1984 Characters: Complete Analysis

Winston Smith is not a hero in any traditional sense. He is physically frail, middle-aged, plagued by a varicose ulcer and a chronic cough. He drinks too much Victory Gin and eats terrible Victory food. He is unremarkable in every outward way—which is precisely Orwell's point. Winston represents the ordinary person's capacity for independent thought, and Orwell shows how even this basic human quality becomes revolutionary under totalitarianism.

Winston's rebellion begins with the smallest possible act: purchasing a diary and writing in it. But in a world where thoughtcrime is the ultimate offense, even private thoughts are dangerous. His diary entries start hesitantly but grow bolder, culminating in 'DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER' scrawled repeatedly across the page. This escalation mirrors how dissent works under oppression—once you allow yourself one forbidden thought, others follow inevitably.

What makes Winston compelling is not his bravery but his doubt. He isn't certain the Party is lying. He thinks it is. He remembers fragments that contradict the official record. But the Party's control of information is so thorough that Winston can never be completely sure his memories are real. This uncertainty—the inability to distinguish truth from fabrication—is the novel's most psychologically realistic element.

Winston's destruction in the Ministry of Love is total. O'Brien doesn't just force compliance—he forces belief. Winston must not merely say two plus two equals five; he must see it, believe it, feel it as truth. The torture succeeds because the Party understands something profound about human psychology: pain can override reason, fear can rewrite memory, and isolation can make any reality feel real.

When Winston betrays Julia in Room 101, he loses his last claim to humanity—the ability to love another person more than he fears pain. After his release, he is a hollow shell, drinking gin in the Chestnut Tree Cafe, incapable of the independent thought that once defined him. His final emotion—genuine love for Big Brother—represents the total victory of the state over the individual mind.

O'Brien is 1984's most complex and disturbing character because he understands everything Winston understands—and chooses the Party anyway. He is not ignorant or brainwashed. He comprehends that the Party's reality is manufactured, that its history is fabricated, that its wars are engineered. He knows all of this and believes the Party is right, not despite these facts but because of them. Power, O'Brien argues, is the ability to make reality whatever you want it to be.

During Winston's torture, O'Brien functions as both priest and executioner. He speaks with genuine warmth and patience, as though re-educating Winston is an act of love. 'You are mentally deranged,' he tells Winston. 'You suffer from a defective memory... Fortunately it is curable.' The horror is that O'Brien sincerely believes this. In the Party's philosophy, independent thought is a disease and torture is the cure.

O'Brien's most chilling speech articulates the Party's true purpose: 'The object of power is power.' Unlike historical tyrants who justified oppression through ideology—building a workers' paradise, purifying a race—the Party has dispensed with justification entirely. They want power because power is the only real thing. 'If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.' O'Brien delivers this vision not with regret but with satisfaction.

Julia represents a fundamentally different kind of resistance than Winston's. While Winston seeks truth and wants to understand the Party's mechanisms of control, Julia is uninterested in ideology. She falls asleep when Winston reads Goldstein's book aloud. She doesn't care about the Party's manipulation of history because the past doesn't interest her. Her rebellion is about the present: sex, pleasure, good food, beautiful things—everything the Party tries to suppress.

This makes Julia simultaneously more and less threatening to the Party than Winston. She's less threatening because she has no desire to organize resistance or understand the system well enough to fight it. She's more threatening because her rebellion targets something the Party considers essential: the redirection of sexual and emotional energy toward Big Brother. Julia proves that the human desire for pleasure and connection is irreducible—the Party can suppress it but can't eliminate it.

Julia's pragmatism extends to her survival instincts. She is better at navigating the Party's rules than Winston, knowing which risks to take and which to avoid. She's been having affairs for years without getting caught. She understands the Party's surveillance better than Winston does precisely because she's been evading it longer. Her competence makes her capture in Part Two all the more devastating—even the most practical rebel cannot escape a system designed to catch everyone eventually.

When Winston and Julia meet after their release, both recognize that something irreparable has been destroyed. Julia admits she betrayed Winston too: 'I betrayed you.' 'I betrayed you,' Winston responds. They acknowledge this without emotion—the capacity for emotional connection has been burned out of them. The Party succeeded not just in separating them but in making their love something neither can remember feeling. This brief, cold exchange may be the novel's saddest moment.