Winston did not know where he was. He must have been in the Ministry of Love, but there was no way of making certain. He was in a cell with four telescreens around him, one in each wall.

There was an ache in his stomach and he was hungry. It might have been twenty-four hours since he had eaten, it might have been thirty-six. He sat as still as he could on the narrow bench, with his hands crossed on his knee. He had already learned to sit still. If you made unexpected movements they shouted at you from the telescreen.

He hardly thought of Julia. Logically, he knew he loved her and would not betray her. But in his heart, he felt no love for her, and he hardly even wondered what was happening to her. He thought more often of O’Brien, with a tiny bit of hope. The Brotherhood, O’Brien had said, never tried to save its members. But they would send a razor blade if they could. He was not certain that he would use the razor blade even if he got the chance. It was more natural to exist from moment to moment, accepting another ten minutes of life even if there was the certainty of torture at the end of it.

There was the sound of marching boots outside. The iron door opened and Ampleforth walked into the cell. He had been Winston’s colleague in the Ministry of Truth and had corrected poems. He had no shoes on and looked terrible; he did not even notice that Winston was there.

Winston decided he had to speak to him and risk a shout from the telescreen. Maybe Ampleforth had a razor blade.

‘Ampleforth,’ he said.

There was no shout from the telescreen. Ampleforth looked surprised.

‘Ah, Smith!’ He said. ‘You too!’

‘What are you in for?

‘To tell the truth –’ He sat down on the bench opposite Winston. ‘There is only one offence, isn’t there?’ he said.

‘And you have committed it?’

‘I seem to have. I think it was leaving the word ‘God’ in one of the poems. I couldn’t do anything else – it was impossible to change the line.’[53]

They talked casually for a while then, for no obvious reason, the telescreen shouted at them to be silent. After about twenty minutes, or maybe an hour – it was difficult to judge – there was the sound of boots outside. The door opened and the officer told Ampleforth, ‘Room 101.’

What seemed to Winston like a long time passed. He had only six thoughts. The pain in his stomach; a piece of bread; the blood and the screaming; O’Brien; Julia; the razor blade. Again he heard the heavy boots approaching. As the door opened, there was the powerful smell of cold sweat. Parsons walked into the cell.

‘You here!’ Winston said.

Parsons gave Winston a look of neither interest or surprise, but only misery.

‘What are you in for?’ said Winston.

‘Thoughtcrime!’ said Parsons, almost crying. ‘You don’t think they’ll shoot me, do you? They don’t shoot you if you haven’t actually done anything – only thoughts, which you can’t help. I know they give you a fair hearing. Oh, I trust them for that! They’ll know my record, won’t they? You know what I was like. I wasn’t bad in my way. Not clever, of course, but I tried hard. I tried to do my best for the Party, didn’t I? I’ll get off with five years don’t you think? Or even ten years? I could make myself useful in a labour-camp.’

‘Are you guilty?’ said Winston.

‘Of course I’m guilty!’ cried Parsons with a nervous look at the telescreen. ‘You don’t think the Party would arrest an innocent man, do you?’ His frog-like face grew calmer. ‘Thoughtcrime is a terrible thing. It can get hold of you without your even knowing it. Do you know how it got hold of me? In my sleep! Yes, that’s a fact. There I was, working away, trying hard – I never knew I had any bad thoughts in my mind at all. And then I started talking in my sleep. Do you know what they heard me saying?’

His voice got quieter as if he was going to talk about some embarrassing medical problem.

‘“Down with Big Brother!” Yes, I said that! Said it over and over again, it seems.’

‘Who reported you?’ said Winston.

‘It was my little daughter,’ said Parsons with a sort of sad pride. She listened at the keyhole. Heard what I was saying and went to the patrols the next day. Pretty smart, for a seven-year-old, don’t you think?’

The boots were approaching again. The door opened and O’Brien came in.

Winston stood up. The shock had stopped him being careful. For the first time in many years he forgot the presence of the telescreen.

‘They’ve got you too!’ he cried.

‘They got me a long time ago,’ said O’Brien with a gentle, almost regretful tone. He stepped to one side. From behind him a big guard came in and beat Winston so badly his left arm was now useless.

