Literature / 1984

Big Brother Is Watching.

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

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This is the book. One of the most horrifying and depressing codifiers for the Dystopian genre, ever, notwithstanding its now-outdated title.

After reading Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian thriller We, George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four as a Pragmatic Adaptation of the novel for non-Russian audiences, with the addition of the then-new technology of television. Finished in 1948 (Orwell merely reversed the last two digits of that year to devise the title) and published the next year, it became one of the most iconic stories in the English language, and introduced the phrases “Big Brother Is Watching You,” “thoughtcrime,” “Thought Police,” “Newspeak,” and “doublethink” into the English lexicon (but not “doublespeak”, “groupthink” or “wrongthink”.).

The book is set in London, the chief city of Airstrip One and part of the superpower of Oceania. Life sucks. Oceania is ruled by the totalitarian regime of "the Party", personified by the omnipresent figure of "Big Brother". Standards of living are low due to the Forever War Oceania is engaged in alongside their ally Eurasia against Eastasia (or is it the other way around?). Sex is banned for all Party members except for procreation, and only between state-approved couplings. Media, entertainment, and art are all heavily controlled and censored by the Party. And most importantly, Sinister Surveillance is omnipresent: nearly every space has some sort of monitoring device and it’s impossible to tell whether you are being watched or listened to at any time. The novel’s protagonist is Winston Smith, a member of the middle-class "Outer Party" who lives a dismal existence working for the Party's Propaganda Machine, secretly nursing thoughts of rebellion. Until one day, a chance encounter with a woman might prompt him to do something about it...

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The BBC adapted the book for television in 1954 with a script by Nigel Kneale and Peter Cushing as Winston Smith. It resulted in probably the earliest large-scale eruption of protests about "taste and decency" involving a British TV programme. Questions were asked in the House of Commons when it was alleged that one viewer had actually died of shock while watching.

Two film versions were made, in 1956 and (appropriately) 1984 (in fact, the film was shot on the actual days from Winston's diary when possible). The 1956 version was directed by Michael Anderson and featured Edmond O'Brien, Donald Pleasence, Jan Sterling and Michael Redgrave; one of the deeply ironic things about it was that the CIA changed the film to suit the needs of the government. The brilliant and depressing 1984 version of Nineteen Eighty-Four, starring John Hurt as Winston and Richard Burton in his final role as O'Brien, with a soundtrack by Eurythmics, is far more true to the original novel, but is often compared unfavorably to Terry Gilliam's surreal dystopian movie Brazil (which came out one year later, in 1985), which takes a much more subversive and blackly humorous view of Orwell's themes. In 2013, this novel was adapted into stage in West End, with a Broadway run premiering in June 2017. Other adaptations include audio dramas, an operatic production, and a ballet.

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David Bowie had plans of a musical adaptation of the novel in The '70s, but plans were rejected by the George Orwell Estate through Orwell's widow herself (the numbers “We Are The Dead”, “1984” and “Big Brother” were later used on Bowie’s eighth studio album Diamond Dogs).

Also, this book is frequently compared to Brave New World as a way of showing the perspectives of the dystopian society. Note that Nineteen Eighty-Four shows that what we fear controls us, while Brave New World shows that what we love controls us.^note The most famous expression of this argument was in the introduction to media scholar Neil Postman's 1985 work Amusing Ourselves to Death.

Compare also with Jennifer Government, another Dystopian novel in which it's not the state or a single party, but corporations who control everything; and with The Handmaid's Tale in which the suppression of sex for any reason other than breeding is also a major element. Contrast Brave New World where hedonism instead of terror is used to control the populace, and Fahrenheit 451, where dystopia came about from the people while the government was less involved.

The book also inspired the trope Room 101, a Place Worse Than Death no person wants to be sent to. The book also inspired the TV Series, where celebrities send their pet hates into the room for all eternity.

All spoilers below are unmarked. Reader beware.

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NOTE: Do not identify this book as being anti-communist or anti-fascist anywhere on this wiki. It's anti-totalitarianism. Orwell was personally a socialist, but detested authoritarian regimes that had been put in place in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. The original political leaning of the Party is deliberately vague, and their sole concern is retaining power — no more, no less, as stated In-Universe by O'Brien near the end.

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This novel and adaptations provide examples of:

