In George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the remaining question concerns something quieter.
What Can The Party Still Want From A Man Who Has Confessed?
Winston Smith has surrendered information, signed what the authorities put before him and learned how completely O'Brien can control his immediate world. An ordinary dictatorship might settle for obedience on those terms. In George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the remaining question concerns something quieter. When Winston thinks about Julia in the one place he still experiences as private, whose interests come first?
Why Julia Matters To The Party
Winston and Julia's relationship gives each an attachment that the Party did not arrange. Their room above the shop feels precious because they can imagine owing something to one another that the state cannot cancel by decree. The illusion of privacy collapses at their arrest. The attachment takes more work to destroy.
Forced disclosures about Julia do not by themselves settle the issue. A prisoner can speak under intolerable pressure and still believe that inwardly he has remained loyal. O'Brien understands that residual distinction. The institution he serves wants Winston to participate in the remaking of his own loyalties.
What Changes In Room 101
Winston faces the terror most precisely fitted to him. He asks that Julia suffer it in his place. The decisive element is the immediate wish behind the words. For that instant he means the transfer. He wants the person he had loved to stand between him and the thing he fears.
Afterwards Winston and Julia can acknowledge that each betrayed the other. Their meeting offers little prospect of recovering their earlier intimacy. Both know what happened when their private loyalty met a fear chosen expressly to defeat it. Even the memory of shared refuge now carries the knowledge of what they wished for each other.
Why The Café Matters
At the Chestnut Tree Café, Winston has the outward freedoms of someone of little political consequence. He can drink, play chess and follow announcements about the war. The reader still remembers the labour it took to create a citizen capable of occupying that chair so harmlessly.
News of victory supplies an occasion for emotion. Winston can locate the feeling in the great public figure who presides over this world. Fear, relief, dependence and the longing to be reconciled have become so entangled that the language of love fits his experience. The final sentence is disturbing because the reader has access to his inward response. There is no secret wink across the page.
Early in the novel, a diary allows Winston to address an imagined future reader. By the end, we have become the witnesses he once hoped for. We can remember the route by which the Party produced his love even when he no longer treats that history as a reason to resist it.
