This is the second time I’ve read 1984, both since graduating college.
I got what I think is a different sense of it this second time.
Mainly, the typical meme of, “Hey man the government (Big Brother) man, going after the jokes I’m trying to tell about __ group man!” feels childish and undervalues the complexity of this book.
I’m sure I read it that way the first time.
This time though, I was just blown away by how painful the story is.
How does one write a book review who is not a book reviewer? I guess by just scattering thoughts and perceptions about the book and hitting publish. So, that’s what I’ll do.
I think Orwell has two great set ups that make the book so powerful
1. The character of Winston
2. The conception of the Party
The character of Winston
I felt led into believing Winston was special and had a meta understanding of what was happening all around him even if he hadn’t really discovered anything about the Party, the Brotherhood, or Big Brother.
The way he picks out O’Brien early and how that’s done through the subtleties of body language and how Orwell describes Winston’s intuitions about O’Brien through the eyes.
The introduction of Julia… At first, Winston thinks she’s all in on the Party and graphically describes wanting to murder her. Then, she becomes this complex lover who he exercises this sort of subterfuge against the Party with. He is complexly in love with her. Out of all of the Doublethink possible, he would never betray Julia.
Winston/Julia’s capture… This writing is brilliant. I wasn’t expecting that O’Brien was a part of the Party. So this turn from him seemingly bringing Winston and Julia into the resistance, giving them Goldstein’s book, and setting them up to be caught was great. This writing is so good because when scenes happen you weren’t expecting, it speaks to how wrapt you are in the story and how the writer almost suspends your knowledge that you’re reading fiction and could, if you thought hard, predict what characters might do based on what you know about fiction. Good stories like this help you ignore all of that.
Winston betrays Julia. We learn he’s not special… The exchanges between O’Brien and Winston after his capture are the heart of the book. You learn the distinguishing philosophy of the Party: Always more Power through the control of the past, present, and future. You see Winston hanging onto his dissonance. You see the struggle to maintain that 2+2=4 and O’Brien destroying that belief that is so through suffering. You see Winston’s thinking, grasping, trying to understand how even though he believes that his inner thoughts cannot be manipulated by the Party, eventually you see they’re known the whole time. So his dissonance must go even deeper, “In any case, mere control of the features not enough. For the first time he perceived that if you want to keep a secret you must also hide if from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it merge into your consciousness in any shape that could be given a name. From now onwards he must not only think right; he must feel right, dream right.” Maybe Party succeeds in the story, and Winston falls, because the solitary depth he goes to to fight the Party is a road paved in inhumanity. He doesn’t have the meta understanding it seemed like he had at the beginning. He didn’t read O’Brien right – how could he?, he is alone in his dealings with the world. He didn’t love Julia, he betrayed her. And of course he did!, he’s alone. A person alone doesn’t lose their humanity in such a profound (although typical Oceanic) way. If you build a society that rejects the individual altogether and say their only purpose is to serve the Party, 99% of us make Winston’s same decisions in the end, do we not? “He could not fight against the Party any longer. Besides, the Party was in the right. It must be so: how could the immortal, collective brain be mistaken?” and “He accepted everything. The past was alterable. The past never had been altered… He remembered remembering contrary things, but those were false memories, products of self-deception. How easy it all was! Only surrender, and everything else followed. It was like swimming against a current that swept you backwards however hard you struggled, and then suddenly deciding to turn round and go with the current instead of opposing it. Nothing had changed except your own attitude: the predestined thing happened in any case. He hardly knew why he had ever rebelled.”
The conception the Party
“The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.” This seemed like one of the most important lines, and ideas, in the book. With the Party, power comes from any one, and every one, individual becoming, themselves, the Party. Apart of the Party, you have no originality (Newspeak) or no independent ideas (Doublethink): “The command of the old despotisms was ‘Thou shalt not.’ The command of the totalitarians was ‘Thou shalt.’ Our command is ‘Thou art.’”
Like I said, I didn’t see O’Brien coming. He was a great character because he also had a sort of care for Winston. I think at one point he says that he sees some of himself in Winston. So he’s a great representative for the Party by Orwell: he’s intellectual, philosophical, and thorough.
Winston’s demise into a kind bliss, after his release from Room 101, seems like the Party’s ultimate expression of being identity-less – or completely in the Party’s custody. Not even that, just a cell in the Party. It’s not even that he’s become submissive. To be submissive would imply that there’s still some choice he’s making. There is no choice. He’s been turned; he’s fully aware that he’s not aware anymore: “It was a false memory. He was troubled by false memories occasionally. They did not matter so long as one knew them for what they were.“
It’s easy to want to apply Big Brother to one’s current political environment. It’s never fully analogous. It can be present and real, but it’s a matter a scale. I think here in present day (June 2, 2025) we are experiencing it in a relatively high degree in the sense that Culture and Society is at war with words (Newspeak, i.e. TikTokification of identity) and tariffs (Doublethink, i.e. I voted for this, but I didn’t vote for this).
The Party is an excellent apparatus to scrutinize one’s own political environment.
I think the book is a warning about creating un-complex, fragile (Nassim Taleb’s ‘antifragility’ comes to mind here), societies and politics that produce un-thinking and all the bad stuff of Newspeak, Doublethink, and the like.
Meaning, it’s a warning that says to not create systems that easily make people alone.
I read this in a Free Press article a few days after writing it (6/4/25) and saw a pattern match in my thinking about what 1984 is about: don’t create a society where everyone’s alone.
Winston was alone. He was doing life with no one. And he had no choice. The point of his existence, according to the developments of the Party, is to love Big Brother (“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.“).
This kind of degradation of human autonomy, the will, individualism, and the maturation of the death cult, makes everyone utterly alone.
I can’t emphasize what I mean by this enough: a society in which everyone is alone (even in their relationships) is one that will give the human project a run for it’s money. It is evil. It is sad. It is the anti-thesis of living and of life.
