Winston had talked with Julia about the
connection he felt to O'Brien earlier. And now they both were
standing in O'Brien's home.
””Shall
I say it, or will you?” he said.
”I
will say it,” said Winston promptly. ”That thing is really turned
off?”
”Yes,
everything is turned off. We are alone.”
”We
have come here because--”
He
paused, realizing for the first time the vagueness of his own
motives. Since he did not in fact know what kind of help he expected
from O'Brien, it was not easy to say why he had come here. He went
on, conscious that what he was saying must sound both feeble and
pretentious:
”We
believe that there is some kind of conspiracy, some kind of secret
organization working against the Party, and that you are involved in
it: We want to join it and work for it. We are enemies of the party.
We disbelieve in the principles of Ingsoc. We are thought-criminals.
We are also adulterers. I tell you this because we want to put
ourselves at your mercy. If you want us to incriminate ourselves in
any other way, we are ready.””
O'Brien asked them some
questions about how far they were willing to go in effort to fight
the Party. He also had it arranged that Winston would get his hands
on Goldstein's book.
“The
Brotherhood cannot be wiped out because it is not an organization in
the ordinary sense. Nothing holds it together except an idea which is
indestructible. You will never have anything to sustain you, except
the idea. You will get no comradeship and no encouragement. When
finally you are caught, you will get no help. We never help our
members. At most, when it is absolutely necessary that someone should
be silenced, we are occasionally able to smuggle a razor blade into a
prisoner's cell. You will have to get used to living without results
and without hope. You will work for a while, you will be caught, you
will confess, and then you will die. Those are the only results that
you will ever see. There is no possibility that any perceptible
change will happen within our own lifetime. We are the dead. Our only
true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of
dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be,
there is no knowing. It might be a thousand years. At present nothing
is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We
cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards
from individual to individual, generation after generation. In the
face of the Thought Police there is no other way. “
“”We
shall meet again-- if we do meet again--”
Winston
looked up on him “In the place where there is no darkness?” he
said hesitantly.
O'Brien
nodded without appearance of surprise. “in the place where there is
no darkness,” he said, as though he had recognized the allusion.”
All of the workers in The
Ministry of truth had busy week of altering all written records to
say that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia and an ally
with Eurasia, after a flip-flop from the party. Winston had worked
18-hours a day for the past week and did not have a chance to read
Goldstein's book until now. He had arrived to the rented room, Julia
was yet to be present, so he began reading the book.
“The
book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense it
told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction.
It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to
set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind
similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic,
less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell
you what you know already. “
In
the first chapters of the book, it explains the party's slogan:
WAR
IS PEACE
FREEDOM
IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE
IS STRENGHT
It
explains the doublethink and true meaning behind it all.
Bit
later on Julia arrives to the room, they lied down on the bed and
Winston started to read the book aloud from the start. A good bit
into the first chapter he noticed Julia had fallen asleep, so he put
the book down and did the same, mumbling the words “sanity is not
statistical” as he fell asleep.
Winston
had awakened and was dozing for a while until he started hearing the
same old prole woman, that he had at many other times hear, start
singing. The song woke up Julia. They stood at the window looking at
her and listening to her singing.
“The
birds sang, the proles sang, the Party did not sing. All round the
world – everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable figure, made
monstrous by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death and
still singing. Out of those mighty loins a race of conscious beings
must one day come. You were the dead; theirs was the future. But you
could share in that future if you kept alive the mind as they kept
alive the body, and passed on the secret doctrine that two plus two
make four.”
“We
are the dead” he said.
“We
are the dead,” echoed Julia dutifully.
“You
are the dead,” said an iron voice behind them.
It
was the end of the line, Winston and Julia both knew it, they did not
resist or even move when the black uniformed men stormed into the
room. Mr Charrington, the old man whose room they had rented, was a
member of the thought-police. Julia was taken out of the room first,
and that was the last Winston would see of her.
“He
did not know where he was. Presumably he was in the Ministry of Love;
but there was no way of making certain. He was in a high-ceilinged
windowless cell with walls of glittering white porcelain. Concealed
lamps flooded it with cold light, and there was a low, steady humming
sound which he supposed had something to do with the air supply. A
bench, or shelf, just wide enough to sin on ran round the wall,
broken only by the door and, at the end opposite the door, a lavatory
pan with no wooden seat. There were four telescreens, one in each
wall.”
For
a while Winston sat in the room while other prisoners came and went,
some to the mysterious “room 101”, which seemed like a fate worse
than death by the reactions of the other prisoners. After being alone
in the cell room for a while, but then the door opened and O'Brien
stepped in.
