When Winston asks O’Brian when they got him. “They got me long ago” (Orwell 220). O’Brian helps torture Winston and try’s to get him to love big brother. Winston realizes that he lied to him and Winston is very hurt. O’Brian is so complex because at one point he may have rebelled against the party.
Winston soon receives word that a man named O’Brien wants to see him, which excites him because Winston believes that O’Brien is a member of a secret party called The Brotherhood. The Brotherhood is the only glimpse of opposition towards Big Brother that Winston has seen. Winston and Julia go to see O’Brien and are indoctrinated into The Brotherhood. Things take a turn for the worse when Julia and Winston are snatched up and taken to a place called The Ministry of Love, where Winston finds out that O’Brien was actually a spy who tricked him into openly opposing Big Brother. Winston is then tortured until he is mentally broken and no longer attached to J... ... middle of paper ... ...d filled that void with Big Brother.
Everywhere a person can go, they can be sure that the Party is watching. Rebellious in nature and not wanting to lose his individuality, low-ranking Party member Winston Smith buys a diary where he writes down his “thoughtcrime” against the Party. Winston begins a love affair with another party member, Julia, an act that is extremely illegal in the eyes of the Thought Police. He also becomes fixated on a powerful party member named O’Brien, who he believes shares his dislike of the Party. He believes that O’Brien may just be a member of the Brotherhood – the infamous yet mysterious underground rebellion against the Party’s rule.
Winston is caught up with the urge to become more corrupt. In any way that he could, Winston wants to stick it to the man: “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” (Orwell 126).
When John, a man from the reservation in Brave New World is brought to the new world he has difficulties fitting into to society because he is so used to the "old" way of doing things. In 1984 by George Orwell, the government of Big Brother is overbearing and all knowing which crushes freedom of speech and free thought. Big Brother easily edits history and tries to convince people that reality is something different. The main character, Winston can remember what life was like before Big Brother and when he first comes into power. The memory of his father being vaporized also serves as a catalyst for his hatred of Big Brother and leads him... ... middle of paper ... ...y 190).
Yet Winston is strong willed enough to try to make his situation better in a totalitarian society. In comparison to Winston’s outlook on life at the beginning of the story, his character traits are developing, changing due to torture by the Party to force him to conform to the system of totalitarian government lead by Big Brother. In the beginning of the story, Winston strongly opposes the Party and their anti-memory tactics used to better control the population. Although Winston opposes the Party, he is still fearful of their power and this causes him to view the world from an extremely paranoid point of view, suspecting everyone and trusting no one. Upon seeing a particular girl, who later becomes his lover, he thinks of her, “… that she even might be an agent of the Thought Police.
They are allowed to do as they please as long as they are smart enough to stay out of the spotlight. The Outer Party has more of the freedom and power, but not much knowledge as to what happens behind the scenes of the society. As Winston’s last hope for freedom, Emmanuel Goldstein revealed in his book The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, that “the Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture, and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation” (216). Winston soon learns that the society that he had always hated was a lie, and it fuels his fire of rebellion even more. His lack of knowledge was one piece that forced him to detract from the totalitarian ruled society.
The book and the movie, respectively, are much more than simple narratives. Using dark dystopian settings, the authors show how futuristic societies are instead tyrannized by their fearsome governments who mask themselves in a utopian ideal. The protagonists, Orwell’s Winston Smith and McTeigue’s V, realize the corrupted totalitarian nature of their government as they plan to break free from their ruling power. While almost six decades separate these two pieces of fiction, the authors resides both protagonists in a society ruled by tyrannical power, but the severity of oppression differ. Additionally, the main characters share deep hatred toward their government, yet Winston and V have different characteristics which affect their influence on society in 1984 and V for Vendetta.
“There was truth and there was untruth,” insists Winston, “and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.” Yet in the end, even Winston has succumbed to the delusions of the majority. His defiance will go forgotten; it’ll be as though it never existed in the first place. Even he will not remember the person he once was. The Party will erase Winston Smith from history. In the essay “Ideology and Terror,” Hannah Arendt asserts that loneliness is the “common ground for terror” – something that reinforces dystopian novels’ central theme of failed human connection.
For many readers, the ending of George Orwell’s 1984 is a kick to the gut. Throughout the novel George Orwell teases the audience with the idea that there was going to be some sort of happy ending, and that Winston as an individual could live his life without control of the Party. In the end, he becomes brainwashed just like every other member of society. However, as readers we should have been able to pick up that the real end came in the beginning. When Winston began writing in that journal it was the beginning of the end for him and although he claims he won the victory over himself, the only real victor, in reality, is the Party.