Nineteen Eighty-Four

George Orwell — born Eric Arthur Blair

Winston Smith edits the past for a living and commits the crime of keeping a private diary in a state that has abolished privacy.

DystopiaPolitical fictionSurveillanceLanguageMemoryLove

Reading edition

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How to read it

The horror is epistemological: Oceania does not merely punish dissent, it dismantles the conditions under which dissent could be thought. Newspeak, the memory hole and doublethink are three names for one project — to make the sentence 'two and two are four' unsayable.

Selected section overview

These are selected acts, parts or episodes, not a complete chapter list. Summaries contain spoilers; descriptive headings are editorial.

Part OneThe diary
Airstrip One, the telescreen, the Two Minutes Hate. Winston begins writing and becomes, in his own mind, already dead. Establishes the machinery: Ministries whose names invert their functions.
Part TwoJulia and the room above Charrington's
Love as sedition. The rented room is a small restored past — a paperweight, a rhyme, a bed. O'Brien draws them into the supposed Brotherhood, and Goldstein's book explains the world too neatly to be trusted.
Part ThreeRoom 101
Arrest, torture, and the deliberate destruction of the self that could love. Betraying Julia is the point; the state wants not obedience but conversion. He loved Big Brother.