Winston is clearly established from the beginning as an unheroic figure; he is thin and frail, on the way to middle age, and has a leg ulcer (we later discover that he has false teeth and is subject to coughing fits). He may, by his author's irony, have been named after Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister during World War II when he was born, but in many ways it is clear that he is to stand for Everyman. He is presented as a man from an earlier age, old enough to have a vague memory of the distant world when he was a boy and to respond to objects from an earlier era (the " smooth creamy pages " of the diary, the nib-pen which he feels the diary deserves, and the " soft rainwatery glass " of the coral paperweight) . His only memory of unselfish and devoted love from one human being to another comes from his childhood, and the culture on which the world of his childhood was based is so far removed from the one in which he now lives that when he dreams of Julia tearing off her clothes in an act of sexual (and therefore political) defiance, he wakes up with the word "Shakespeare" on his lips. Because Orwell wants to show him as a representative as well as an individual, it is important that, for example, Winston is shown genuinely to respond to the Two-Minute Hate and not as essentially different in this respect from other Party members, as would happen if he were shown from the beginning of the novel as very strong-minded or with his own clearly formed political ideas. At the beginning, Winston's rebellion consists mainly of a dislike of the physical dullness of the world in which he lives and a vague feeling that things are not as they should be, and his diary enables him to express his unease without having to formulate the principles which he feels Ingsoc has violated. His acts of rebellion against the society in which he lives (buying and writing in the diary, having an affair with Julia, visiting the prole area of the city, renting the room from Charrington, and - the most openly political - making contact with O'Brien) are, in the last analysis, less important than the rebellion of mind and feeling from which they all spring, and it is for this that he is punished. As he himself reflects in the first chapter : " Only the Thought Police mattered." His contact with Julia leads him to put into words ideas critical of the society in which they live, which before had been little more than vague feelings of unease - " the mute protest in your own bones ", as he describes it - even if she hardly listens to him when he explains these ideas to her and does not understand their significance, as when he tells her he has proof of official falsification of the news about Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford. Knowing Julia makes him feel that he is no longer, in the words of the original working title, " The Last Man in Europe ", but also makes him realize clearly that he was doomed from the moment he started writing in the diary. So an act of madness such as renting the room above Charrington's shop and continuing to meet in it (in direct contradiction of Julia's dictum that no meeting-place is safe more than twice) can be seen as an attempt to make the most of the moment before the inevitable blow falls, rather than a seriously-held hope that he can escape punishment for such a flagrant offence. His last words to Julia in the moment before the Thought Police arrest them are : " We are the dead. "

His earlier impression of O'Brien as a man of intelligence who has the same doubts about Ingsoc as himself, and the conspiratorial feeling that this creates, are so strong that he trusts O'Brien without question. Both before his arrest and when imprisoned, this trust mirrors something of the emotional dependence which a loyal member of Ingsoc should feel for Big Brother, so that in a sense O'Brien's purpose in their interviews in Miniluv is to turn Winston's love for himself into love for Big Brother. One of Orwell's most important points is that mere obedience is not enough : Winston must achieve a moment of genuine love for Big Brother, just as earlier he achieved a moment of genuine hate for Big Brother's enemy. In order to feel this love Winston has to reject, and to admit to himself that he has rejected, all feelings of love and loyalty to anyone else. In the early stages of his time in Miniluv, although he suffers degradation, torture and humiliation, there is still some integrity inside him. But finally, threatened with what is for him the worst thing in the world, he betrays Julia by begging for her to suffer in his place, and by betraying her he betrays himself. After this, as he himself reflects, something is killed in his own heart : " burnt out, cauterized out ". He has lost something vital to himself and is a shell of a man, no longer any possible threat to the State or to anyone else.

Julia 

She has dark eyes and hair, and she’s very sensual and athletic. Like Winston, Julia is against the Party, but she has a different personality from his: she’s very pragmatic. She lives “hic et nunc” (here and now), and tries to live a good present. She des not worry about their biggest problems, and tries to get pleasure in the present shacking up the Party, that means cheating it by small crimes.

