, the first type of purges like the revolucionaries Goldstein, Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford and heroes, they were eliminated by public trial and execution; and the second purging was the Unperson, a person like Comrade Ogilvy was conmemorated, but later in the ministries he was erased through fake photographs or fake information about his life.

The Figth for Fredoom to Remember 

One way of fighting the Party and the State, Winston is writting in a diary his opinion of the present world, by doing that he is rebelling against the repression to think freely his opinion of his way of life, the Party, or the information gained by reading the book of Goldstein about repression of the human beings by the Party.

In the minutes of hate as part of the Hate Week, the telescreen shows the picture of Goldstein, while everyone is screaming like lunatics, but Winston focus his hate against Big Brother, the Party, and Thought Police.

The fight of Winston, he said “You are ruling over rus for our own good”, but O´Brian, the torturer, answers that he is stupid. O´Brian mentions the idea of the Dictatorship is made to safeguard the revolution, and the object of power is power, so “we are the priests of power”. 

He continues, in the future there will be no wives, no children, no sex instincts, and abolish orgasm. This is the victory, but Winston fights it by mentioning the spirit of man, to have it rebuked by O´Brian saying that he is the last man. 

At the end, O´Brian tells him to look at the mirror to see “his ugliness, his gracelessness, a bundle of bones in filthy underclothes sitting”, making him disgusted. 

Finally, when the photographs are shown of himself and Julia, he understood he could not fight the Party, and accepted everything that the past can be alterable, Oceania was at war with Eastasia, and that he loved Big Brother. Here the importance is the fight against repression by the government, whether you end up losing or wining, one day the change will happen.