He woke up on a wooden bed. He had been beaten again and again. The confession was nothing important. But the torture was real. The beatings became less frequent, and became mainly a threat, a horror he could be sent back to if his answers were unsatisfactory. His questioners were no longer the men in black uniforms, but Party men, small with round glasses and quick movements. They took turns with him over periods – he thought, but could not be sure – of ten or twelve hours without a break. They made sure he was in constant slight pain, just to destroy him mentally. Their real weapon was the endless questioning. The only thing he wanted was to find out what they wanted him to confess, and then confess it quickly, before the bullying started again. He confessed to the murder of leading Party members, the distribution of anti-Party leaflets, stealing public money, the sale of military secrets. He confessed that he had been an Eastasian spy as far back as 1968. He confessed that he was a religious believer, an admirer of capitalism, a sex criminal.

There were other memories. He was tied in a chair surrounded by dials, under bright lights. A man in a white coat was reading the dials. There was the sound of heavy boots outside. The door opened and an officer marched in, followed by two guards.

‘Room 101,’ said the officer.

He sat up on the wooden bed, half-certain that he had heard O’Brien’s voice. All through the questioning, although he had never seen him, he had had the feeling that O’Brien was at his elbow, just out of sight. It was O’Brien who was directing everything. He told the guards to beat Winston and he stopped them killing him. He decided when Winston should scream with pain, when he should have a break, when he should be fed, when he should sleep, when he should be given drugs. He asked the questions and suggested the answers. He was the torturer, he was the protector, he was the questioner, he was the friend. And once he heard a quiet voice: ‘Don’t worry, Winston; you are under my protection now. I will save you, I will make you perfect.’ He was not sure whether it was O’Brien’s once; but it was the same voice that had said to him, ‘We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.’

Lying flat on his back, he was unable to move, his body being held down, even his head. O’Brien was looking down at him rather sadly. Under his hand there was a dial with a lever on top and numbers around 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, Winston felt pain all over his body. It was a frightening pain, because he could not see what was happening, and he felt that it would kill him. He did not know whether the thing was really happening or whether the effect was electrically produced, but his body was being turned out of shape, the joints slowly being torn apart. He tried to stay silent for as long as possible.

‘You are afraid,’ said O’Brien, washing his face, ‘that in another moment something is going to break. Your special fear is that it will be your back. That is what you are thinking, isn’t it, Winston?’

Winston did not answer. O’Brien pulled the lever on the dial and the pain immediately stopped.

‘That was forty,’ said O’Brien. ‘You can see that the numbers on this dial go up to a hundred. Will you please remember, throughout our conversation, that I have the power to give you pain at any moment, and whatever amount I choose. If you tell me any lies, or give answers that are at all unclear, or even speak without your usual intelligence, you will cry out in pain, immediately. Do you understand that?’

‘Yes,’ said Winston.

O’Brien relaxed a little. When he spoke his voice was gentle and patient. He seemed like a doctor, a teacher, even a priest, wanting to explain and persuade rather than punish.[54]

‘I am taking trouble with you, Winston,’ he said, ‘because you are worth trouble. You know very well what is the matter with you. You have known it for years, though you have fought against the knowledge. You are insane. Your memory is faulty. Fortunately we can cure it. Now we will look at an 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 opened his mouth to speak and then did not speak. He could not stop looking at 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, we were not at war with Eastasia at all. The war was against Eurasia. That had lasted for four years. Before that –’

O’Brien stopped him with a movement of his hand.

‘Another example,’ he said. ‘Some years ago you made a very serious mistake indeed. You believed that three men, three one-time Party members named Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford – men executed for serious crimes after making the fullest possible confession – were not guilty of those crimes. You believed that you had seen clear evidence proving that their confessions were false. There was a certain photograph which you thought you saw but had not. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.’

O’Brien showed Winston the photograph.

‘It exists!’ he cried.

‘No’ said O’Brien.

He stepped across the room. There was a memory hole in the opposite wall. O’Brien threw the paper in and it was burned.

‘Burnt,’ he said. ‘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 felt hopeless. That was doublethink. If he could have been certain that O’Brien was lying, it would not have seemed to matter. But it was perfectly possible that O’Brien had really forgotten the photograph.

‘There is a Party slogan about the control of the past,’ he said. ‘Repeat it, please.’

‘“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,”’ repeated Winston.

‘“Who controls the present controls the past,”’ said O’Brien. ‘Is it your opinion, Winston that the past has real existence?’

Again Winston felt helpless. He looked at the dial. He not only did not know whether ‘yes’ or ‘no’ was the answer that would save him from pain; he did not even know which answer he believed to be the true one.

