1984 Chapter 9 - Book 3 Chapter 6

Winston has to wait several days to read the book although he receives the delivery in a most spectacularly covert manner. He is unable to find an opportunity to read the lengthy work due to a sudden onslaught of work at the office. This large amount of work is sourced through a last-minute change in the enemy of the country. Oceania had been at war with Eurasia throughout the Party spokesman’s initial address at the beginning of the hate week. However, the enemy changed in minutes as the spokesman received news that Eurasia was now an ally and that Oceania was now at war with Eastasia, which had been an ally just a moment ago. Winston and the rest of the ministry of Truth have to work harrowingly hard throughout the week to correct documents that had indicated Oceania had ever been at war with Eurasia. Winston visits the shop above Charrington’s shop after a week-long hiatus, as Hate week continues in the city.

He begins to read through the book on that night and covers the initial few chapters that describe the ideology of the Party and how it has organized the world. He learns that there have always been three groups in society, the low people (The Proles), the middle people (The Outer Party members), and the High (The Inner Party members). This system has continued since time immemorial, though it has worked in a cyclical manner where people have moved from the Middle to the High, and from the High to the Low. He learns that Party aims to halt this cyclical change to remain in the High group forever. They have used the tools of war and deprivation to keep the Low forever struggling for survival and used the same tactics for the middle members of society as well. He learns that the Party creates poverty deliberately even though technical advancements of the time could easily allow people access to equal resources. The Party believes there must be poverty vis a vis the proles, who would allow the Party’s hegemony to remain intact forever. War is another such tool that is used to expend the excess resources that are created from the people’s labor so that the true nature of war is destruction for the sake of destruction. The three powerful nations are in balance, and war is primarily over the possession of a labor-rich area in a poorer section of the world.

Winston continues to peruse the book as Julia arrives, although she isn’t quite as interested in reading it as him. Julia asks Winston to read the book to her, but she soon falls asleep, and Winston continues to read. He eventually realizes that he had already possessed a somewhat loose understanding of how the Party perpetuated itself, but he had failed to understand why the Party practiced this path, an answer he had hoped to find in the book. Winston eventually falls asleep, and they both awaken much later with a feeling of something altered in the room. They begin to prepare for their departure from the room, and Winston observes the aged Prole woman doing her laundry. He begins to appreciate the poetic beauty of her existence as a prole and appreciates the marks that her hard life has had on her body. The sight of the prole woman energizes him, and Winston becomes optimistic that the Party would one would be overthrown by the Proles, who would rise to claim their power. As Winston talks to Julia and expresses this thought, a third voice joins their conversation, and a Telescreen is revealed to be hidden in the room. The voice from the Telescreen asks them to remain still as several men in black attires storm the room. Winston becomes stricken with fear, he is unable to move as he watches the ThoughtPolice punch and manhandles Julia. Charrington walks into the room behind the police, and Winston realizes that he has always been a covert member of the thought police.

 Winston loses consciousness and regains his senses as he finds himself in a room that appears to be a holding cell with bright white lights that make it impossible to keep track of time. Winston learns that political prisoners like himself are generally left alone by the criminals in the holding cell of the Ministry of Love, and he happens to meet several political prisoners like himself. He comes across Abasolm, another person from the Ministry of Truth who had been vaporized rather recently. Surprisingly, Winston encounters Parsons as well, who has been captured by the thought police after being reported by his young daughter. He tells Winston that he had been shouting slogans against Big Brother in his sleep, and his little daughter had heard him saying such terrible things, however, Parsons sounds like he is rather proud of his daughter’s behavior. Winston meets another man, who has been severely degraded through starvation and beatings. The skeletal man like all the other prisoner express a deathly fear of Room 101 and even begs his captors to expose his child to torture so that he may be spared further punishment. Winston thinks about the punishment that awaits him, and hopes for the needle that O’Brien had promised would be delivered to him in the instance of his capture. Just as he is dwelling on the needle, O’Brien walks in through the cell door. Winston is convinced that O’Brien has been captured much like him, but he learns that O’Brien had never been in the brotherhood and that he had fallen into a trap.