Tropes A-M

• 20 Minutes into the Future: Although apparently this was a case of Executive Meddling, supposedly Orwell wanted to set the book in 1948, but was told he couldn't, so he just switched the last two digits around to arrive at the new date/title. Winston comments that he can't be sure what year it is, due to the Party's constant editing of history.
• Adaptation Expansion: The 1954 BBC adaptation notably added a scene not present at other adaptations where we get to see how a novel is being produced and made in the Pornosec.
• Adaptational Name Change:
  • Syme was given the first name of 'Harold' in the 1984 adaptation. Before that, he was referred to as "Syme. B" in the 1954 BBC Adaptation.
  • Julia was given the last name of 'Dixon' in the 1954 BBC Adaptation. In the book, her last name was never revealed.
  • The 1956 film changes O'Brien's name to 'O'Connor', to avoid confusion with actor Edmond O'Brien (who played Winston).
  • In the Radford adaptation, the ironically named Ministry of Plenty is renamed Ministry of Production, or Miniprod.
  • The Radford film changes the Party honorific from "Comrade" to "Brother" (for men) and "Sister" (for women).
• After the End: Ingsoc's rise was preceded by a nuclear war, albeit one that did not snuff out all civilization. All the same, the Party (and its two rivals) have permanently stalled all human progress, and even history itself:
  Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.
  • A major aversion of the common 1950s versions of this trope. Despite reference to a “nuclear exchange in the 1950s.... dropping a nuclear bomb on Colchester” (a minor, historic English County Town with a long history as a base for the British Army), there is no reference to radiation poisoning, nuclear winter, or related phenomena, though it would explain the general sickliness of the population.
• Airstrip One: Trope Namer. It's the name given to Great Britain under Ingsoc.
• All Crimes Are Equal: Because in Oceania, there's only one crime: Thoughtcrime, or failure to serve The Party with the utmost of one's labor and devotion. All other crimes as we'd know them are simply considered different expressions of this single offense.
• All for Nothing: Winston learns the hidden history of the world around him, discovers that he's not alone in his resistance, and even starts to believe that the proles will someday overthrow Big Brother, only for Winston to be caught by the Party and tortured into near-mindless obedience, with it being explicit that he'll inevitably be vaporized into an Unperson.
• All Nations Are Superpowers: The world in 1984 only includes three superpowers who are (or are not) unceasingly at war with each other.
• Ambiguous Situation: Because of the nature of the world and the Party's iron grip on all information, anything and everything that Winston doesn't personally witness is open to interpretation:
  • The Forever War between Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia. The actual state of the world is so poorly known that (a) the idea that Oceania dominates the entire world, and the existence of the other states is simply a fiction to justify a war with which to keep people's expectations of a better life crushed, and (b) the idea that Oceania is little more than a Banana Republic consisting of only Airstrip One, and is applying propaganda to make its position on the world stage sound grander than it really is, are both equally valid interpretations of what might really be going on. The "Three states making only token attacks on each other" is just one other possibility which may or may not be the truth. Of course, we don't actually know anything of the other two powers, or indeed how finely balanced the Balance of Power actually is.
  • The existence of Big Brother, Emmanuel Goldstein, and the Brotherhood. Big Brother is the leader of Oceania, Emmanuel Goldstein is a traitor and public enemy number one, and the Brotherhood is Goldstein's rebel network. But we never actually see any of them in person. Big Brother is solely limited to pictures and posters with his face, Goldstein is never seen outside the Two Minutes Hate movies (which are explicitly state propaganda) and a book he wrote, and the Brotherhood is represented by O'Brien, who turns out to be luring Winston and Julia into a trap. it is heavily indicated that Big Brother is merely a fictitious strongman to serve as a symbol for the Party and the citizens to rally around, Emmanuel Goldstein is an equally fictitious example of The Scapegoat on which the blame for all things bad is placed upon, and the Brotherhood is merely a trap created by the Party, and their handbook was written by them. O'Brien himself leads a lot of credence to this possibility, but refuses to confirm to Winston either way.
  • The appendix. The end of the book contains an often overlooked appendix that refers to Newspeak in the past tense, possibly implying the Party will in fact fall eventually. Of course, this may not technically be part of the story, and Word of God said it was open to interpretation if the Party does eventually fall. This isn't even getting into most of the story with how the Party keeps changing facts leaving it ambiguous as to what is truly real or not.
• Apathetic Citizens: The Proles are deliberately conditioned to not give a damn about anything except their daily lives, the state lottery, and all sorts of trashy, disposable fiction.
• Arc Words:
  • "Big Brother is watching you," and on a different level, the slogan of the Party:
  WAR IS PEACE
  FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
  IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
  • "DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER."
  • "Two plus two equals five."
  • ""Oranges and lemons," say the bells of St. Clement's."
  • "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past."
  • "If there is hope, it lies in the Proles."
• As Long as There Is One Man: Subverted. Even after withstanding torture for weeks on end, Winston tells O'Brien that the Party will someday fall due to the "spirit of mankind," a conviction he holds onto with desperate faith alone. O'Brien responds coldly, by showing Winston his battered and malnourished body in a mirror and using it as a metaphor for Winston's idea of humanity. What happened to Winston, he explained, is what would happen to anyone who would dare defy Ingsoc. "If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man." O'Brien's revelations about the Brotherhood or the future of the world may or may not have been lies designed to demoralize Winston and facilitate his brainwashing but still relevant even if they were, since the bad guys think it's important members of the resistance feel alone, isolated and the last of their kind.
• Assimilation Plot: The Party claims to be doing this.
  "You know the Party slogan 'Freedom is Slavery." Has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible? Slavery is freedom. Alone -free- the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal.
• Author Tract: Orwell was never the slightest bit shy in admitting that he wrote primarily in defense of democratic socialism and against totalitarianism.
• Awesome, but Impractical: The Floating Fortresses are introduced as unstoppable war machines that combine the entire naval might of the Ministry of Peace in a single point in the ocean. They are apparently unsinkable and loaded with enough firepower to make an ork green with envy. However, each one takes so long to build that it becomes obsolete by the time it's finished, so it ends up being scrapped before a new one is built. This is deliberate. The mass amount of labor and raw materials needed to construct one must be diverted toward the supposed war, and thus wasted on something that doesn't exist, lest they be used to benefit the population at all (see Goldstein's book).
• The Bad Guy Wins: The whole point of this book is that moral and/or ethical standards are irrelevant to Realpolitik, and thus the good guys never will remake the world in their image. Ever. Within the story itself, O'Brien successfully captures Winston and brainwashes him into loving Big Brother.
• Barefoot Poverty: Winston estimates half the population of Oceania goes barefoot, even though 57 million boots had supposedly been produced in the last quarter.
• Beauty Equals Goodness: Subverted. Everyone in Oceania is hard looking and rough around the edges. Winston is not even in his forties yet and he's already decrepit. Julia is only in her twenties, and yet Winston says that her lips are probably the only part of her he could genuinely call pretty. They fall in love, anyway. Meanwhile, Winston at first is struck by O'Brien's friendly, disarming demeanor and mannerisms, along with his 'prize fighter figure'... but eventually even he notices how tired and worn O'Brien looks.
• Beneath Suspicion: The Party has this attitude towards the Proles, in the most condescending way. Unlike Party members, Proles can be permitted intellectual freedom precisely because they have no intellect.
• Betrayal by Offspring: The Party encourages children to turn their parents in to the Thought Police for subversive behavior. Parsons is arrested after his daughter (allegedly) hears him whispering "Down with Big Brother" in his sleep. Parsons is such a faithful Party member that he's actually proud of her for doing this.
• Beware the Nice Ones: It never crosses Winston's mind that Charrington, the quiet, friendly little man he and Julia rent their room from, is actually a member of the Thought Police.
• Big Beautiful Woman: Winston finds the prole woman who sings the "Love Song" outside his apartment to be beautiful in her own way.
  Julia: She's a meter across the hips, easily.
  Winston: That is her style of beauty.
• Big Brother Is Employing You: Winston works for the Party as a professional historical revisionist, rewiting historcial documents so they line up with whatever the Party says.
• Big Brother Is Watching: The Trope Namer. The party has surveillance measures in every home and prosecutes everybody who shows the slightest of suspicious behavior.
• Big Bad: O'Brien is the most significant villain seen in the story, and responsible for both Winston's and Julia's ultimate capture and Winston's conversion to Ingsoc. Big Brother is more of an unseen Greater-Scope Villain, if he even exists.
• Black-and-Grey Morality: When they are enrolling themselves in the Brotherhood, Winston and Julia agree to commit atrocities in order to topple Ingsoc, which already commits atrocities because it is utterly evil.
• Blatant Lies: The whole purpose of the Ministry of Truth is to publish obvious lies and have them taken as truth. The scary thing is no one questions them.
• "Blind Idiot" Translation: The original Finnish translation, but it was later remedied by a much better and accurate one.
• Bread and Circuses: The Proles, because "Proles and animals are free." The Ministry of Truth has a section that produces crappy entertainment for them (called "prolefeed" in Newspeak): newspapers that only contain crime, sports and horoscopes, sensationalistic novels, films "oozing with sex," sentimental songs made by machines, and porn. They can also do as they bloody well please, and Big Brother doesn't give a crap if they have orgies, until one of them proves intelligent enough to organize revolutions and thus gets marked down by the Thought Police.