O’Brien smiled slightly. ‘You are no philosopher, Winston,’ he said. ‘Until now you had never considered what is meant by existence. Does the past exist concretely, in space? Is there somewhere or other a world of solid 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 Winston, again forgetting the dial for a moment. ‘We cannot control it. It is outside ourselves. You have not controlled mine!’

O’Brien became serious again and laid his hand on the dial.

‘No,’ he said, ‘you have not controlled it. That is what has brought you here. You are here because you failed to discipline yourself. You preferred to be a madman, a minority of one. Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something that exists externally. When you tell yourself that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon dies: only in the mind of the Party, which is many people and never dies. Whatever the Party says is the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party. That is the fact that you have got to re-learn, Winston. It needs an act of self-destruction, a great effort.’

He stopped for a few moments, as though to allow Winston to understand all this.

‘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, with four fingers held up.

‘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 sudden shot of pain. The needle of the dial had gone up to fifty-five. Winston was covered in sweat. O’Brien watched him holding up four fingers. He drew back the lever but the pain was only slightly less.

‘How many fingers, Winston?’

‘Four.’

The needle went up to sixty.

‘Four! Four! What else can I say? Four!’

The needle must have risen again, but he did not look at it.

‘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!’

Suddenly he realised that he was sitting up with O’Brien’s arm round his shoulders. He felt very cold and was shaking uncontrollably, the tears were rolling down his cheeks. For a moment he held on to O’Brien like a baby, strangely helped by the heavy arm round his shoulders.

‘You are a slow learner, Winston,’ said O’Brien gently.

‘How can I help it?’ he replied. ‘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 are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy for the mind to become healthy again.’

He laid Winston down on the bed.

‘Again, said O’Brien to the man in the white coat.

The pain rushed into Winston’s body. The needle must be at seventy, seventy-five. He had shut his eyes this time. He knew that the fingers were still there, and still four. All that mattered was somehow to stay alive until the pain stopped.

The pain lessened again. He opened his eyes. O’Brien had pulled 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 want: to tell me that you see five, or really to see them?’

‘Really to see them.’

‘Again,’ said O’Brien.

Perhaps the needle was at eighty – ninety. He could hardly remember what he had to do. He only knew he was trying to count the fingers, and that there were either four or five. The pain lessened again. When he opened his eyes he saw the same thing.

‘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 was put into Winston’s arm and a beautiful healing warmth spread all through his body. The pain was already half-forgotten. He opened his eyes and looked up gratefully at O’Brien. He suddenly loved him deeply.[55] O’Brien was looking down at him with a kind expression.

‘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 think we bring people to this place?’

‘To make them confess.’

‘No, that is not the reason. Try again.’

‘To punish them.’

‘No!’ shouted O’Brien, shocked. ‘No! Not merely to get your confession, nor to punish you. Shall I tell you why we have brought you here? To cure you! To make you sane! Will you understand, Winston, that no one we bring to this place ever leaves uncured? We are not interested in those stupid crimes that you have committed. We do not destroy our enemies, we change them. Do you understand what I mean by that? When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the thought-criminal because he resists us: so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We burn all the evil out of him and bring him to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of us before we kill him. We cannot allow even one mistaken thought to exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be.’

‘Do not imagine that you will save yourself, Winston, however completely you surrender to us. No one who has ever committed crimes will be forgiven. Even if we do not kill you, you will never escape from us. What happens to you here is for ever. Understand that now. We will crush you down to the point from which you could never recover, even if you lived for a thousand years. Never again will you be able to feel like a human. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be able to love, enjoy friendship, laugh, be curious, be brave, or be honest. You will be empty and then we will fill you with ourselves.’

He paused and told the man in the white coat to move a big machine to behind Winston’s head. He sat down with his face almost on the same level as Winston’s.

‘Three thousand,’ he said.

Two soft pads were placed above Winston’s ears.

‘This time it will not hurt,’ he said. ‘Keep your eyes fixed on mine.’

At that moment there was a huge explosion, or what seemed like an explosion and a sudden bright light. It was painless, but powerful and Winston could not move. It felt like a piece had been taken out of his brain.

‘It will not last,’ said O’Brien. ‘Look me in the eyes. What country is Oceania at war with?’

‘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 the beginning of your life, since the beginning of the Party, since the beginning of history, the war has continued without a break, always the same war. Do you remember 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 four fingers.

