Winston Smith is a fictional character and the protagonist of George Orwell's dystopian 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. He was employed by Orwell as an everyman character. He is an unremarkable individual who questions the novel's oppressive regime and secretly rebels against its edicts, but is ultimately crushed into conformity.
Winston exists under a brutal, oppressive regime in Oceania, a totalitarian super-state. He works in the Ministry of Truth, rectifying historical documents for the Party, which is led by Big Brother. In defiance of the Party's directives, he begins to have revolutionary ideas, making him guilty of thoughtcrime. He takes further risk by beginning a forbidden secret affair with Julia, a fellow worker. The affair is eventually discovered and they are arrested by the Thought Police.
Weak, unattractive and self-pitying, Winston is a flawed hero, but has been described by critics as one of the most unconventional and compelling protagonists. He has been portrayed in numerous adaptations of the novel in film, television, radio and theatre, including Peter Cushing in the 1954 television adaptation and John Hurt in the 1984 film.
Role in Nineteen Eighty-Four Winston Smith works in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, where his job is to revise historical documents so they match the continually shifting party line. He revises newspaper articles and doctors photographs—mostly to remove "unpersons", people who have fallen afoul of the party. Because of his proximity to the mechanics of rewriting history, Winston Smith nurses doubts about the Party and its monopoly on truth.
Winston meets a mysterious woman named Julia, a fellow member of the Outer Party who also bears resentment toward the party's ways; the two become lovers. Winston encounters O'Brien, a member of the Inner Party who Winston believes is secretly a member of The Brotherhood, a resistance organisation dedicated to overthrowing the Party's dictatorship. Believing they have met a kindred spirit, Winston and Julia meet him privately and are given The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, a book written by Emmanuel Goldstein – the leader of the Brotherhood and principal enemy of the state of Oceania – under the requirement that only after they have read it will they be full-fledged members of the Brotherhood.
O'Brien is really an agent of the Thought Police, which had Winston under surveillance. Winston and Julia are captured and imprisoned in the Ministry of Love, but Winston remains defiant and endures several months of extreme torture at O'Brien's hands. His spirit finally breaks when he is taken into Room 101 and confronted by his worst fear: the horror of being eaten alive by rats. He denounces Julia and pledges his loyalty to the Party. Any possibility of resistance or independent thought is destroyed when he is forced to accept that 2 + 2 = 5. By the end of the novel, Winston has been converted to an obedient, unquestioning party member who loves Big Brother.
Characteristics Winston exists under a brutal regime that demands complete loyalty to its leader Big Brother and controls its population by promoting fear and hatred. He lives under the threat of constant surveillance, language distortion and the rewriting of historical fact. Within a depressing, decaying London, the principal city of Airstrip One, his home is a dilapidated apartment building named Victory Mansions that contrasts with the enormous white concrete structures of the four ministries. His personal privacy is constantly invaded by the telescreen in his apartment, which transmits Party information but is also a tool of surveillance, giving him a persistent sense of anxiety.
Winston is an unconventional and flawed hero. He is 39 years old and has various health conditions including varicose veins and false teeth. He has a violent recurring cough that leaves him gasping for air. He is tortured by the possibility that he betrayed his mother and sister as a child but hardly remembers his father. Orwell had also barely known his father, as he had only reappeared in his life in 1912. Winston has misogynist views about women. After noticing Julia, he imagines beating her with a rubber truncheon in a moment of hatred. Rob Hastings wrote in The Guardian that Winston's characterisation is compelling. He is small and frail, unattractive and self-pitying. His response to Julia's interest in him is self-aware: "I'm thirty-nine years old. I've got a wife that I can't get rid of. I've got varicose veins. I've got five false teeth." He later asks, "What could you see to attract you in a man like me?" Hastings noted that this characterisation was necessary for the purposes of expressing repression within Orwell's political writing.