O’Brien and the other officials begin to torture Winston, although Winston is unmoved by the violence at first, this soon begins to change as the torture grows worse. Winston’s resolve breaks, and he soon begins to accept all of their accusations even the crimes that he had never committed. This doesn’t satisfy his captors and the torture continues to escalate, without Winston truly understanding what is expected of him. O’Brien takes over his torture and reveals to him that they had always been aware of his diary as well as his relationship with Julia. O’Brien had written the book that Winston had been reading, and he reveals that the Party did not believe in killing the rebels but focussed its efforts on converting them. Winston is hooked into a machine that induces intense pain, while the magnitude of the pain is controlled through a dial that O’Brien controls. O’Brien tells Winston that the Party is only interested in remaining in power, as he focuses on the key question that Winston had struggled with for a long time. He tells Winston that the Party cares nothing about the proles or the outer Party for that matter and that all Totalitarian regimes in the past had failed precisely because they had propagated the lie that their rule was for the benefit of the masses.

Winston tries to keep his principles in the forefront of his mind as O’Brien attempts to convert him into a powerful machine. Sometimes it seems like O’Brien is responding to the rebellious thoughts that Winston has rather than the words he utters. However, Winston mounts a formidable resistance against O’Brien’s attempts to convert him, alas the last of the resistance fades as O’Brien shows his captive a mirror. Winston is shaken when he sees the stooped and emaciated figure in the mirror, with nearly all of its teeth fallen out and its dirty hair falling off in clumps at the slightest touch. Winston begins to appreciate the power of the Party for the first time, and it begins to change his mind. He surrenders his mind to the Party’s concepts of DoubleThink as he finally begins to see how two plus two could equal five.

Winston has a singular comfort in his mind, as the Party releases him from the hard regimen of punishment and torture, which is that he had never betrayed Julia. Winston is then kept in an individual cell where his health finally begins to recover, and he progresses to the next stage of his re-education. He comes to embrace the concept of DoubleThink, as he begins to believe that the past can be altered just as he believes that the past has never been altered. However, Winston has a slip-up before he can be fully reintegrated into society, as he suddenly awakens from a nightmare while screaming Julia’s name. He is brought before O’Brien who asks Winston about his true feelings for Big Brother. Winston cannot help himself, and he angrily spews out all the hatred that he harbors for the Party’s figurehead. O’Brien decides to take Winston to room 101 since he wants Winston to grow to love Big Brother, and not simply accept him as the leader of their society. Winston learns that room 101 is a different experience for every prisoner since it is made to activate that person’s biggest fear. Winston learns about this as he is exposed to a cage with starving rats, who are going to be put against his eyes. Winston panics and tries to agree with all of their demands but he eventually comes to understand that the only way to escape the punishment would be to betray Julia. He tells O’Brien that they should spare him, and do it to Julia instead. The punishment stops.

Several years later, Winston spends most of his time at the Chestnut Tree Cafe drinking and playing chess as he listens to the news about Oceania’s war. He has an easy and high-paying job on a committee that is responsible for the Newspeak dictionary, with other members like himself. The only thing in life that he looks forward to is the bullet that all people who rebel are promised although no one ever knows when it will arrive. He runs into Julia once, but they are unable to connect even though there is no suspicion between them anymore. Both of them had betrayed one another and had thus forever changed how they felt about each other.

Analysis

Orwell concludes the book with an ominous note, and the conclusion of the book begins with Winston reading the book that is believed to be written by Emmanuel Goldstein. Winston learns the twisted mechanism through which the Party remains in power. He learns about the reasons for the war, the pointless poverty, and all the other terrible aspects of their society. However, the book fails to give him an answer to the question of why the Party wishes to remain in power since he had always known how the Party did so, but never quite understood why. Winston doesn’t receive the answer to his question until his conversation with O’Brien, and it is also important to note that Orwell had foreshadowed Winston’s meeting with O’Brien early in the book. Winston has a dream early in the book, and he believes he hears O’Brien’s voice say that they would meet again in a place without darkness. Winston’s holding cell is a room lit with white light that has no windows. There are several mysteries that the book doesn’t solve for the reader in addition to the mystery of the dream, one other such pressing mystery is the fact that O’Brien is somehow able to read Winston’s mind. However, it could be argued that Winston was perhaps too confused to realize that he was not having those thoughts but rather expressing them.

In the end, Winston receives a simple yet cruel answer for the question that had been going through his mind for the longest time, the question of why. Winston learns that the Party carries out such horrendous acts of cruelty because it simply wishes to remain in a position of power, and not because it wishes to lead humanity towards a better future. Ultimately, Orwell asserts that totalitarian regimes have no one’s but their interests in mind, irrespective of the claims they make about their purpose.