• Break the Cutie: O'Brien explains that this is the pure, final reason why they allow hopeful wide eyed idealists to exist.
• Breather Episode: The whole of Part II (especially Chapters II and IV), when nothing threatening happens, and even a Hope Spot or two begins. Within Part II itself, special breather episodes are when Winston reads the book, because by definition there can be no threat.
• Call-Back: At the end, the newsreader comments that the Oceanian war maneuver to bring the whole of Africa under its control "may bring the war within measurable distance of its end" — exactly the same thing said about another maneuver in the beginning. Whether this is meant to imply that the news report is just pure propaganda, or an actual coincidence, is up for debate.
• Came Back Wrong: Crossed with Irony. The Party did a good deal to erase various things both good and ill (capitalism, nationalism, liberty and even peace) supposedly for the purpose of bringing about true proletarian power... only to re-purpose and regurgitate them all (including the "War is Peace" idea) for upholding the Party's power.
• The Cameo: Blink and you'll miss it, but Eurythmics frontwoman Annie Lennox appears in the 1984 adaptation as a woman at a rally.
• Canned Orders over Loudspeaker: In the Radford film version, there's a loudspeaker constantly announcing the various production quotas that have been met or exceeded.
• Can't Stop the Signal: Yes, they can. They started it in the first place.
• Chekhov's Gun: Winston's freakout when a rat shows up in the hiding place demonstrates his fear of rats... which O'Brien uses against him in Room 101, where a person's greatest fear is used to torture them.
• Clock Discrepancy: The book plays with this idea. The main character looks at the clock which reads 8:00. He thinks it's still 8 PM, but instead it was actually 8 AM. In a broader sense, there might also be a calendar discrepancy, as Winston is not even sure the year is 1984. He believes he was born in 1944 or 1945 and is fairly sure his age is 39, but it all remains an estimation as nobody can be absolutely certain of the year anymore.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: The Ministry of Love specializes in this.
• Color-Coded Castes: In Oceania, members of the governing body, the Party, are all dressed in overalls (for clarification for those in North America, that’s what we’d call “jumpsuits” or “coveralls” in Canada and America, not the farmer wear we know as “overalls” today) though members of the higher-ranking division, the Inner Party, dress in black, and members of the lower-ranking one (roughly equivalent to a middle class), the Outer Party, in blue.
• Comic-Book Fantasy Casting: In a Manga adaptation of this novel, Winston Smith is drawn to look like a mixture of two of the actors who played him, Peter Cushing (1954 BBC Adaptation) and John Hurt (1984 film version).
• Commie Nazis: The Party that rules Oceania combines the worst authoritarian aspects of Nazism and Communism, something explicitly referenced by O'Brien in his speech in the Ministry of Love. As a democratic socialist, Orwell considered Nazism and Communism to be very similar in their effects on the general populace.
• Conversation Cut: Julia and Winston call this "talking in installments." They will sometimes abruptly cut off their conversations mid-sentence if they think someone could hear them, and continue talking as if nothing had happened the next time they crossed paths.
• The Constant: Notable London landmarks which exist in the year 1984 include Victory Square, which features a monument to Big Brother consisting of a large column with lions around the base and a statue of Big Brother on top, as well as a statue of Oliver Cromwell on horseback. A mere stone's throw away is a Party museum which showcases bits of war propaganda. Contrary to the lies of oldthinkers, all of these places have always been exactly the way they are now.
• Conveniently Interrupted Document: Winston is reading Emmanuel Goldstein's book, and is just about to learn why the Party is so brutal and totalitarian — upon which he stops because Julia's fallen asleep, preventing both him and the reader from learning the reason (until later).
• Crapsack Only by Comparison: Discussed; Goldstein's book within a book notes that it's much easier to oppress someone and get away with it when they have no metric of comparison and don't know they're being oppressed.
• Crapsack World: It was probably the single most ultimate example in all of fiction before I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, and even then it might still be number one (might, there are some really horrible ones out there) if you consider the latter less a dystopia than a depiction of hell itself. Living in the world of 1984 is a Fate Worse than Death even worse than living in a Cosmic Horror Story. At least in a Cosmic Horror Story you lived just like a Prole with privacy and freedom because the gods don't care about your thought-crimes (unless, of course, your curious mind actively seek them out with punishments galore). O'Brien explains to Winston why the Party has made Oceania a place of such utter misery and terror:
  O'Brien: How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?
  Winston: (thinks) By making him suffer.
  O'Brien: Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own?
• Daydream Surprise: In the film, a twisted version of this occurs after Winston is taken to the Ministry of Love. He is shown standing in the idyllic Golden Country, staring into the distance as O'Brien lectures him about the Party and its motives. A few moments into this, the scene dissolves into - surprise! - Winston strapped to a table in an oppressive Ministry of Love cell, with O'Brien ready to begin his Electric Torture.
• Deader Than Dead: Those who become "un-persons" are executed and have all traces of their existence removed. It was as if their whole existence never happened.
• Deconstruction: Of My Country, Right or Wrong and Patriotic Fervor. Orwell shows how easily the people can be manipulated into mindless patrotism and xenophobia.
• Diesel Punk: The tech level of Oceania is permanently stuck here.
• Disproportionate Retribution: The hell Winston Smith is put through is astonishing, considering that his rebellious acts — keeping a diary, having an affair and enjoying it — are so trivial and furtive that he would pose no threat to the Party at all if he were only left alone. Very likely he would never agitate, or publish samizdat tracts, or even whisper thoughtcrime to his acquaintances, much less commit any sabotage or terrorism. He would just go on in his humble way, writing lies for the Ministry of Truth, meeting up with Julia, and wondering wistfully if there is a Brotherhood, until his natural death. But for the Party, mere obedience is not enough.
  Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.
  • As O'Brien explains to Winston in the Ministry of Love:
  "It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be. Even in the instant of death we cannot permit any deviation."
• Don't Think, Feel: The Newspeak term for this is "bellyfeel," as in feeling Ingsoc in your belly.
• Doomed Moral Victor: Actively defied by the party in two ways. Normal operating procedure is to torture dissidents until they have no hatred of or resistance to the party left in them. They also have sting operations with Inner Party members posing as Goldstein supporters, and the oath they make them take is to renounce all ethics; this oath is recorded, and played back during Winston's time in Room 101.
  O'Brien: If, for example, it would somehow serve our interests to throw sulphuric acid in a child's face — are you prepared to do that?
  Winston: Yes.
• Downer Ending: After his "rehabilitation" in the Ministry of Love and betraying Julia to his own Fate Worse than Death, Winston forsakes his first and earliest childhood memory and replaces it with pure hot-blooded devotion to the truly-proved-meaningless cause of war on the Party's behalf. He ends his life — or imagines the end of his life — in stupid ecstasy, after confessing to crimes he did not commit in order to alleviate guilt from the Party (the same lie of which others partook at the start of the novel being the incitement of his intellectual rebellion), he finally professes unconditional love for Big Brother. Perhaps the worst part of the ending is the fact that Winston's re-education is so successful that he actually mistakes it for a happy ending. The Michael Radford movie has a similarly bleak ending, having Winston look at the image of Big Brother, then thinking, "I love you."
  "He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother."
• Droit du Seigneur: A rare modern example, in which one element of The Party's propaganda is the claim that before Ingsoc there had existed a law "by which every capitalist had the right to sleep with any woman working in one of his factories." This draws on a very similar statement in Marx's Communist Manifesto, where he tried to justify his ideas for abolition of the family by claiming that all working-class women were really slaves and prostitutes for the capitalists, anyway. Given his own dabbling in Socialism, Orwell had most likely read this.
• Dude, Not Funny!: In-universe. Winston sees horrible Newsreel footage of refugees being murdered, including a woman with a small child. The audience at the picture theatre laugh. A prole woman loudly objects to this, and is taken out of the theatre by the police.
• Dystopia: Trope Codifier.
• Dystopia Is Hard: A harsh aversion. Oceania is an airtight dystopia, with absolute control over its citizens. Even its inefficiencies are intentional and carefully used to reinforce the dystopia.
• Electric Torture: Merely one tool of the Ministry of Love, along with gang-beatings, psychological abuse, starvation, brainwashing, and the most vicious sort of phobia exploitation.
• The Empire: Oceania controls the entirety of North and South America, Australia, and parts of the other continents as well. At least, that's what's claimed. Perhaps Airstrip One is all there is to Oceania, or perhaps it dominates the whole world and bombs its own citizens to keep up the appearance of war. Winston (and the reader) never learn the truth.
• Empty Shell: The Ministry of Love mass manufactures these out of thought criminals.
  "You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves."
• Enfant Terrible:
  • Parson's kids, the son in particular. They're little hellions whom Winston believes will kill their own mother one way or another within a couple of years. And that's before they turn their father — who is staunchly loyal to the Party — over to the Thought Police.
  • There is an evil version of the Boy Scouts, who get specialized training to teach them to be fanatically loyal. And the only activity they do is stalk people who they think are suspicious and turn them over to the authorities, often regardless of whether they actually did anything or not.
• Equal-Opportunity Evil: Goldstein's book tells that the Party accepts Jews, blacks and Indios in their ranks, if only to avoid people feeling oppressed by specific other races/cultures/nationalities within Oceania.