“The
shock of the sight had driven all caution out of him. For the first
time in many years he forgot the presence of the telescreen.
“They've
got you too!” he cried.
“They
got me a long time ago,” said O'Brien with a mild, almost regretful
irony. He stepped aside. From behind him there emerged a
broad-chested guard with a long black truncheon in his hand.
“You
knew this, Winston” said O'Brien
“Don't
deceive yourself.” You did know it – you have always known it.”
Yes,
he saw now, he had always known it. But there was no time to think of
that. All he had eyes for was the truncheon in the guard's hand. It
might fall anywhere: on the crown, on the tip of the ear, on the
upper arm, on the elbow –
The
elbow! He had slumped to his knees, almost paralyzed, clasping the
stricken elbow with his other hand. Everything had exploded into
yellow light. Inconceivable, inconceivable that one blow could cause
such pain!
The
light cleared and he could see the other two looking down at him. The
guard was laughing at his contortions.”
A
process begun that started with beatings from the guards and then
moves on to torture and confessions, and then to more torture to
rewrite Winston to an orthodox party member. The last part is done by
O'Brien.
“Do
not imagine that you will save yourself, Winston, however completely
you surrender to us. No one who has once gone astray is ever spared.
And even if we chose to let you live out the natural term of your
life, still you would never escape from us. What happens to you here
is for ever. Understand that in advance. We shall crush you down to
the point from which there is no coming back. Things will happen to
you from which you could not recover, if you lived a thousand years.
Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything
will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or
friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage,
or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then
we shall fill you with ourselves. “
““There
are three stages in your reintegration,” said O'Brien. “There is
learning, there is understanding, and there is acceptance. It is time
for you to enter upon the second stage.”
O'Brien
goes into explaining why the Party does what it does.
“The
Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in
the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or
luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure
power means you will understand presently. We are different from all
the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All
the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and
hypocrites. “
Winston
tries to argue for objective reality, only to be met with more
torture and humiliation.
“There
will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All
competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget
this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power,
constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at
every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of
trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the
future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.
“
"Tell
me," Winston said, "how soon will they shoot me?"
"It
might be a long time," said O'Brien. "You are a difficult
case. But don't give up hope. Everyone is cured sooner or later. In
the end we shall shoot you."
The
tortures had stopped and they were giving him food regularly and
letting him take care of his hygiene. All he cared about right now
was to sleep and feel his strength regaining. He was still after all
the torture and reprogramming deep down rejecting the doublethink,
and tried to do exercises to keep it from surfacing.
“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. “
He
had a hallucination about Julia, strong enough to register on the
telescreens, and he ponders how many years of servitude his moment of
weakness added.
“For
the first time he perceived that if you want to keep a secret you
must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it
is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge 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. And all the while he must keep his hatred locked up inside him
like a ball of matter which was part of himself and yet unconnected
with the rest of him, a kind of cyst.”
Winston
constructed a plan that when he knew they were going to shoot him, he
would take down all the mental barriers he had built up to discard
the truth, at the last seconds so that he would die hating them.
“To
die hating them, that was freedom.”
“You
asked me once,” said O'Brien, “what was in Room 101. I told you
that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The think that
is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.”
And
the worst thing in the world for Winston, was rats. So they had a
mask with rats inside, with a switch to release the rats on the
person wearing the mask. O'Brien put the a mask on Winston.
“The
mask was closing on his face. The wire brushed his cheek. And then –
no, it was not relief, only hope, a tiny fragment of hope. Too late,
perhaps too late. But he had suddenly understood that in the whole
world there was just one
person tho whom he could transfer his punishment – one
body that he could thrust
between himself and the rats. And he was shouting frantically, over
and over:
“Do
it to Julia!
Do
it to Julia!
Not
me! Julia!
I
don't care what you do to her.
Tear
her face off, strip her to the bones.
Not
me! Julia!
Not
me!”
“He
was falling backwards, into enormous depths, away from the rats. He
was still strapped in the chair, but he had fallen through the floor,
through the walls of the building, through the earth, through the
oceans, through the atmosphere, into outer space, into the gulfs
between the stars – always away, away, away from the rats. He was
light-years distant, but O'Brien was still standing at his side.
There was still the cold touch of a wire against his cheek. But
through the darkness that enveloped him he heard another metallic
click, and knew that the cage door had clocked shut and not open.”
"They
can't get inside you," she had said. But they could get inside
you. "What happens to you here is forever,"
O'Brien had said. That was a true word. There were things, your own
acts, from which you could never recover. Something was killed in
your breast: burnt out, cauterized out.
“
But
it was all right, everything was all right,
the struggle was
finished. He had won the victory over himself.
He
loved Big Brother.