‘There are five fingers there. Do you see five fingers?’

‘Yes.’

And he did see five, for a moment, before everything changed and became normal again. The old fear, the hatred and the confusion came back. But there had been a moment, perhaps thirty seconds, of certainty, when each thing O’Brien said became absolute truth.

‘You see now,’ said O’Brien, ‘that it is possible.’

‘Yes,’ said Winston.

O’Brien turned to Winston with a smile.

‘Do you remember writing in your diary,’ he said, ‘that it did not matter whether I was a friend or an enemy, since I was at least a person who understood you and could be talked to? You were right. I enjoy talking to you. I like your mind. It is similar to my own mind except that you are insane. Before we stop, you can ask me a few questions if you want to.

‘Any question I like?’

‘Anything.’ He saw that Winston was looking at 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. I have rarely seen anyone do this so quickly. You would hardly recognise her if you saw her. All her lies, her stupidity, her dirty-mindedness – everything has been burned out of her. It was perfect.’

‘You tortured her?’

O’Brien did not answer. ‘Next question,’ he said.

‘Does Big Brother exist?’

‘Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the Party.’

‘Does he exist in the same way as I exist?’

‘You do not exist,’ said O’Brien.

Once again Winston felt helpless.

‘I think I exist,’ he said. ‘I was born, and I shall die. I have arms and legs. I occupy a space. 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 you free, and if you live to be ninety years old, you will still never know.’

‘What is in Room 101?’

The expression on O’Brien’s face did not change. He answered:

‘You know what is in Room 101, Winston. Everyone knows what is in Room 101.’

O’Brien raised a finger to the man in the white coat. The session was at an end. A needle went into Winston’s arm and he immediately fell into deep sleep.

‘You have to go through three stages,’ said O’Brien. There is learning, there is understanding, and there is acceptance. It is time for you to start the second stage.’

As always, Winston was lying on his back. He was still tied, but he could now move a little. He was less frightened of the dial. He could avoid the pain if he was clever: it was mostly when he was stupid that O’Brien pulled the lever. Sometimes they had a whole session without it.

‘Do you remember writing in your diary,’ O’Brien asked, “I understand how: I do not understand why”? It was when you thought about “why” that you thought you were going mad. You have read the book. 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 was one of the writers. No book is written by one person, as you know.’

‘Is it true, what it says?’

‘As a description, yes. But the plan it describes is nonsense. The proles will never revolt, not in a thousand years or a million. They cannot. There is no way in which the Party can be defeated. The rule of the Party is for ever. Make that the starting-point of your thoughts.’

He came closer to the bed. ‘For ever!’ he repeated. ‘And now let us get back to the question of “how” and “why”. You understand well enough how the Party keeps its power. Now tell me why.’ Why should we want power? Go on, speak,’ he added as Winston remained silent.

But he knew what O’Brien wanted him to say: ’You are ruling over us for our own good,’ he said. ‘You believe that human beings cannot govern themselves, and therefore –’

He almost cried out. Pain shot through his body. O’Brien had pushed the lever 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 only interested in power. Not money or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. We are the priests of power. God is power. But at present power is only a word as far as you are concerned. It is time for you to understand what power means. The first thing you must realise is that it is a group thing. The individual only has power when he ceases to be an individual. You know the Party slogan: “Freedom is Slavery.” Has it ever occurred to you that the opposite is true? Slavery is freedom. Alone – free – the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being will die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can completely give up his individuality, if he can escape from his identity, if he can become so much part of the Party that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and will never die. The second thing for you to realise is that power is power over human beings. Over the body – but, above all, over the mind. Power over things – external reality, as you would call it – is not important. Already we have total power over things.’

For a moment Winston ignored the dial.

‘But how can you control everything?’ he shouted out. ‘You don’t even control the weather or the law of gravity. And there is disease, pain, death –’

O’Brien silenced him by a movement of his hand. ‘We control things because we control the mind. Reality is inside the head. You will slowly learn this, Winston. You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature.’

‘But you do not! You are not even masters of the earth. What about Eurasia and Eastasia? You have not defeated them yet.’

‘Unimportant. We will defeat them when it suits us. And if we did not, what difference would it make? We can shut them out of existence. Oceania is the world.’

‘But the world itself is only a tiny thing. And humans are tiny – helpless! How long have we been in existence? For millions of years there was no one on the earth.’

‘Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists unless humans think it.’