• Evil Plan: O'Brien seeks to crush Winston and Julia's dissent by pretending be a Rebel Leader himself.
• Eviler Than Thou: The Party actually looks down on the fascisms and communisms of the past, claiming that the fact that they cared about things like racial purity, communal property, or really anything other than remaining in power is the reason they all eventually fell.
• Evil States of America: Played with. The story is set in dystopian Britain, but Oceania is primarily an American-based superstate according to the authorities, though there are no American characters in the novel and the government departments are all described in the British manner as Ministries and located in London. The other two superstates (successors of Russia and China) are, by all appearances, just as totalitarian and imperialistic, however.
• Evil Will Fail:
  • This book is an infamous aversion of this trope: the evil Big Brother governments of the world have things so completely under control and so tightly locked into their plans, that the book ends with the "resistance" depicted as a myth and the protagonist of the story successfully brainwashed into obedience.
  • Of course, there's always the Newspeak appendix written in the past tense, which may or may not be in-universe. Not only does the Appendix place the Party and its creations in the past tense, but it's dated 2050 (well after the action in the book), mentions the name of Winston Smith (whom O'Brien stated would be forgotten), and even references Party-verboten things such as the Declaration of Independence in its examples.
• Expanded States of America: Of the "Transcontinental American Empire" subtype, as apparently the USA absorbed Britain and the British Commonwealth along with the rest of the Americas to form Oceania.
• Extreme Speculative Stratification: Probably one of the Trope Codifiers: the proles, who make up most of the population, are manual laborers with no privilege who live short and brutal lives, while Party members get all the perks. However, Party members are so intensely monitored and their lives so tightly controlled that they are effectively prisoners, whereas the apathetic Proles are allowed to cavort and debauch in relative freedom, just so long as they don't start organizing.
• False Flag Operation: Julia believes that that Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia are basically ruled by the same ideology, and are bombing each other/themselves to create a Pretext for War and totalitarianism, and that the Party is using the Brotherhood to bait dissidents for capture. She's proven wrong, but that's not to say the powers use the warring to their own benefit internally, too.
• False Friend:
  • O'Brien, as revealed in the third act.
  • Also, Charrington.
• Fan Disservice: Winston's visit to a prostitute, in the book and especially the 1984 film.
  Winston: She had a young face, painted very thick. It was really the paint that appealed to me, the whiteness of it, like a mask, and the bright red lips. Party women never paint their faces. There was no one else on the street, and no tele-screens. She said: 'Two dollars'. I went with her through the doorway and across a backyard into a basement kitchen. There was a bed against the wall, and a lamp on the table, turned down very low. She threw herself down on the bed, and at once, without any kind of preliminary in the most coarse, horrible way you can imagine, pulled up her skirt. I turned up the lamp. When I saw her in the light, she was quite an old woman, fifty years old at least. But I went ahead and did it just the same.
  • Parsons using the lavatory in the cells of Miniluv definitely qualifies as this.
• Fascist, but Inefficient: Played with. The only efficient organizations in Oceania are the Thought Police and the Ministry of Love. Every other aspect of society is left neglected and crumbling because of the Inner Party's belief that a prosperous and comfortable society would overthrow the ruling oligarchy.
• Fate Worse than Death: It is the Trope Namer for a subtrope, after all.
• Fictional Political Party: 'The Party.' Simply 'The Party' since they've long since gotten rid of the competition, forming a totalitarian regime. The Party's original name was 'The English Socialist Party,' but, when referred to as other than simply 'The Party,' it is now solely spoken of and written as 'Ingsoc' (Newspeak for 'English Socialism').
• Fictionary: The Newspeak dictionary.
• Flowers of Romance: Winston picks a bunch of bluebells for Julia when they meet in the countryside for the first time.
• Fluffy the Terrible: Big Brother.
• Foe Yay:
  • Invoked. The purpose of the Two Minutes' Hate is to channel the citizens' sexual impulses into their hatred for the state's enemies.
  • There's also a disturbing subtext of this between Winston and O'Brien.
• Foregone Conclusion: Winston fatalistically accepts towards the beginning of the novel that the very fact he has bought a journal and dared to think for himself will eventually doom him. It turns out that he's right, as the Thought Police were on to him even before the novel even began. He also ends up dooming Julia along with him (assuming the Thought Police had not already been on to her too).
• Foreshadowing:
  • Julia, albeit unintentionally. "I bet that picture's got bugs behind it."
  • Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me...
  • O'Brien telling Winston and Julia about how they will risk being captured, tortured, and vaporized after joining the Brotherhood.
  • In the Ministry of Love, Winston sees one of his fellow prisoners get called to go to Room 101. As he frantically resists being dragged to his fate, he tries to convince them to punish someone else instead of him, thereby prefiguring what Winston ends up doing. In fact, just as the prisoner tries to sacrifice the only individual who had shown kindness towards him (the other prisoner who had offered him food), Winston ends up sacrificing the only person who loved him — Julia.
    • More specifically, the prisoner asks to punish the man who attempted to share his last piece of bread with him (and who got a beating because of that already). Room 101's job is not complete until it makes a person betray the people who actively show care and compassion towards them.
• Forever War: One vital component of a totalitarian Hell.
• Freud Was Right: Invoked. Julia theorizes that the Party keeps people in a state of warlike hysteria and power hunger by subjecting them to sexual deprivation. She even calls it "sex gone sour."
• Future Food Is Artificial: In the Radford adaptation, Parsons comments that the meat in their stew likely isn't meat at all. But still doubleplusgood.
• Genericist Government: The dystopian state in the novel doesn't have a specific ideology beyond naked totalitarianism. Oceania officially practices Ingsoc (English Socialism), while its rivals Eurasia and Eastasia respectively practice Neo-Bolshevism and an ideology that can best be translated as "Obliteration of the Self". However, there's no practical difference between them, and any illusion of such is just to keep the state of war between them active. A government agent of Oceania specifically defies the notion that they are successors to the Nazi Germans or Soviet Communists, since those groups still couched their murderousness behind utopian goals. Big Brother's regime is after power and making people suffer for its own sake.
• Ghibli Hills: The 'Golden Country', a countryside landscape that appears often in Winston's fantasies, and the place where he and Julia had their first tryst.
• The Good Guys Always Win: Completely inverted; not only do the bad guys win, it's heavily implied that they will always do so.
• Grand Inquisitor Scene: Part III is about O'Brien telling Winston about how the Party controls the populace, and where it is going in the future. Winston had also read part of Goldstein's book covering the same topics.
• Great Offscreen War: There is supposedly a vast war raging between the three superstates, but it has no actual bearing on the novel's plot. It could just be made up to make the party's rule seem legitimate.
• Happiness in Slavery: The Proles are, ironically, freer than the Outer Party, since their lack of education and resources means they aren't closely monitored.
• Happiness Is Mandatory: And you love Big Brother and we are at war with Eurasia. We have always been at war with Eastasia.
• Hope Spot:
  • The entire second part has Winston wondering if his intellectual rebellion can be extended or shared by others to overthrow the regime. He believes it seems possible with a resistance group outside Party control. Not coincidentally, this is the part of the book where he is having a love affair with Julia.
  • Within the 'Oranges and Lemons' motif. When O'Brien continues Winston's recitation of the rhyme a couple of lines beyond Winston's recollection of it, he exclaims 'You knew the last line!,' and O'Brien agrees (that it's the last line). But the rhyme as normally told continues a little more ("I'm sure I don't know, said the great bell of Bow," — that is, interestingly, Bow Bells, the Cockney Londoner's central point.) suggesting to an educated reader that the Inner Party is not as omniscient as it believes.
• Horrible Housing: The homes of the Outer Party members and the Proles are all filthy, dilapidated, and in a very poor state of repair. In particular, the Victory Mansion apartment block where Winston lives is in a constant state of breakdown: the lifts are always out of order, repairs around the apartments are strictly DIY, and the only thing that works are the omnipresent telescreens used to spy on the residents. Not that the Inner Party residences are much of an improvement...
• The Horseshoe Effect: A major theme:
  • The ideology of the Party is called Ingsoc (English Socialism), yet the society it governs is a dystopia with a strictly regimented class system based upon a subservient working class and a hierarchical, dictatorial system of rule. Goldstein's book, which describes the society, puts it rather baldly:
  ...the Party rejects and vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood, and it chooses to do this in the name of Socialism.
  • The premise of the book postulates an ongoing Forever War between three superpowers, Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, the political ideologies of which are, respectively, Ingsoc, Neo-Bolshevism, and what roughly translates as Obliteration of the Self. To the extent that the citizens of each superpower are aware of the other superpowers' political ideologies, they deride them as monstrous outrages upon common sense. However, as Goldstein notes, the three ideologies are functionally indistinguishable, as are the societies they support.
