Essay Winston 1984 Character Analysis (Orwell's Book)

In the book “1984”, George Orwell cynically depicts a dystopian, totalitarian country named Oceania where there is no sense of individuality, freedom of thought and citizens are brainwashed by strict laws, propaganda and language. Winston Smith, the protagonist of the book, is illustrated as an everyday man: middle class, middle-aged and physically detoriating. However throughout the book, he is separated from others because of his ability to question authority, stray from conformity and rebel. In the book Winston is characterized as an ordinary citizen, transforms into a rebel and then a conformed member of his government. To start with, in the beginning of the book Winston is shown as frail, powerless, and alone; both his physical and mental health is weak. The quote “His hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soaps and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.” (4) uses tactile and visual imagery to set a cold, gloomy tone. Winston’s worn out from the city’s environment but also from his hopeless state under the totalitarian regime he lives in. The irritating imagery of Winston’s physical appearance irritates the audience and makes them despise the totalitarian regime and this also makes them feel sympathy toward the worn-out Winston.The atmosphere is depressing, bleak ,and gloomy mirroring how much of a miserable life will it be if forces of totalitarianism are allowed to prevail, warning the reader of this potential risk. Furthermore, Winston feels dead inside. This can be inferred from “He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. “ He is alone since he is only person around him who has human thoughts.(till he meets Julia) He feels trapped between the pressure of the totalitarian regime, the manipulation and his own conscious, his own perception of reality. He feels crazy, alone and hopeless. The metaphor of himself being “the monster” in monstrous world shows how how since he is aware of the corruption, absurdity of the government he is an outsider, in the wrong side of society. Winston as a character that is merely getting through the day for a reason that was unknown to him; an individual that is living just for the sake of doing so. To sum up, at the beginning of the book Winston is a depressed, isolated man trying to get by, under the the confinements of the regime. As the book progresses, Winston takes initiative to rebel in his own ways. For instance, he begins to write little memoirs to a diary bough from a prole’s shop, today’s “blackmarket”. He expresses his long thought ideas about his life and the oppression on the people from the state. He just lets out his thoughts impulsively on the paper. “Suddenly he began writing in sheer panic, only imperfectly aware of what he was setting down. His small but childish handwriting straggled up and down the page, shedding first its capital letters and finally even its full stops.He did not know what had made him pour out this stream of rubbish.” ( 11)When Winston writes in his diary, emotion often overtakes him and his writing changes to unpunctuated,uncapitalized, and with run-on sentences (mirroring his racing thoughts) from his normal grammatically correct and precise writing style. He writes “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER” in repetition, as if he writes the phrase enough it will come true. This repetition gives a sense of urgency, desperateness to the reader and also displays Winston’s strong hatred towards the regime, he is no longer able to keep his thoughts to himself.What his heart knows to be true overwhelms his caution and capacity to suppress emotion, he needs to take the action.Because of his fatalism, he is aware that his days are numbered since he started writing a diary.Since he is now a thought criminal, he believes that he will be caught no matter what he does, he convinces himself that he must continue to rebel.The next major event is the beginning of his love affair with Julia. His relation with Julia converts Winston's will to rebel into a physical representation compared to his prior expression by thought and words in his diary. His love for her is what makes him differentiate him from others: he is still able to feel basic human emotions, unlike the overall callous society . They feel love towards each other and make love together which is forbidden in the regime. The Party only accepts sex, if it’s for procreational reason since it is assumed that sexual desire could potentially compete with loyalty to the State. The Party discourages sex and love since it’s linked to human emotions and therefore, not controllable. Allowing people to love could lead to, the desire to be free,the desire to revolt since love is free, it’s unbinding and tolerant. Love, the most strong emotion, represents everything that the Party doesn’t want.To add, Winston’s name is used to symbolize his characteristics. Smith is the most common last name in the English language, thus his name suggests that he is an ordinary man who makes a vigorous attempt to challenge the regime. The reader identifies with the ordinary protagonist and admires his strength to try and change his circumstances for the better. All in all, with the help of writing and his relationship with Julia, Winston transforms into a rebellious threat to the Party. Finally at the end of the book, Winston becomes the ideal, indifferent civilian wanted by the Party as he is caught by the Thought Police and tortured in order to cripple his will and thoughts. The torture is conducted in both mental and physical levels stripping all his thoughts, feelings and capabilities from him (including his love for Julia).There are various foreshadowing of events that lead up to the inevitable end of Winston. In his neighbours apartment the two children chase shouting “Traitor!” and “Thought criminal!” at him. This demonstrates that eventually Winston’s being a traitor and thought criminal will come out. Additionally, the quote “eyes looked into Winston’s, sometimes with strange intensity, and flashed away again. The convoy was drawing to an end. " (146) uses foreshadowing to imply the prisoners looking at Winston so intently could foreshadow Winston becoming one of them in the future. Their glares could be a way of drawing Winston towards them showing how he may be with them one day. Foreshadowing builds up the anticipation among the reader; even though from the first page it’s almost obvious that Winston will suffer, author wants to builds up tension and assure that the reader is not naive and picks up the information that helps to understand what comes later.Plus, the author uses direct comparison and irony to contrast Winston before and after his brainwash in the Room 101. Before his imprisonment, Winston wrote an aphorism to his diary: "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four" (84) He asserts that the truth exists even though the Party’s effort to destroy it. People will only be truly free when party doesn’t have the ability to control the truth anymore. The aphorism displays Winston’s perception and deep understanding about the state that leads him into making a wise generalisation. Nonetheless, at the end of the book he is transformed into someone who writes “2+2=5” on the table. While once he was questioning that whether everybody believing in something because the Party wanted them to makes that information true; now he, himself, is a believer of the false dogmas. Orwell’s, change of word in the slogans conveys the audience the sharp difference between Winston before and after his treatment.Numb and stupefied, Winston starts a life of conformity and acceptance of the Big Brother and the regime. He has betrayed his Julia,his humanity and is no longer able to feel love.In this sense, the bullet at the end of the book can be presumed as a symbol of Winston being metaphorically dead, dead on the inside. Even though he is not deceased,now his life is pointless. All in all, Winston is transformed into a conformed member of society as he is inflicted to physical and mental pain. In conclusion, Winston transforms into an iconoclast rebel only to devolve back into a pawn of the Party. With the development of Winston Orwell is perhaps implying the inevitable doom of the individual in a totalitarian regime. To add, he may also be indicating that physical pain can overcome anything and that in the face of pain there can be no heroes.Although the ending of the book is pessimistic, it also offers a notable insight; that it takes a lot of effort to bring down a thinking man.