‘But the rocks are full of the bones of animals which lived here long before humans were ever thought of.’

‘Have you ever seen those bones, Winston? Of course not. Nineteenth-century scientists invented them. Before humans there was nothing. After humans, if they stopped existing, there would be nothing. Outside humans there is nothing.’

‘But look at the stars! Some of them are a million light-years away. They are out of our reach for ever.’

‘What are the stars?’ said O’Brien. ‘They are bits of fire a few kilometres away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could get rid of them. The earth is the centre of the universe. The sun and the stars go round it.’

Winston made another movement. This time he did not say anything. O’Brien continued as if he was answering the point Winston would have made:

‘For certain purposes, of course, that is not true. When ships have to find their way in the ocean, it is convenient to assume that the earth goes round the sun and that the stars are millions and millions of kilometres away. But what of it? Do you suppose that it is impossible for us to make a double system of science? The stars can be near or far, according to what we need them to be. Do you suppose that our mathematicians cannot do that? Have you forgotten doublethink?’

Winston felt he would always be crushed by O’Brien’s answers. And yet he knew, he knew, that he was right. The belief that nothing exists outside your own mind – surely there must be some way of proving that it was false. Had we not known it was false since long ago?

‘But none of this really matters, Winston. The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over humans.’ He paused, and for a moment looked like a teacher questioning a clever child: ‘How does one man show his power over another, Winston?’

Winston thought. ‘By making him suffer,’ he said.

‘Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in causing pain. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilisations claimed that they were based on love or justice. Ours is based on hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, anger, triumph and self-disgust. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares to trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives or friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as we take eggs from a hen. Sex will disappear. Having children will be an annual duty, like renewing an identity card. 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. When we have total power we shall have no more need of science. There will be no difference between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of life. All pleasures that are not connected to the Party will be destroyed. But always – do not forget this, Winston – always there will be the thrill of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing less obvious. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the feeling of destroying an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot crushing a human face – for ever.’

He paused as though he expected Winston to speak. But Winston could not say anything. His heart seemed to be frozen. When he recovered enough to speak, he said ‘You can’t!’

‘What do you mean by that, 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 base a civilisation on fear and hatred and cruelty. It will never last.’

‘Why not?’

‘It would have no life. It would collapse. It would kill itself.’[56]

‘Nonsense. You are under the impression that hatred tires us quicker than love. Why should it be? And if it were, what difference would that make? Suppose we died quicker – what difference would it make? Can you not understand that the death of an individual is not death? The Party does not die.’

As usual, Winston felt helpless. If he kept arguing with O’Brien, he would twist the dial again. And yet he could not keep silent. Weakly, without arguments, with nothing to support what he was saying except his horror of what O’Brien had said, he started again.

‘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 imaging that there is something called human nature which will be angered by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Humans can be changed. Or perhaps you have returned to your old idea that the proles will rise and overthrow us. Put it out of your mind. They are helpless, like the animals. Humanity is the Party. The others are outside – they are irrelevant.’

‘I don’t care. In the end they will beat you. Sooner or later they will see you for what you are, and then they will tear you to pieces.’

‘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. Do you understand that you are alone? You are outside history, you do not exist. And you consider yourself morally superior to us, with our lies and our cruelty?’

‘Yes, I consider myself superior.’

O’Brien did not speak. Two other voices were speaking. After a moment Winston recognised one of them as his own. It was a recording of the conversation he had had with O’Brien, on the night when he thought he had joined the brotherhood. He heard himself promising to lie, to steal, to murder, to encourage drug taking and selling sex, to throw acid in a child’s face.

‘Get up from that bed,’ O’Brien said.

Winston was untied and he stood up unsteadily.

‘You are the last man,’ said O’Brien. ‘You are the guardian of the human spirit. You will see yourself as you are. Take off your clothes.’

‘Go on,’ said O’Brien. ‘Stand between the sections of the mirror. You will see the side view as well.’

Winston saw a bent, grey skeleton-like thing. It looked frightening, apart from the fact that he knew it was himself. As he looked at his face, he could see it was his, but it seemed to him that it had changed more than he had changed inside. But the truly frightening thing was how thin his body was. He looked from the side and saw how bent his back was. He would have guessed that it was the body of a man of sixty, suffering from some terrible disease.