In fact she is an active member, and works as a mechanic in the Fiction department of the Ministry of Truth. She also attends a prude league against sexuality: the Party considers it only related with reproduction. But Julia does not agree, and “Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner meaning of the Party’s sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party’s control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. The way she put it was: ‘When you make love you’re using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don’t give a damn for anything. They can’t bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you’re happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?’ That was very true, he thought. There was a direct intimate connexion between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account.” (Nineteen Eighty-four, II.2)  

“The young, strong body, now helpless in sleep, awoke in him a pitying, protecting feeling. But the mindless tenderness that he had felt under the hazel tree, while the thrush was singing, had not quite come back. He pulled the overalls aside and studied her smooth white flank. In the old days, he thought, a man looked at a girl’s body and saw that it was desirable, and that was the end of the story. But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.”  (Nineteen Eighty-four, II.2)    

Julia is younger than Winston and does not have his memories of the world before Ingsoc changed it. Her rebellion is more instinctive and immediate than his, and she is able to live within the State's system because she has stronger feelings of self-preservation and much greater self-confidence. She is not at all interested in the theoretical basis of rebellion; she starts to listen dutifully to Winston reading " the book " but soon goes to sleep. She is, however, much better than Winston not only at practical arrangements (for making contact, hiding signs of their meetings, etc) but also at understanding instinctively the underlying reasons for some of the Party's policies, particularly those connected with sexual matters. She understands that the reason for the Party's sexual puritanism is that by making the sexual act either a political duty between husband and wife (as it was for Katherine) or - for a man - a furtive and joyless encounter with a prole prostitute, the Party can use sexual frustration and the resulting hysteria for its own purposes. Therefore any enjoyable act of lovemaking freely entered into by two Party members (as in the first sexual contact between Winston and Julia before there is any emotional contact between them at all) is in itself a political act. Winston begins as a rebel with his mind and feelings and progresses to physical acts of rebellion via Julia's influence. She has been a rebel with her body all her adult life and has learned to survive in ways Winston does not have the capacity for, but both of them believe that " they [the State, in the form of the Thought Police " can't get inside you ", and both are proved wrong.

O’Brien    

During the “Two minutes of hate” Winston notes a man, and immediately believes that he is a member of Broherhood, an organization against B.B. The man is named O’Brien. But Winston is wrong: he is a member of the Inner Party. A very mysterious person. He’s powerful and his intelligence is superhuman: in fact he often guesses words and sentences before that Winston spells them. He got in touch with him because Charrington, the owner of the secondhand store in the proles’ district where Winston bought his diary, is a member of the Toughtpolice: he arrested them and sent to jail, where O’Brien directed tortures against Winston for converting him to the crazy dogmas of the Party through Newspeak.

"The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible." (Nineteen Eighty-four, Appendix)

Here are some sentences that O’Brien tells Winston while he is torturing him:

"There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always —do not forget this, Winston —always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face —for ever."  (Nineteen Eighty-four, III.3)

"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. That is the world that we are preparing, Winston."  (Nineteen Eighty-four, III.3)

"We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science."  (Nineteen Eighty-four, III.3)

"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-existant."  (Nineteen Eighty-four, III.3)

“ 'You asked me once,' said O'Brien, 'what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world’.”  (Nineteen Eighty-four, III.5)

"Somehow you will fail. Something will defeat you. Life will defeat you."  (Nineteen Eighty-four, III.3)

O’Brien seems also to be crazy, for his behaviour and for some particular points he says. I think that he could be considered the symbol of dictatorship’s madness, and his thought, his work can be considered the extreme trial to have a sort of individual liberation, a redemption in such a society.

All dictatorships are based on the individual liberation of the elite forming the ruling oligarchy, a “redemption” that can be obtained only by means of the annihilation of other innocent men. Ingsoc does this, but the worst feature of this dystopian world is that people do not have  anymore the possibility to fight the dictatorship because they can’t know, they can’t think. Ingsoc makes them blind, and paradoxically makes them happy. Happy to love the Big Brother, that is what Winston, defeated, will think at the end of the book:

"But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother."  (Nineteen Eighty-four, III.6)  

The secondary characters in the novel are sketched in more lightly. Perhaps the most interesting, and potentially the most complex, is O'Brien. On his first appearance Orwell, through Winston, points up two contrasting strands in his character: a coarse brutality, emphasized by his physical appearance, and the delicacy of gesture which Orwell compares to that of an eighteenth-century nobleman. It is the combination of these qualities which is so dangerous for Winston; O'Brien has the sensitivity to be aware of Winston's secret disloyalty to the State, and t he force and ability to indict pain by which he makes Winston suffer for it. He works on Winston in Miniluv with intelligent and fanatical devotion until Winston can be released back into society, cured for ever of the infection in his mind (as O'Brien sees it) which prevents him from loving Big Brother. O'Brien is an example of the type of intellectual from whom Orwell feared the worst : he would use his energy and intelligence to preserve and support a dictatorship whose sole aim was to keep power.

