1984

Winston Smith, the protagonist, arrives home at Victory Mansions. The setting is dismal: Vile wind pushes gritty dust into the building as Winston enters, and the smell of boiled eggs and cabbage overpowers the hallway. The elevator is inoperable, so Winston takes the stairs to his seventh-floor flat, resting along the way to relieve a varicose ulcer on his right leg. There is the same oversized poster on each landing along the way up: A vaguely middle-aged man with a black mustache and the caption “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU” (3).

A telescreen, a device that transmits audio and images in both directions, is speaking inside Winston’s flat. Winston turns the device down, but he cannot turn it off completely. Posters of Big Brother and another with the word “Ingsoc” dominate the landscape outside his window, and a police patrol helicopter drops among the buildings to spy on occupants. Winston observes that police patrols are nothing compared to the Thought Police, who might be watching anyone at any time, perhaps even through the telescreen in his own flat.

The Thought Police, Big Brother, Ingsoc, and Newspeak are all aspects of the war-ridden future under the Party’s rule. Winston lives in London, which is now the chief city of Airstrip One in Oceania. The year is approximately 1984, although Winston isn’t certain. Oceania is governed by the Party, which is led by Big Brother, and although there are no formal laws, there are repercussions for disobeying Party rules. Winston is a member of the Outer Party and is not supposed to visit common proletariat (prole) shops, but he has acquired a diary and begins to write in it. Possessing and writing in a diary are offenses punishable by death for Party members.

Winston pauses after writing the date—April 4, 1984—and is briefly distracted by the telescreen’s abrupt change to military music. He continues writing and reflects on two people from work that morning: a dark-haired girl and Mr. O’Brien, an Inner Party member. Both attended the Two Minutes Hate—a daily Party propaganda viewing—with Winston that morning. Winston suspects the dark-haired girl might be spying on him, and he thinks he sees a fleeting moment of understanding in O’Brien’s eye. He wonders whether perhaps O’Brien is a member of the Brotherhood, a secret anti-Party organization.

Winston comes back from his memory of the morning and finds himself writing “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER” repeatedly in his diary when there is a knock at his door. Winston knows that what he’s written constitutes a thoughtcrime, and he reflects on the possibility of being arrested, although such arrests usually take place at night.

Winston is relieved when he answers the door and sees his neighbor Mrs. Parsons instead of the Thought Police. Mrs. Parsons requests Winston’s assistance in unclogging the drain in her family’s flat, a chore Winston is accustomed to in their rundown building. While helping in the Parsons flat, Winston is both annoyed and unsettled by the Parsons children as they play realistic spy games. Children in Oceania are raised to love Big Brother and report their parents to the authorities for any anti-Party behavior, making it common for parents to grow to fear their own children. Winston returns to his own flat briefly before preparing to leave for work again. He dedicates his diary “to the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free” (35) before carefully storing it away.

Winston dreams of his family, although he doesn’t have many solid memories of them. His parents might have been picked up in an early purge, and Winston has a vague sense that his mother and sister were somehow sacrificed to save him, but he can’t remember details of his past, and the Party has destroyed any historical references to times before the revolution. Winston vaguely remembers a period of chaos in the streets of London when he was young, and he knows there must have been a time in history when Oceania was not at war “because one of his early memories was of an air raid which appeared to take everyone by surprise” (41).

Winston awakens to the sound of the telescreen and performs the daily Party-prescribed exercises for his age group. As he goes through the motions commanded on the telescreen, Winston reflects on the impossibility of tracing history when all records and mention of the past are destroyed or changed by the ruling party. The most frightening part of history being changed is that it has the potential to become truth: “if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth” (44). Winston’s thoughts are interrupted when the woman on the telescreen yells at him to try harder in his exercises, and he finds himself touching his toes for the first time in years under the harsh but encouraging direction from the screen. 

Winston works for the Records Department at the Ministry of Truth, a large Party-run ministry responsible for producing literature, newspapers, posters, and all types of reading material for each segment of society. The proletariat class is provided with material more appropriate for their standing—news stories about crimes and even cheap pornographic literature—whereas Winston and his fellow Party members are allowed other forms of propaganda, such as speeches from Big Brother and updates on the ongoing war.

Winston’s job is to rectify records. This can include altering a speech to make it seem as though Big Brother predicted what was to come, or it can mean altering newspaper records to remove all mentions of an individual from any form of recorded history. When working on large-scale rectification projects, it’s common for multiple writers to work on their own versions of the same rewritten history, not knowing who else is working on the same project or whose work will be selected as the official new version of history.

“Memory holes” are used to discard evidence of previously recorded history, sweeping artifacts and paper away to unseen furnaces deep within the Ministry of Truth. On this particular day, Winston’s assignment is to remove a person from history. Withers, a Party member previously praised by Big Brother, has crossed the Party in some way and is now an “unperson,” someone who does not and never did exist and therefore must be removed from all historical records (58). Winston excels at this task because he considers every detail that goes into altering history, and he creates a fantastic tale about a comrade hero to completely alter the content of a speech that once mentioned the now-unperson.