‘Look at the condition you are in!’ O’Brien said. I could break your neck like a carrot. Do you know that you have lost twenty-five kilograms since you came here. Even your hair is coming out. Look!’ He pulled at Winston’s head and more hair came out. ‘Open your mouth. Nine, ten, eleven teeth left. And the few you have left are dropped out of your head. Look here!’

He pulled out one of Winston’s remaining front teeth and threw it across the cell.

‘What are you? A bag of dirt. Now turn round 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.’

Winston began to dress himself and suddenly felt pity for his destroyed body. He started to cry. O’Brien put 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 you.’

‘You did it!’ cried Winston.

‘No, Winston, you did it to yourself. This is what you accepted when you started fighting the Party. You knew this would happen. We have beaten you, Winston. We have broken you. You have seen what your body is like. You mind is the same.’

Still crying, Winston looked up at O’Brien.

‘I have not betrayed Julia,’ he said.

O’Brien looked down at him thoughtfully. ‘No,’ he said, that is true. You have not betrayed Julia.’

‘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 will shoot you.’

He was much better. He was growing fatter and stronger. The cell was much more comfortable than before. He could take a bath and they even gave him warm water. He had a fresh set of clothes.

Weeks or months must have passed. The food was surprisingly good and he even got a packet of cigarettes once. He tried to make himself fitter and his mind was growing more active. He had given up. In reality, as he saw it now, he had been ready to give up long before he had taken the decision. He understood the foolishness of trying to stand against the Party. He knew now that the Thought Police had watched him so carefully for seven years. He had done nothing, thought nothing, that they were not able to know. He could not fight against the Party any longer. Besides, the Party was in the right. It must be so: how could they be wrong and he be right? Only –!

He tried to practice doing Crimestop as they called it in Newspeak. ‘The Party says that the earth is flat’ and trained himself to not think of or not understand the arguments against it. It was not easy. The mathematical problems, such as ‘two and two make five’ he could not deal with. Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence.

All the while, he wondered when they would shoot him. ‘Everything depends on yourself,’ O’Brien had said, but he knew that there was nothing he could do to bring it nearer. It might be in ten minutes or ten years. The one certain thing was that there would be no warning.

There was the sound of boots outside and O’Brien entered his cell.

‘Get up,’ said O’Brien. ‘Come here.’

Winston stood up opposite him. O’Brien looked at him closely.

‘You have thought about lying to me,’ he said. ‘That was stupid. Stand up straighter. Look at me.’

He paused and then continued in a gentler voice.

‘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 – remember, no lies: you know that I always know when you are lying – tell me, what are you 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.’

He gave Winston a little push towards the guards.

‘Room 101,’ he said.

This place was many metres underground, as deep as it was possible to go. It was bigger than most of the cells he had been in. There were two tables in front of him and he was sitting upright in a chair, tied so tightly he could not move at all, not even his head.

O’Brien came in and said ‘You asked me once what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.

The door opened again. A guard came in, carrying something made of wire, a box or a basket of some kind. Winston could not see what it was.

‘The worst thing in the world,’ said O’Brien, ‘varies from person to person. It may be being buried alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or fifty other deaths. There are cases when it is something quite small, which not even kills them.’

O’Brien had moved a little to one side, so that Winston could see what was on the table. It was a cage divided into two sections, with some kind of living creature in each. They were rats.

‘In your case,’ said O’Brien, ‘the worst thing in the world is rats.’

Winston felt terrified. ‘You can’t do that!’ He cried out in a high voice. ‘You couldn’t, you couldn’t! It’s impossible.’

‘Do you remember,’ said O’Brien, ‘the moment of panic that used to occur in your dreams. There was a wall of blackness in front of you, and a terrible sound in your ears. There was something terrible on the other side of the wall. You knew that you knew what it was, but you dared not bring it into the open. It was the rats that were on the other side 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?’

‘By itself,’ O’Brien replied, ‘pain is not always enough. There are occasions when a human being will endure pain, even to the point of death. But for everyone there is something that cannot be endured – something that cannot be thought about. It isn’t about courage. For you, rats cannot be endured. They are a form of pressure that you cannot fight against, even if you wanted to. You will do what we want you to.

‘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. Winston made a desperate effort to get out of the chair. You understand this cage. It will fit over your head, and then I will free the rats. They are starving. They will jump out like bullets. They will attack your face. Sometimes they attack the eyes first, sometimes they bite through the cheeks and eat the tongue.