Big Brother

Though he does not necessarily exist, he can certainly be called a character in this novel. Omnipresent, on posters everywhere and stamped on the coins in your pocket, "BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU." Big Brother, theoretically one of the original founders of the Party and the Revolution, has never been seen by anyone, and his birthdate is unknown. He is a creation of the Party, the human face it chooses to put on its achievements so as to more easily appeal to people's devotion. Infallible, glorious, immortal, Big Brother is a symbol whose words are in fact created, ironically, by persons such as Winston working in the Ministry of Truth and "rewriting" Big Brother's speeches. Yet he is worshipped by the very people who create him, called a "savior" and prayed to. Big Brother, the mysterious all-seeing, all-knowing leader of the totalitarian society is a god-like icon to the citizens he rules. He is never seen in person, just staring out of posters and telescreens, looking stern as the caption beneath his image warns “Big Brother Is Watching You.” Big Brother demands obedience and devotion of Oceania’s citizens; in fact, he insists that they love him more than they love anyone else, even their own families. At the same time, he inspires fear and paranoia. His loyal followers are quick to betray anyone who seems to be...

Big Brother is not a real person, nobody sees Big Brother in person. Orwell had several things in mind when he created Big Brother. He was certainly thinking of Russian leader Joseph Stalin; the pictures of Big Brother even look like him. He was also thinking of Nazi leader Adolph Hitler and Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. Big Brother stands for dictators everywhere. Orwell may have been thinking about figures in certain religious faiths when he drew Big Brother. To Inner Party members, Big Brother is a leader, a bogeyman they can use to scare the people, and their authorisation for doing whatever they want. If anybody asks, they can say they are under orders from Big Brother. For the unthinking proles, Big Brother is a distant authority figure. For Winston, Big Brother is an inspiration. Big Brother excites and energises Winston, who hates him. He is also fascinated by Big Brother and drawn to him in some of the same ways that he is drawn to O'Brien, developing a love-hate response to both of them that leads to his downfall.

Proles

The proles make up about 81% of the population of Oceania. The Party itself is only interested in their labour, because the proles are mainly employed in industry and on farms. Without their labour, Oceania would break down. Despite this fact, the Party completely ignores this social caste. The curious thing about this behaviour is that the Party calls itself socialist, and generally socialism (at least in the beginning and middle of this century) is a movement of the proletariat. So one could say that the Party abuses the word "Ingsoc". Orwell again had pointed at another regime, the Nazis, who had put "socialism" into their name. One of the main phrases of the Party is "Proles and animals are free". In Oceania, the proles live in very desolate and poor quarters. Compared with the districts where the members of the Party live, there are far fewer telescreens, and policemen. And as long as the proles don't commit crimes (crimes in our sense, not in the sense of the party - Thoughtcrime) they don't have any contact with the state. Therefore in the districts of the proletarians one can find things that are abolished and forbidden to Party members. For example, old books, old furniture, prostitution and alcohol (mainly beer) Except "Victory Gin" all of these things are not available to Party members. The proletarians don't participate in the technological development. They live like they used to do many years ago. To my mind, the Party ignores the Proles because they pose no danger to their rule. The working class is too uneducated and too unorganised to pose any real threat. So there is not really a need to change the political attitudes of this class.

Considering Winston's belief that " if there is hope, it lies in the proles ", a theme which runs through the novel and which we are to understand as coming from Orwell himself, the proles play very little part in the novel. In some cases, like that of the woman singing as she hangs out her washing, they are merely in the background to point a contrast with the lives and behaviour of the members of the Party. When Winston makes an extended visit to the prole quarter and attempts to ask the old man in the pub about his memories of his youth, the response is confused and uninformative. Orwell describes Winston's hopes for the proles as " a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity " , and from the evidence in the novel, the latter part of the phrase is the more accurate description. Yet Winston needs to feel that there is some hope somewhere, and certainly there is none in the harsh world of fear and drabness in which Party members live. So the proles become for him not just a romantic hope for the future, but the only hope of all. In fact, the novel shows no hope, and certainly not for Winston. He betrays Julia and his feelings for her, and thus betrays an innermost part of himself which, once lost, can never be recovered : his personal emotions and his individual integrity, which, for Orwell, should be out of the reach of any powers of the State. Winston is no more heroic under the pressure of Mintluv than he was earlier. At the end he is seen in the Chestnut Tree cafe, where he himself had watched other men who had been broken by the State. Here he finally admits to himself that all rebellion is over and the struggle is finished. Orwell's warning is clear : Winston, with all the force of the State against him, comes not merely to accept that he is powerless against it, but actively to welcome his own defeat : he loves Big Brother.

Tom Parsons