Chapter Beyond Totalitarianism of Nineteen Eighty-Four - Study Guide by George Orwell

Winston is still convinced he can resist. No matter what he says and does, if he still loves Julia and hates the Party, then the Party will not have won. However, he knows that the Party can see all: 'he perceived that if you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself... From now onwards he must not only think right; he must feel right, dream right.' Eventually even Parsons is betrayed by his own children for shouting 'Down with Big Brother' in his sleep. Still though, Winston imagines that he can store up his hatred of the Party and unleash it in the instant before death: 'They would have blown his brain to pieces before he could reclaim it. The heretical thought would be unpunished, unrepented, out of their reach for ever. They would have blown a hole in their own perfection. To die hating them, that was freedom.' But, sure enough O'Brien is aware of his hatred, and through Winston's worse fear - rats in Room 101 - he brings him to condemn Julia. As she says to him when they meet again shortly before the end of the novel, 'They threaten you with something - something you can't stand up to... And then you say, "Don't do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to so-and-so.' And perhaps you might pretend 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 want it to happen to the other person. You don't give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself.'"

Julia's statement does, however, leave the possibility that the self is not totally obliterated as the Party would wish, and indeed Julia's speech and character is a problematic feature of the novel, as shall be discussed shortly. However, this notwithstanding, in Winston's case the Party is finally victorious: 'Everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had one the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.' The power of the Party is complete on every level of human existence and sensation.

The hopelessness of all this is heightened in the novel by the regular raising then dashing of hope. Whether Orwell really believed in such a transformation of feeling - to learn to truly love Big Brother as Winston does - is not entirely clear. Had he written it before the war, Nineteen Eighty-Four might just have contained more reasons for optimism, but the novel speaks a great deal about Orwell's post-war disillusionment. The England that Orwell envisaged in The Lion and the Unicorn had failed to materialise, and although he was not hostile to the post-war labour government, he was sceptical about its achievements. Indeed many have seen Nineteen Eighty-Four as in part a satire on grinding, inefficient state-sponsored socialism and post-war shortages in England.