• Huge Holographic Head: The face of Big Brother is displayed on huge screens to comfort the citizens after the Two Minutes' Hate is over.
• Humans Are Bastards: It really does say something that Nineteen Eighty Four is one of the most horrific and depressing stories ever written, yet has no supernatural or impossibly science-fiction elements. All the world's suffering can be pinned on a bunch of insane, power-hungry psychopaths who happen to run everything.
• Hypocrite: In the original book and subsequently, in the film made in 1984, O'Brien claims that the German Nazis and Russian Communists (in his mind the closest groups of the past resembling Ingsoc) were hypocrites, arguing that they propagated their atrocities served a greater purpose, while openly admitting that the Party is only cruel for the sake of pure power, while Ingsoc tries to sell itself and Big Brother to the nation as benevolent and perfect, using Doublethink as justification. Although, technically, he's being Metaphorically True. The Inner Party is well aware of their intentions. The inevitable course of human societies (as discussed in Goldstein's book) is that there will always be: the high, the middle, and the low. The Inner Party has simply figured out how it will always be the "high" for now and for forever after.
• Industrialized Evil: While the party has very specifically created tortures for dissidents, the entire apparatus is one huge example of human degradation for its own sake.
• Infodump: Goldstein's book.
• Innocent Inaccurate: Anyone who swallows the Party line without question.
  • Winston doesn't even question that O'Brien and the Thought Police have had him under surveillance for years, and were aware of his treason at every stage. Actually, he’s probably right; it’s implied that the Party noticed his momentary hesitation when holding a news cutting which he destroys, but subsequently appears again in O’Brien’s hands during the torture sequence. The second-hand shop where he bought his journal, other curios and subsequently rented a room, was operated by a Thought Police agent (Mr Charrington). Winston doesn’t actually KNOW any of this in detail, but he is proven right in general terms.
  • Parsons expresses nothing but admiration for his daughter when she denounces him to the Thought Police for whispering, "Down with Big Brother" in his sleep. It doesn't even occur to him that his daughter probably made the whole thing up and he actually said nothing of the kind.
• Internal Retcon:
  • Winston's job is to receive reports of new articles that do not match the current party line and fix their "mistakes" or write new articles to replace Unpersons. He also notices the same being applied to announcements on telescreens, where some rations are cut back but still shown to be greater than last year.
  • At one point during a rally, the Party, having always been at war with Eurasia, suddenly has always been at war with Eastasia, in mid-speech (the speaker is handed a note with the change). And — as Winston notes with horror — the audience instantly goes along with it. The rally in question took tons of preparation, including creating banners and propaganda damning Eurasia, but once Eastasia has been named as the enemy, the crowd becomes aghast that their banners now falsely name Eurasia as the enemy and believe Goldstein's heretical group is to blame for them being wrong.
• I Reject Your Reality: On a society-wide scale.
• Ironic Echo:
  • One of the Arc Words lines, "We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness", turns out to refer to a brightly-lit prison cell.
  • "Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh?" Both times, it's said by Parsons, with proudness regarding his daughter, who had become a youth spy. The second time, however, has its context more twisted: he is praising her for selling him out to lose his humanity in the Ministry of Love, and by extension, Room 101.
• Ironic Nursery Tune:
  • "Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head!"
  • "Under the spreading chestnut tree / I sold you and you sold me."
• It Won't Turn Off: The telescreens, which all party members have in their homes, constantly broadcasting party propaganda, and also keeping watch. These could be "dimmed", but not silenced completely.
• Jail Bake: Winston, after being imprisoned, thinks that the Brotherhood might send him a razor blade hidden in his food, not to escape but to kill himself with. It doesn't happen.
• Kids Are Cruel:
  • Winston, in his youth. During a flashback he remembers how he was driving his family (mother and little sister) out of house and home and was generally a greedy brat who wanted to keep the family's scant food rations for himself. Julia says she shares this perception of his younger self, and says the same seems to apply to all children.
  • The children of Oceania are brought up to mistrust and spy on their own parents. Family values and loyalty are discouraged in favor of sadistically ratting out the other members of one's family.
  • Parsons' kids attack Winston with a catapult, accusing him of being a traitor and a thought criminal, and say they want to shoot him, vaporize him or send him to the salt mines. According to their mother, they're acting out because they can't go to a hanging. They end up turning in their father because they (supposedly) heard him say "down with Big Brother" in his sleep.
• La Résistance: The Brotherhood, which may or may not actually exist, led by Emmanuel Goldstein, the supposed author of "the book" who also may or may not actually exist.
• Language Equals Thought: The entire purpose of Newspeak is to reconfigure the way people think by controlling the language in which they express their thoughts; the intended logical conclusion of this is that thoughtcrime will eventually be impossible, because there will no longer be any words in which to express it, and what a person doesn't have words to describe, he can't think.
• Laser-Guided Broadcast: There is such a scene at the beginning. Justified, since the televisions there are fitted with cameras and are openly used to watch people.
• Least Rhymable Word: Ampleforth, one of Winston's co-workers in the Ministry of Truth is responsible for rewriting poems to make them align with Party propaganda. Winston eventually meets him in jail; Ampleforth thinks he was arrested because he left the word "God" in a Rudyard Kipling poem (probably McAndrew's Hymn) because he could not find another rhyme for "rod". He tells Winston: "Do you realize that there are only twelve rhymes to "rod" in the entire language? For days I had racked my brains. There was no other rhyme."
• Lie Back and Think of England:
  • Party women are encouraged to do this when they have sex. "Goodthinkful" women are taught to call it "our duty to the Party." Men aren't really encouraged to enjoy it either. Marriages between Party members have to be approved by a committee which rejects couples who seem to be attracted to one another. The Party wants sex to be seen as a dirty but necessary act, like vomiting or getting an enema.
  • At one point, O'Brien claims the Party plans to abolish the orgasm ("Our neurologists are at work upon it now,") making sex a purely reproductive act devoid of pleasure for anyone.
• Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics: One of Winston's tasks at the Ministry of Truth is to make up statistics, in order to make The Party look good. In one instance, he "corrects" an article that stated 145 million boots would be produced, to say that 57 million would be made. He has been told that 67 million were "actually" produced. Winston thinks it is possible that none at all have been made, as approximately half the population of Oceania goes barefoot; most likely nobody really knows or cares how many had been made.
• Light Is Not Good: "The place where there is no darkness" is not a place you ever want to end up.
• Loners Are Freaks: The Party is trying to stamp out "ownlife."
• Metaphorically True: The names of the Ministries (Ministry of Truth, Ministry of Love, Ministry of Plenty, Ministry of Peace) can be perfectly true from The Party's point of view, rather than ironic. Minitrue doesn't falsify or lie, it corrects the past to show the new truth, which having been corrected has now always been the truth; Minipax maintains internal peace by continually waging external war; the goal of Miniluv is for everyone to love Big Brother and The Party; and Miniplenty is in control of Oceania's economy, which appears to actually be very strong but is directed almost solely towards creating plenty of weapons and large public gestures which do not actually improve the lives of the population but keep their minds occupied.
• The Metric System Is Here to Stay: Some focus is given to everybody having to use the metric system; for instance an old man in a pub wants a pint of beer, because half a litre is not enough an one litre is too much. Orwell was against the complete scrapping of Imperial, though he supported the use of the metric system in scientific work.
• Mind Rape: The Party is subjecting the entire Oceanian population to a form of Mind Rape, with the goal of making them mindless and obedient like cattle. Also, the last third of the novel may be the the most disturbing and prolonged Mind Rape ever put to paper.
• Mind Screw: Doublethink is essentially a deliberately invoked instance of this, as it involves the willful belief in the truth of mutually contradicting statements.
• Misaimed Fandom: The book was unfortunately popular among some real life totalitarians, with Stasi chief Erich Mielke even naming his office Room 101.
• More Than Mind Control: The Party wants to destroy even the capability of independent thought. They want you to really love Big Brother, and in the end, Winston does.
• Multiple Choice Form Letter: "...few people ever wrote letters. For the messages it was occasionally necessary to send, there were printed postcards with long lists of phrases, and you struck out the ones that were inapplicable."
• Mutually Assured Destruction: While it's not made totally clear in the novel proper, according to Word of God MAD is apparently a large part of the reason why Oceania is so messed up, being based on Orwell's rather pessimistic idea of what world peace, or at least a nuclear-enforced one, would actually be like, as laid out in his seminal essay You and the Atomic Bomb. Because Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia can't go to war without completely annihilating all three of them at once, their leaders have nobody to take out their sadistic tendencies on but their own people.

