Winston's Predicament in 1984

Winston's Predicament in 1984

The dystopian world George Orwell created for 1984 is a bleak,

emotionless place, grey shaded and foul smelling, full of hate and

distrust. The humans that inhabit it do not live, they are simply

expected to exist for the good of the sinister Party, a totalitarian

government, while their leader gazes down at them from every wall,

watching their every move. One of these humans, and our protagonist,

is Winston Smith. His problems when simplified may seem like the

problems of any other person: his lack of freedom, his repressed

emotions and his desperate loneliness. These problems however, are

exasperated by the society he lives in.

'Thought crime', punishable by death, goes so far as to prohibit

freedom of thought, nevermind speech. The Party want their people to

be simply hate machines, incapable of love or even original thought,

it wants them to live by slogans instead of natural instinct .By the

end of the first chapter Winston believes that what he is thinking and

feeling will eventually get him killed, and by the middle of the book

he takes to repeating the dogma "we are the dead". Right from the

beginning we see this fatalist thinking in all Winston does, as if he

lives his whole life under a self imposed death sentence. At times it

seems he actually does know he will be caught and has just trained his

mind to accept this as inevitable. He knows the illegal diary he keeps

will be read and could be used to prove him guilty of thought crime,

with its scribbled missives of "down with Big Brother" and "hope lies

in the proles", and yet he carries on writing in it, pouring out his

restrained feelings onto the 'creamy smooth' paper. His lack of trust

in communications with ...

... middle of paper ...

...escribes the Party's idea of the perfect future society to Winston:

"a boot stamping on a humans face - forever". Its now we realise that

despite Winston's death, this will happen in that world if things

carried on as they were. It's at this point that nearly all hope is

lost. Next is the betrayal of Julia, the one last thing keeping

Winston going. It is a certainty by now that there will be no happy

end and that Winston will die and life outside in Air Strip One will

remain the same. Winston's predicament is not then to do with love and

loss, it's to do with futility. For all he did, for all the rules he

broke, for all the rebellion he thought and wrote, nothing changed.

The Party remains in power and no future generations were saved.

Despite all his good intentions Winston dies broken, hopeless and

loveless, a "non-person" who as good as never existed.