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To What Extent Does Winston Have Control Over His Fate In 1984

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Does Winston Have Control Over His Fate? Throughout 1984, Winston Smith commits many rebellious acts against the party, and while this should mean that Winston has control over his fate, in actuality, he does not. At first glance, it appears that Winston finds few hardships in resisting the party; however, as time progresses, it becomes more and more evident that the party is aware of everything that he is doing. Eventually, it becomes blatant that Winston cannot change society, nor what will happen to others, or to himself. As a result, it is evident that Winston has no control over his fate. Winston’s primary goal is to remove the power of the party, and his method of doing so is to maintain the hate for the party and commit acts that …show more content…

This is shown through O’Brien’s guidance throughout Winston’s years. As mentioned earlier, O’Brien reveals that he had been closely watching Winston for several years and this means that the Thought Police had suspected Winston of treason throughout the entire novel (Orwell 249, 259). Knowing this, O’Brien continues to depict himself as a friendly figure when giving Winston his address or making unnaturally intimate eye contact with Winston, only so that he can entrap him whenever he wants (Orwell, 17, 159). This demonstrates that O’Brien is the one who has absolute control over Winston’s fate, as he could have made Winston conform to the party years earlier, but instead chose to toy with him by acting as a comrade instead. While O’Brien’s ability to choose when Winston is arrested demonstrates his control over Winston’s fate, the act of penetrating his mind does as well. Winston says that his subconscious mind embodies his emotions, and so long as his emotions are impregnable, the party does not have full control (Orwell 166-167). However, as Winston believes in multiple concepts contradictory to the party, such as his love for Julia, and hatred of Big Brother, by forcing Winston to wholeheartedly follow the party, it shows that the party has overruled Winston’s subconscious mind, which was supposedly impregnable. As such, when Winston betrays Julia and says “He loved Big Brother”, it becomes clear that the party has obtained complete control of Winston’s mind (Orwell, 292, 298). This thorough dominance of Winston’s mind depicts that Big Brother runs a totalitarian society with absolute control, and that the outer party members are no longer considered humans. With this, it becomes evident that Winston has no control of what happens to

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This quote shows that Winston has always felt guilty of his mother’s death as if he had been the reason she was killed. In other instances in the book it is almost like she is haunting his conscience, constantly appearing in his dreams, “Winston was dreaming of his mother” (page 31). This might be another reason why he was so determined to oppose, an obsession with wanting to avenge his mother. Winston fought hard against the government because he desperately craves to feel real emotion, he wants to experience love, to live knowing he accomplished something, despite knowing deep down the party would not allow accomplishments to survive, as they could erase him from history in the blink of an eye. “‘Does he [Big Brother] exist in the same way I exist?’ / ‘You do not exist,’ said O’Brien” (page 272).

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1. Winston believes that the true way to defeat the Party is by the proles. He says that he knows that power lies within the proles and that power can be used to overthrow and defeat the Party. 2. To Winston, the most important thing for him is that he knows that the Brotherhood exists.

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In this section, Winston’s entire out look and thought process changes extremely quickly and determinedly. Once he starts to interact with this girl who he seems to keep bumping into to, the whole course of Winston’s outwardly obedient but internally disobedient behavior becomes much more actively counter regime than it ever had before. This drastic change begins even in his first interaction with the mysterious girl who falls in front of him in the hallway at their office, “A curious emotion stirred in Winston’s heart. In front of him was an enemy who was trying to kill him; in front of him, also, was a human creature, in pain and perhaps with a broken bone. Already he had instinctively started forward to help her” (107-108).

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Winston is forced to undergo tortuous procedures and brainwashing. While incarcerated, Winston has terrible nightmares about rats, in which O’Brien uses to his advantage. Winston is forced to have a cage of rats strapped to his head and eventually these rats eat Winston’s face. After receiving such tremendous amounts of torture, Winston pleads with O’Brien to torture Julia instead of himself. This utter lack of hope and feeling of helplessness is what O’Brien desired from Winston the entire time.

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Winston knew that his time would come when the thought police would finally catch him. He knew this since he committed thoughtcrime by writing in his journal and he didn’t like big brother. Knowing this information, he tried to eventually pry deep into the secrets of his world and stand out. However, this just ended up making him meet someone that eventually would be the person who tortured him. All this would happen because he was different and he couldn’t be himself or have a different personality than the rest.

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As a result of Winston’s neglect of the rules, he was able to maintain his own perspective, as he attempted to defeat Big Brother’s ‘sinister plan’. “You’re a flaw in the pattern, Winston. You are a stain that must be wiped out….when finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will,” stated O’Brien (page 255). In the book, free will depicted the Ministry’s truthful judgments of the state of mind, which happened to correspond to Winston’s freedom of beliefs. When O’Brien was torturing Winston, he revealed Big Brother’s notions of simply destroying the rebelling mind of any person who had dared to testify against The Party’s core values.

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Throughout the novel, Winston experiences many acts of betrayal, both internal and external, which showcase the theme that survival takes precedence over all other personal morals and

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It was not until O’Brien summoned Winston to Room 101, where he used the last string of hope Winston had—only able to function because of a vague feeling of trust—in order to finally and actually ostracize him. His initial “morbid self-isolation [comes] from shunning social contact due to anger toward the world,” (Diamond). When O’Brien speaks of essentially taking over the world through war and indoctrination as seen in the Ministry of Love, Winston simply refutes and expresses that alienation as such would eliminate the free will of mankind and is virtually impossible. The hope that Winston had for the Proles and the rest of humanity was obliterated time and time again with O’Brien’s torture. This repetitive destruction adds to the novels entirety as a desolate, dystopian novel.

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Winston has an imaginative mind and later in the book he claims that the “power that would one day overturn the world” lies “in the proles”. He feels that the fate of the Party would lie in their hands and “when their time came, the world they constructed would not be just as alien to him” since “at the least it would be a world of sanity” (220). Winston expresses one of his heroic qualities through displaying his vision for the good of

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At the beginning of the novel, Winston made it prominent that he dissented Big Brother and his party’s idea. He wrote in his diary, in Book 1 Chapter 1, “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER…” (Orwell 18). This shows that Winston dissented his country’s government and was willing to rebel for he knew deep inside that

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In Winston’s believes, liberation is an entity hidden behind a mist of futility, an endless cycle of failed uprisings caused by the insolence of the general masses. The cycle also represents the situation that Winston finds himself within, regardless of his awareness he is still paralyzed by the irrational animalistic instinct to cower in fear of the party’s promised punishment. Resulting in his apathy towards revolution which causes him to abstain from any true revolutionary undertaking; as a result, the cycle of despair continues infinitely. Moreover, the paradox may highlight the extent of Winston’s indoctrination by the party. Winston views the revolution as fantastical due to the Proles oblivious nature, which is an assumption that is made by Winson as a result of party propaganda, which states that all “proles and animals are free”.

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