Tropes N-Z

• Neologism: Invented terms like "Big Brother," "Thought Police," and "doublethink" and popularized "unperson." Just look at all the tropes this book has named.
• Newspeak: Trope Namer.
• Necessarily Evil: If O'Brien is correct, the Brotherhood has no choice but to commit the most heinous of acts to defeat The Party.
• Noodle Incident: Exactly how did the Party come into power? Winston, at one point, muses that he doesn't really remember hearing of Big Brother before the 1960's. References are made to a war including a nuclear exchange having taken place in the 1950's during his childhood, leading to the breakdown of government and society and a period of chaos lasting for an indeterminate time (possibly including civil war; Winston remembers the streets being roamed by gangs of youths in different-colored shirts) before the Party finally solidified its control.
• Not So Different: Oceanian, Eurasian and Eastasian societies and ideologies are all functionally identical and all have the same goal: the ruling class creating a world built on entirely on suffering which they can rule over forever.
• No Sex Allowed: All intercourse within the Outer Party is strictly regulated only for the development of children. There's a lecture in a part of the book talking about artificial insemination and trying to remove the orgasm to prevent any pleasure being derived from sex. For Julia, all these have a mere purpose of increasing frustration which can be channeled into war hysteria and orgiastic rallies. The Proles, are allowed to have sex as freely, though it's viewed in the same vein as farm animals mating.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: "Mr. Charrington," a Thought Police officer who pretends to be an old, harmless prole shopkeeper under that alias. The real him is so different that it's disturbing.
• Oh, Crap!: Winston and Julia's reaction to the fact that there was a telescreen in their hiding place the whole time.
  Winston: We are the dead.
  Julia: We are the dead.
  Thought Police: You are the dead.
• Painful Rhyme: One of Winston's co-workers is responsible for re-writing famous poetry to make sure it aligns with Party propaganda. Winston notes it is generally gibberish.
• Parental Abandonment: Both of Winston's parents disappeared; his mother when he was around 11, his father much earlier. He has many memories about his mother, but remembers little about his father. He knows nothing of their fate; they might have been executed or sent to a forced labor camp.
• Persecuted Intellectuals: Those who are too openly intelligent are quietly eliminated, both from the Party ranks and the proletariat. This happens to Winston's friend Syme — even though he's a vociferous supporter of the regime, he "sees too clearly and speaks too plainly," and simply disappears one day.
• Personal Horror: This is what the horror of Room 101 is all about. Using your greatest fears to get you to betray the most important thing about yourself, to destroy your self-image by making you betray everything and anything that's left of what you valued before they arrested you.
• Pimped-Out Dress: Julia attempts to invoke this trope. In the Michael Radford adaption, the dress is ill-fitting and not very flattering, as presumably this was the best she could get.
• Pointless Civic Project: Oceania constantly builds things like monuments, both to inspire mindless nationalism, and to soak up excess resources and keep living standards so low that the people are too worn down to resist. Also inverted: It's heavily implied that the war is merely a way to justify how little the government spends on its population. Throw a few token rockets at them and tell them you're dropping thousands more on the enemy, and they won't complain about bread shortages.
• Potty Emergency: Parsons has one in the Ministry of Love, and uses the lavatory in front of Winston, to his disgust. Later, Winston himself is subjected to this as part of his torture, since he is "not given leave to urinate".
• The Power of Language: One Central Theme of the book seeks to show how language can be used politically to deceive and manipulate people. The Party has mandated Newspeak be used as a way to further control the thoughts of the populace, and writing has been banned altogether. Winston's job involves going through old documents and periodicals and carefully replacing words to suit whatever new narrative is being constructed by the Party, and one of his first acts of rebellion is to hide a notebook he finds and begin recording his thoughts in it.
• Pragmatic Adaptation: The 1984 movie is extremely faithful to the book, but the shift in medium means that Orwell's detailed narration on the history of Ingsoc is lost. Since the movie obviously cannot devote itself to lengthy info breaks like the novel does, it spends more time cultivating atmosphere and showing just how miserable life is in Airstrip One. Also, because all of Winston's thought processes (save for his diary entries) are lost, he ends up as more of an Audience Surrogate — the fact that he's magnificently played by the incredibly aptly named John Hurt (who even looks like George Orwell) is an added bonus.
  