Winston tried not to panic, but to think. Suddenly his nose was hit by the terrible smell of the rats. Everything went black. For a moment he was insane, a screaming animal. There was only one way to save himself. He must put another human between himself and the rats.

‘It was a common punishment in old China,’ said O’Brien, the teacher as always.

The mask was closing on his face. Suddenly Winston thought about who could take the punishment instead of him.

‘Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you do to her. Tear her face off. Not me! Julia! Not me!’[57]

The Chestnut Tree Café[58] was almost empty. Winston sat in his usual corner, looking into an empty glass. He looked up at the huge face looking at him from the opposite wall. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU. Although he hadn’t asked for it, a waiter came and filled his glass up with Victory Gin. The television had bad news about the war. Oceania was losing Central Africa and its own territory was in danger.

They kept giving him a dirty piece of paper with the bill, but he always thought it was too low. It would have made no difference if it had been too high. He had plenty of money nowadays. He had a job in which he did not have to do anything but was more highly paid than his old job had been.

Almost without thinking he started writing with his finger in the dust on the table:

2 + 2 = 5

‘They can’t get inside you,’ she had said. But they could get inside you. ‘What happens to you here is for ever,’ O’Brien had said. That was true. There were things, your own actions, which you could not recover from. Something was killed inside you, burnt out.

He had seen her; he had even spoken to her. There was no danger in it. He knew that they now took almost no interest in what he did. He could have arranged to meet her a second time if either of them had wanted to. It was by chance they had met, in the Park, on a horrible cold day in March. He thought she had changed in some way. She did not speak. He put his arm round her waist. She did not respond. He did not try to kiss her.

‘I betrayed you,’ she said.

‘I betrayed you,’ he said.

She gave him a quick look of dislike.

‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘they threaten you with something – something you can’t stand up to, can’t even think about. And then you say, “Don’t do it to me, do it to somebody else.” And perhaps you might try to think, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn’t really mean it. But that isn’t true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there’s no other way of saving yourself, and you’re quite ready to save yourself that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You don’t care what they suffer. All you care about is yourself.’

‘All you care about is yourself,’ he repeated.

‘And after that, you don’t feel the same towards the other person any longer.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘you don’t feel the same.’

There did not seem to be anything more to say. The wind was cold. It was embarrassing to sit there in silence. She said something about catching a train and stood up to go.

‘We must meet again,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we must meet again.’

He followed hesitantly for a little distance, slightly behind her. They did not speak again. She did not actually try to get away from him, but went fast to stop him walking beside her. He decided to stay with her until the station, but suddenly following her in the cold seemed pointless and unbearable. He did not so much want to get away from Julia as to get back to the Chestnut Tree Café, which would be warm. They became separated and she disappeared.

A waiter noticed that his glass was empty and came back with the gin bottle. The gin became more horrible every time he drank it. But he needed it: it was his life, his death, and his rebirth. It was gin that put him to sleep every night, and gin that got him up in the morning. He rarely woke before eleven hundred, when he could hardly open his eyes and his back felt broken. In the middle of the day he sat, with the bottle beside him, listening to the telescreen. From fifteen until closing-time he was at the Chestnut Tree Café. No one cared what he did now. Occasionally he went to a dusty, forgotten-looking office in the Ministry of Truth and did a little work, or what was called work.

A loud trumpet-call sounded from the telescreen. It was news! Victory! It always meant victory when there was a trumpet-call. Excitement ran around the café, but they could not hear the news report very well because there was so much cheering outside. Winston just heard little bits: ‘Compete victory – half a million prisoners – control of the whole of Africa – the war has almost been won – victory – greatest victory in human history – victory, victory, victory!’

Winston imagined himself with the crowds outside, cheering and cheering. He looked up at the picture of Big Brother. The great man that had conquered the world! He thought how ten minutes ago – yes, only ten minutes – he had wondered if the news would be victory or defeat. But it was more than a Eurasian army that had been destroyed! So much had changed in him since that first day in the Ministry of Love, but the final, necessary, healing change had never happened, until this moment.

The voice from the telescreen was still talking about the battle, but the noise from outside had quietened and the waiters were turning back to their work. One of them approached with the gin bottle, but Winston was in a happy dream, and gave him no attention as his glass was filled up. He looked up at the huge face. It had taken him forty years to learn what kind of smile was hidden behind the dark moustache. Oh how foolish he had been! Two tears fell down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the fight was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.[59]