Orwell illustrates that Winston is nostalgic. He buys a diary for no conscious reason other than for its physical appeal due to its marbled cover, a type not produced for forty years, and obtains a fountain pen purely because he likes the feeling of writing with a nib. Due to amnesia he has only fleeting memories of his past life. He knows that he was born in 1944 or 1945. He remembers significant events, including an air raid, an atomic bomb dropped on Colchester and several wars. He recalls being in a crowded tube station with his mother and younger sister. His fractured perspective of his life eventually leads to a midlife crisis. Winston is prone to thoughtcrime and defies the ruling Party by buying an old notebook and beginning a diary where he writes the inflammatory words "DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER", an act he knows will result in punishment by death. Tom Shippey highlighted the significance of Winston writing a diary. Its function is to record the past but also gives Winston physical evidence that past events took place, although its author struggles to write. Material objects such as a glass paperweight, photographs and the song "Oranges and lemons" provide further fragments of a forgotten past.
Working in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, he regularly rectifies documents in line with Party propaganda and destroys evidence via a memory hole. Feeling utterly alone in his recognition of the Party's contradictions, he questions his own memories and is astonished when noticing that the Hate Week speaker publicly changes the enemy of Oceania from Eurasia to Eastasia in mid sentence without anyone questioning it. James Connors noted the disparity between his commitment to his work and his secret hatred for the Party. Orwell writes that Winston's "greatest pleasure in life was his work" and that he is so skilled that "on occasion he had even been entrusted with the rectification of the Times leading articles". In addition, Winston is untroubled by the fact that every word he murmurs or writes in his work is a lie.
Winston's thoughtcrime leads him to further rebel against the Party's directives by engaging in a clandestine affair with Julia. Murray Sperber commented that Orwell directs the reader's view of Oceania through Winston's closed point of view but manipulates both Winston and the reader into expecting a hopeful ending. O'Brien reveals that Winston has in reality been under close surveillance by the Thought Police for seven years.
Winston's deep fear of rats is exploited by his tormentor O'Brien in Room 101 when he threatens to release a cage of ravenous rats on Winston to devour his face. D. J. Taylor wrote that this scene was characteristic of Orwell, by presenting Winston as a vulnerable human faced with vicious animal intelligence. Orwell studied rats throughout his life and his preoccupation with them recurs throughout his writing. Taylor noted that he would have gained knowledge of the ancient Chinese torture method of releasing rats onto victims while he was in the East.
Themes
Destruction of objective truth Orwell was preoccupied with the idea that "the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world", having witnessed that during the Spanish Civil War historical accuracy had been made impossible due to propaganda. In the novel, Winston's work at the ironically-named Ministry of Truth involves rectifying historical documents in line with the Party's directives. The result of this revisionism is that Oceania's history is infinitely changeable so that objective truth no longer exists. Winston is even uncertain whether the events he records in his diary take place in the year 1984. One of Winston's tasks is to erase an Inner Party member who has become an "unperson" named Comrade Withers and replace him with a fake story about a war hero who never existed. In doing this, Winston is changing the past, which makes the Party infallible. Orwell recognised that history could be inaccurate and biased but wrote in his 1942 essay Looking Back on the Spanish War that the abandonment of historical truth could offer "a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ – well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five – well, two and two are five."
Love as rebellion Winston's struggle against the Party was considered by Gorman Beauchamp to be a re-enactment of Adam's disobedience against God, as embodied in the state, and a representation of the psychological battle between the individual and society proposed by Sigmund Freud. The figurehead of Big Brother is the subject of adoration whereby the individual exclaims "I love Big Brother". Winston begins to rebel through his hatred of Big Brother. The Party's abolishment of recreational sex ensures that no love exists except for love of the leader. Beauchamp comments that Winston's affair with Julia is comparable with Eve luring him to sin against God. Winston's love for Julia is itself a rebellion and must be destroyed by the Party. Orwell writes that their lovemaking is "a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act". Winston initially believes that the state cannot destroy their love because it is impenetrable but is eventually shown the contrary during his torture. When asked by O'Brien if there is anything left of his humanity that has not been degraded, Winston replies "I have not betrayed Julia". O'Brien understands that Winston can only love Big Brother completely once his love for Julia has been extinguished. Winston finally betrays her under torture by shouting "Do it to Julia!". After his release, Winston feels no love for her, signifying the end of his disobedience.
Struggle of self