  The ending is also subtly different, changing the meaning but not the outcome. Winston writes "2 + 2 =" (as opposed to "2 + 2 = 5," which was Orwell's intent; "2 + 2 =" was a typo in many editions), and thinks "I love you!" (after Julia leaves, but while staring at Big Brother, so it could go either way; whereas the book directly states that he loves Big Brother). "2 + 2 =" is arguably more powerful, since O'Brien says in both versions that the answer to 2 + 2 is whatever he decides it is, and could be 3, 6, or all at once. With regard to Winston thinking "I love you!," if he had simply said "I love Big Brother" (translating the famous closing line from third person to first person), it would have sounded a lot more awkward.
• Propaganda Hero: Winston Smith invents the story of the heroic "Comrade Ogilvy" out of whole cloth to replace a story about an unperson in the newspaper archive.
• Propaganda Machine: The Ministry of Truth. They edit all information — every song, story, news report, even porn so that it completely fits the Party's definition of truth; and they don't care if reality says otherwise.
• Public Execution: A few happen in Oceania, with enemy nations' spies and prisoners of war.
• Punished for Sympathy: When Winston is first taken to the Ministry of Love, he witnesses a prisoner offering a hidden piece of bread to another prisoner whom the Party has been deliberately starving. Almost instantly, the guards emerge to beat the kind prisoner. Worse still, when the guards later return to take the starving prisoner to the dreaded Room 101, the starving prisoner tries to convince them to take the kind prisoner instead.
• Rambling Old Man Monologue: When Winston asks an elderly prole what life was like before the Party, he's unable to get a straight answer because the man keeps lapsing into these.
• Room 101: The Trope Namer, where Winston and Julia are faced with their worst fears and made to betray each other.
• Repressive, but Efficient: Played with. Big Brother is not so good about things like ensuring a decent quality of life for all the little brothers and sisters in his care, but he's amazing when it comes to things like keeping the monitoring system up and running, identifying and rooting out possible dissidents, and just generally averting Evil Will Fail. This makes sense as he doesn't really care about the former.
• Russia Takes Over the World: One of the world's three superpowers is Eurasia, the Russian-derived successor state that controls the former Soviet Union and continental Europe (but not the British Isles). They are allied with Oceania against Eastasia until Oceania betrays them by teaming up with Eastasia against Eurasia. Apparently practices "Neo-Bolshevism" and according to the propaganda of Oceania is currently leading a campaign to conquer all of Africa. This is a subversion, since neither Eurasia nor any of the other two superstates really desire world domination, only to control their own peoples.
• Safely Secluded Science Center: Goldstein's book mentions that Oceania has many experimental stations such as these scattered across the world, in Brazilian jungle, in Australian deserts, and even in islands off the coast of Antarctica. Given the Forever War gripping the world, all of them are concerned with developing new weapons, some of them as fanciful as earthquake generators and giant magnifying glasses. However, given that said war is secretly integral to the stability of the Dystopia that currently dominates the world, nobody's interested in actually winning it, so none of these projects ever come to fruition: they're just another means of eating up surplus resources that might otherwise be used to improve the standard of living.
• Scary Shiny Glasses: Winston's duckspeaking colleague.
• Scenery Gorn: Oceania in the 1984 film is filled with these. The Golden Country however, is a Scenery Porn.
  • Taken Up to Eleven in the 1984 film version, where everything looks like it was either nuked or abandoned. In addition, the filmmakers use a processing technique called 'bleach bypass' to take out the bright colors from the film reels, giving the film a washed-out effect. The green color of The Golden Country, however, is emphasized as a contrast to the city's scenery.
• Schizo Tech: The Party has a machine that writes trashy novels (to keep the proles happy) but farms are still worked by using horse plows. Justified in that working the farms keeps the proles busy and poor, while writing even a trashy novel the old fashioned way would potentially lead to dangerous thoughts in the writers.
• Science Marches On: Thankfully, it turns out that you quite simply cannot torture someone into beliving something, and in fact they'll likely wind up far less receptive to whatever beliefs you were trying to instill, since they'll associate it with torturers.
• Screens Are Cameras: The telescreens.
• Sean Connery Is About to Shoot You: The Party has a recurring habit of depicting whoever their eternal enemy is aiming or firing their weapon directly at the citizenry.
• Secret Police: The Thought Police.
• Sex Is Evil: The Party wants to suppress the sex drive and channel it into war hysteria. O’Brien says that their neurologists are working on the abolition of the orgasm in Party members. One of The Party's prominent youth movements is the Junior Anti-Sex League, who want all reproduction done by artificial insemination. Sexual enjoyment is looked down as only for proles and animals.
• Silly Love Songs: The Party mass-produces them for the proles with a machine known as the "versificator." Winston hears a prole woman singing one of these; while the song is "dreadful rubbish," she sings it with so much feeling that it almost becomes beautiful.
• Sinister Surveillance: Surveillance cameras, hidden microphones and two-way "telescreens" exist in every home and in every street, spying on citizens, monitoring their every move and showering them with propaganda slogans. The Proles are lucky in that they have no telescreens, and only members of the Inner Party are able to (temporarily) turn their telescreens off.
• Slavery Is a Special Kind of Evil: As part of the Forever War, the Three Superpowers regularly take people from outside their territory and use them as slave labor to contribute to the war machine. Goldstein's Book also makes it clear that they're not necessary for the world's economy; they speed up production for the war, but since they don't contribute anything else, their role in the grand scheme of things is miniscule. Really, it only seems to serve the purpose of extending the totalitarian cruelty outside of their borders.
• Society Marches On:
  • In general, totalitarian regimes are still feared today, as well they should be, but since Orwell's death, and the downfall of some of the states Orwell was inspired by, we've gotten much more insight into the inner-workings (or lack thereof) of such governments, and the idea that such a state in such a position or condition will last forever is Dated History. In particular, the fall of the USSR in 1991 makes O'Brien's proclamations that the system will stand forever sound laughably arrogant, though he may have been intended to appear as such anyway.
  • The Party's predilection towards corruption and Chronic Back Stabbing Disorder is Handwaved by O'Brien stating that Inner Party Members function by Double Think. Psychology-inspired historical studies has discovered that such people at the top of such regimes would not be like O'Brien — a ruthless, cunning, sadistic, yet loyal and sophisticated man, but rather the paranoia and fear of a climate constant purges and flip-flopping shifts in loyalties would determine that such people were more likely to put on a Mask of Sanity as a dull, incompetent bureaucrat who only makes rent by taking bribes and falls Beneath Suspicion, or a total psychopath who gives good speeches, but would rather just torture you right away than explain the Party's philosophy, and wouldn't Double Think diddley-squat if it meant living in squalor and fear of other such people.
  • The idea that people under torture would be so utterly brainwashed that they would really end up loving Big Brother was inspired by the spectacle of the Moscow Show Trials whereby Old Bolsheviks were forced to confess to absurd crimes and betrayals in front of news cameras. The truth, as post-Cold War history has revealed, was that most of them were tortured and their families and friends were threatened if they didn't confess, and none of them really did believe their accusations, nor did many of the inmates and victims who were sent to The Gulag.
  • The idea that a perpetual war, especially one that was constantly and literally hitting close to home, was a good way to maintain public support should've been discredited after World War I, and is even more laughable in the U.S. due to The Vietnam War and Iraq. It makes sense in Orwell's model where the people of the Soviet Union backed Stalin and his regime as a bulwark against Nazism, as did the Western Communists who Orwell saw as his real target, but of course in that situation Stalin didn't have to make up any fake war, since the Nazis really did invade the USSR and with unspeakable horrifying brutality moreover.
  • Most important is Orwell's portrayal of totalitarianism and its propaganda-based mass-media society as an aspect of ideological conditioning and something that can happen in Britain. Historians studying the USSR after the Cold War see the Stalin regime as backsliding to the Tsarist era, and that USSR party bureaucracy and Stalin's famous nomenklatura wasn't based on ideology but client-patron relations, something which is present in Tsarist society and other traditional societies, and even in Ancient Rome. Real-life Big Brothers and O'Brien operate closer to Don Corleone or the Goodfellas. So the idea that a big-brother style system is a modern phenomenon driven by ideology and Double Think as Orwell notes is a very elegant satire on say "party discipline" in the British Communist Party and other Bourgeois Bohemian fellow-traveler circles, the only model Orwell really knew about, but it's probably not a good model for understanding why authoritarian regimes and dictatorships flourished in the past and the present.
• So Happy Together: Winston and Julia in Part Two.
• Space-Filling Empire: The whole world has been split into three superpowers: Oceania (North and South America, the British Isles, Southern Africa and Australasia), Eurasia (the Soviet Union, mainland Europe and parts North Africa), and Eastasia (China and surrounding Asian nations, down to India and the Pacific Islands). Outside of their claims are the poles, many outlying islands and the equatorial region, whose boundaries are defined by "a rough quadrilateral between Tangier, Brazzaville, Darwin, and Hong Kong." All of this territory regularly changes hands between the three, who capture vast amounts of resources and enslave the local people, but never hold much of it for long.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • 1984 is heavily influenced by Zamyatin's We, from where it seems to draw many of its dystopian elements. Orwell began writing 1984 eight months after he read the now lesser known We.
  • To Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here, published fifteen years before Nineteen Eighty Four. Both novels depict a formerly democratic western nation that succumbed to totalitarianism. The protagonists of both novels chafe under totalitarian rule and rebel through the written word. Both men find solace in secret romantic relationships with women who are both their soulmates and co-conspirators; Winston falls in love with Julia while Doremus has a secret affair with Lorinda. Finally, both protagonists find themselves incarcerated and tortured for their rebellion against the state.
