Winston's Loss Of Identity In 1984 By George Orwell

In the novel “1984” by George Orwell, dreams are shown as a vessel that guide and strengthen the main character Winston smith. Winston is able to maintain humanity, despite Big Brother’s unfathomable control over the minds of his people in Oceania. Although all the love and loyalty was reserved for Big Brother and The Party, Winston’s dreams of his mother’s love and the contrast of how she cared for him and his sister, served as a barrier to defy Big Brother’s rules and helped him strengthen his identity. Winston cannot fight Big Brother on moral grounds, but he can defy him using his dreams of his mother and his lover Julia. In his dream of his mother he sees compassion and her loyalty towards him and in his dream of Julia, he

In his first dream, Winston’s admiration for his mother is triggered as he remembers that she “died loving him,” and “sacrificed herself to a conception of loyalty to him that was private and unalterable.” In Oceania, all forms of private loyalty and compassion are eliminated by Big Brother, for “today there were fear, pain and hatred, but no dignity of emotion”. No matter how inhuman a person is turned into, by the world, there is always something that holds them back to their real identity. For Winston, it was his dreams that kept him bonded with his

He finds love and compassion in this part of the dream because of the “enveloping, protecting gesture of his mother’s arm” and admires the natural embodiment of love in such a simple act. Later, Winston realizes “the terrible thing The Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account”. At this point, an awareness is created for him as he realizes the significance of the values of his mother, which are scarce in Big Brothers world. Winston, through his dreams is able to admire love and loyalty, though also trying to maintain his humanity in an inhumane and emotionless world created by big brother. Through his dreams, he is able to express his love for Julia. He is defying The Party’s ideology of having no romance by having his first dream about an intimate romantic time with his love, Julia. He later goes on to explain the dream and faces “admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown her clothes aside”. This simple act of intimate gesture makes him realize that the “Big Brother and The Party and the Though Police could all be swept to nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm” as he knows of Big Brothers ideologies which “prevent men and women from forming loyalties” and “remove all pleasure from the sexual act”. In this dream, where Julia shows strength and defies the ideology