  • The books is also a successor of sorts, to two non-fiction essays by Orwell, Politics and the English Language and You and the Atomic Bomb, building on the ideas set forth in both of them.
• Staged Populist Uprising: The "resistance's" book claims that all revolutions are just the middle class using the lower class as a tool to supplant the upper class. Ingsoc is designed to prevent this with the meritocratic Inner Party selection process and intense surveillance of the Outer and Inner Parties.
• Stockholm Syndrome: The Party imposes this on its members, including Winston, in the end.
• Strange-Syntax Speaker: Newspeak, though it isn't used often in the novel.
• Super-Fun Happy Thing of Doom: Played very un-comedically with the Ministries. The Ministry of Plenty's business is to maintain shortages; the Ministry of Truth concerns itself with censorship and propaganda; the Ministry of Peace maintains perpetual war; and the Ministry of Love is... Housed in a windowless building with swaths of barbed wire all around it, and is a secret prison with torture chambers.
• Survivorship Bias: Averted. The protagonist ends up being just another would-be rebel who's brainwashed back into a model citizen (so he can't even be a Doomed Moral Victor) and quietly terminated. It's left up in the air if there was even a rebellion for him to join.
• Tempting Fate: The two protagonists really set themselves up for disappointment.
  Winston: If they can stop me from loving you, that would be the real betrayal.
  Julia: That's the one thing they can't do.
• Title by Year: Nineteen Eighty-Four. In-universe, the protagonist thinks this is probably the current year, but due to the totalitarian state he lives and the nature in which it controls all information, he can't be sure. Out-of-universe, George Orwell planned to name it 1948 (the book was released a year after he finished it, in 1949), but he just flipped the last two digits to indicate a 20 Minutes into the Future timeframe.
• Too Good for This Sinful Earth: Infant mortality is up to over one in six.
• Torture Always Works: Inverted. The Party's torture is specifically designed to get the victim to give false information, a purpose for which it is extremely effective. They don't stop until the victim is willing to say, do, and think anything the Party wants them to without question.
• Torture Technician: O'Brien, in Act Three.
• Totalitarian Utilitarian: The Party inverts this: their ideology is obsessed with causing suffering for its own sake as the purest, rawest exercise of one's power over another.
• The Treachery of Images: A relevant part of O'Brien's conversation with Winston revolves around whether the Party could, pragmatically speaking, change reality itself, with the torturer arguing that he could "float like a soap bubble" if he wanted to. After all, if Winston perceives (forcibly) such a thing, and it is on record, in what sense is it untrue?
• Too Long; Didn't Dub: Few foreign translations bothered rendering the original's cumbersome title faithfully, instead settling on the more convenient numeral representation of "1984", occasionally attaching the word for "year" to make it look neater. In fact, pretty much every time someone mentions the novel in an Internet comment, you can bet they will write the title numerically rather than verbally. Hell, even the 1956 English-language film adaptation did just that. Later, so did the 1984 adaptation.
• The Tooth Hurts: In the Ministry of Love, when Winston is shown his reflection in the mirror and realizes how weak he has become, O'Brien accentuates the point by simply yanking out one of Winston's teeth with his bare hand.
• Truth in Television:
  • "Newspeak" had a direct precedent. The basic concept and many of its specific characteristics are a parody of "Basic English," an actual proposal for an international language based on a version of English with a restricted vocabulary and "rationalised" grammar, which Orwell considered aesthetically ugly, and politically repressive in its choices for necessary subject matter to be covered.
  • The overall shifts and inconsistencies of Oceania and IngSoc's party line reflects the build-up of World War II and the sudden shifts in political alliances which Orwell working in the BBC information bureau found bewildering. The Soviet Union was anti-fascist and then signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of neutrality, America was neutral, the British Empire was anti-fascist and then Hitler declared war on the Soviet Union, which led the English to welcome the Soviet Union into the alliance, invade Iran together, Sell-Out Poland to Stalin, to say nothing of the anti-communist Americans suddenly palling around with the USSR and then ending the war as enemies again with Winston Churchill's Iron Curtain speech. Orwell in the bureau realized that overnight and as new information came, a new party line emerged and inconsistencies were papered over for realpolitik reasons.
• 2 + Torture = 5: Though George Orwell used it before in essays, this is it's most remembered from.
• Two-Way Tapping: When Winston and Julia have a quiet conversation after one of their illicit encounters in Charrington's flat, Winston muses about a Prole woman they're observing outside, "Hers is the future, we are the dead," and Julia echoes "we are the dead." A voice from the direction of a painting on the wall immediately responds "you are the dead," revealing that there was a telescreen hidden underneath and that they'd been caught in their forbidden activities and discourse. Moments later the Thought Police arrive in helicopters and arrest them.
• Unnamed Parent: Winston's mother.
• Unperson: Trope Codifier; Josef Stalin used the term long before this book was written. It is known that anyone who opposes the regime of the Party, even in miniscule ways, or is merely too smart for their own good, will suddenly fall on hard times, before one day disappearing altogether, with all public records of their existence being stricken when it happens. Chillingly, with Winston having his spirit broken by the end after his stay in the Ministry of Love, means that he is in the depression and destitution phase, which strongly implies that it is only a matter of time before he will also be disappeared too.
• The Unreveal:
  • Whether or not a resistance movement actually exists is left completely ambiguous.
  • As is whether Big Brother is a real person or not.
• We Will Use WikiWords in the Future: One of the main purposes of Newspeak; condensing words makes it easier to utter them automatically without much thought, and to make communicating against the party impossible.
• Wham Line:
  • Winston receives a note from Julia, which he fears contains something ominous, like an order to kill himself. It actually says, "I love you."
  • At the end of the second portion of the book, Winston and Julia are enjoying each other's company and the scene is described in a calm and peaceful way. The narration reveals that Winston thinks they might actually survive for a few more years. Then he says "We are the dead," referencing something he's been saying since the love affair started, and out of nowhere an "iron voice" repeats "You are the dead." The scene immediately becomes hectic as Winston is nearly paralyzed from fear.
  • "It was behind the picture." A telescreen, that is.
  • O'Brien, coming to Winston in the Ministry of Love, says in response to Winston's belief that they "got" him as part of the resistance, says: "They got me a long time ago" - revealing that he is not a rebel, but an agent of the Thought Police.
  • "You do not exist."
  • "Do it to Julia!"
  • The book ends with a rather chilling one: "He loved Big Brother." In the film, Winston tells the image, "I love you."
• Wine Is Classy: Not only do the members of the Inner Party (the political elite of the totalitarian state) get assigned much better dwellings, clothes, food, coffee, chocolate, and tobacco than the members of the Outer Party (i.e. the mere White Collar Worker bureaucrats), but also while the members of the Outer Party drink gin (and the blue-collar proles drink beer!), the members of the Inner Party drink... Wine, what else?
• With Us or Against Us: Why "War is Peace" literally works.
• Working-Class People Are Morons: The proles are completely useless and indeed, according to Goldstein’s book, the poor lower classes always have been. To be fair, though, the Party refuses to educate the proles well and deliberately keeps them ignorant. The Book explicitly says the Party finds the brightest proles and eliminates them. In contrast, the brightest, most ambitious Outer Party members are allowed to rise into the Inner Party, and hence become harmless. Despite his left-wing views, Orwell was often criticised for his negative views of the English working-class, in particular the idea that they would just naturally degrade into ignorance and filth. Chalk it up to that Eton College education... However, the fact that Winston sees them as the best hope for the future says something.
• Wretched Hive: The prole neighbourhoods, in sharp contrast to the mechanistically controlled Party neighbourhoods. An interpretation is that the Wretched Hive is way better than the mechanical And I Must Scream of the Party because in said Hive you kept your freedoms and humanity.
• You Cannot Kill An Idea; Double subverted: The Party can and does kill an idea. While it does its best to stamp out dissent in individuals, it keeps the means, motive, and opportunity for dissent alive deliberately to justify its own existence. Doublethink in action.
• You Dirty Rat!: Winston Smith's worst phobia. It is used by O'Brien to completely break him.
• You Keep Using That Word:
  • Orwell preferred to use precise language when talking politics and didn't really like the (over)use of metaphors because they lost all their meaning and became just another way that thought was restricted. It's doubtful that he'd like the way his name gets thrown around by people today. See also: Politics and the English Language.
  • For any proposed change in government policy, the opposing side will call it "Big Brother" or Orwellian (the latter of which often happens in cases in which a term such as "freedom" is used disingenuously), especially if it has anything to do with collecting information or regulating industry. An explanation is unlikely, a citation of the book even less so.
• Zeerust: Justified in-universe, as the Party suppresses all research not directly related to weapons technology, so technology has stagnated at about 1950's level.
  • Inter-office communication is sent on paper in glass tubes (no computers).
  • The Ministry of Truth uses 'novel-writing machines' to keep churning out low-grade literature to keep the proles busy. You can tell who works in the Fiction Department by the oil-stains on their overalls.
  • When Julia and Winston meet in the woods, they know that they’re safe from listening devices because the trees are too small to hide a microphone. By the actual year 1984, microphones were sufficiently miniaturized that they could be hidden even in small trees.
  • Played with in an interesting fashion in the Michael Radford film, which of course was made in the real 1984. Winston's office equipment looks exactly as described in the novel, however there is a modern helicopter used in one scene.

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"We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness."