Can you retell it in 2 min? Chapter 1

it was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his 
breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly 
through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not 
quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.
The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At 
one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, 
had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of 
about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was 
no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut 
off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive 
in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, 
and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer 
above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on 
the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster 
with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of 
those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow 
you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING 
YOU, the caption beneath it ran.
Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of fig-
1984
ures which had something to do with the production of 
pig-iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like 
a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the 
right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice 
sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be 
dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure, 
the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue 
overalls which were the uniform of the party. His hair was 
very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by 
coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.
Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world 
looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were 
whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the 
sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed 
to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were 
plastered everywhere. The blackmoustachio’d face gazed 
down from every commanding corner. There was one on 
the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS 
WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes 
looked deep into Winston’s own. Down at street level another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, 
alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down 
between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, 
and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people’s windows. The patrols did 
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not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.
Behind Winston’s back the voice from the telescreen was 
still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment 
of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and 
transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, 
above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by 
it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen 
as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing 
whether you were being watched at any given moment. How 
often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on 
any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable 
that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate 
they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You 
had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in 
the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, 
and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was 
safer, though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. 
A kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, 
towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. This, 
he thought with a sort of vague distaste—this was London, 
chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous 
of the provinces of Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some 
childhood memory that should tell him whether London 
had always been quite like this. Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored 
up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy 
 1984
garden walls sagging in all directions? And the bombed 
sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places 
where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had 
sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses? But it was no use, he could not remember: 
nothing remained of his childhood except a series of brightlit tableaux occurring against no background and mostly 
unintelligible.
The Ministry of Truth—Minitrue, in Newspeak [Newspeak was the official language of Oceania. For an account 
of its structure and etymology see Appendix.]—was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an 
enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the 
air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, 
picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three 
slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE 
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY 
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three 
thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding 
ramifications below. Scattered about London there were 
just three other buildings of similar appearance and size. 
So completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that from the roof of Victory Mansions you could see 
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all four of them simultaneously. They were the homes of 
the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus 
of government was divided. The Ministry of Truth, which 
concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and 
the fine arts. The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself 
with war. The Ministry of Love, which maintained law and 
order. And the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible 
for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, 
Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty.
The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. 
There were no windows in it at all. Winston had never been 
inside the Ministry of Love, nor within half a kilometre of it. 
It was a place impossible to enter except on official business, 
and then only by penetrating through a maze of barbedwire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun 
nests. Even the streets leading up to its outer barriers were 
roamed by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms, armed 
with jointed truncheons.
Winston turned round abruptly. He had set his features 
into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen. He crossed the 
room into the tiny kitchen. By leaving the Ministry at this 
time of day he had sacrificed his lunch in the canteen, and 
he was aware that there was no food in the kitchen except 
a hunk of dark-coloured bread which had got to be saved 
for tomorrow’s breakfast. He took down from the shelf a 
bottle of colourless liquid with a plain white label marked 
VICTORY GIN. It gave off a sickly, oily smell, as of Chinese 
rice-spirit. Winston poured out nearly a teacupful, nerved 
1984
himself for a shock, and gulped it down like a dose of medicine.
Instantly his face turned scarlet and the water ran out 
of his eyes. The stuff was like nitric acid, and moreover, in 
swallowing it one had the sensation of being hit on the back 
of the head with a rubber club. The next moment, however, 
the burning in his belly died down and the world began to 
look more cheerful. He took a cigarette from a crumpled 
packet marked VICTORY CIGARETTES and incautiously 
held it upright, whereupon the tobacco fell out on to the 
floor. With the next he was more successful. He went back 
to the living-room and sat down at a small table that stood 
to the left of the telescreen. From the table drawer he took 
out a penholder, a bottle of ink, and a thick, quarto-sized 
blank book with a red back and a marbled cover.
For some reason the telescreen in the living-room was in 
an unusual position. Instead of being placed, as was normal, 
in the end wall, where it could command the whole room, 
it was in the longer wall, opposite the window. To one side 
of it there was a shallow alcove in which Winston was now 
sitting, and which, when the flats were built, had probably 
been intended to hold bookshelves. By sitting in the alcove, 
and keeping well back, Winston was able to remain outside 
the range of the telescreen, so far as sight went. He could 
be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed in his present 
position he could not be seen. It was partly the unusual geography of the room that had suggested to him the thing 
that he was now about to do.
But it had also been suggested by the book that he had 
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just taken out of the drawer. It was a peculiarly beautiful 
book. Its smooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was 
of a kind that had not been manufactured for at least forty years past. He could guess, however, that the book was 
much older than that. He had seen it lying in the window of 
a frowsy little junk-shop in a slummy quarter of the town 
(just what quarter he did not now remember) and had been 
stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire to possess 
it. Party members were supposed not to go into ordinary 
shops (’dealing on the free market’, it was called), but the 
rule was not strictly kept, because there were various things, 
such as shoelaces and razor blades, which it was impossible 
to get hold of in any other way. He had given a quick glance 
up and down the street and then had slipped inside and 
bought the book for two dollars fifty. At the time he was not 
conscious of wanting it for any particular purpose. He had 
carried it guiltily home in his briefcase. Even with nothing 
written in it, it was a compromising possession.
The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. 
This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no 
longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain 
that it would be punished by death, or at least by twentyfive years in a forced-labour camp. Winston fitted a nib into 
the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. The pen 
was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures, 
and he had procured one, furtively and with some difficulty, 
simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper 
deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being 
scratched with an ink-pencil. Actually he was not used to 
10 1984
writing by hand. Apart from very short notes, it was usual to dictate everything into the speak-write which was of 
course impossible for his present purpose. He dipped the 
pen into the ink and then faltered for just a second. A tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the 
decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote:
April 4th, 1984.
He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To begin with, he did not know with any 
certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that 
date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, 
and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but 
it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within 
a year or two.
For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he 
writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn. His mind 
hovered for a moment round the doubtful date on the page, 
and then fetched up with a bump against the Newspeak 
word DOUBLETHINK. For the first time the magnitude of 
what he had undertaken came home to him. How could you 
communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in which 
case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from 
it, and his predicament would be meaningless.
For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper. The 
telescreen had changed over to strident military music. It 
was curious that he seemed not merely to have lost the pow-
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er of expressing himself, but even to have forgotten what it 
was that he had originally intended to say. For weeks past 
he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed his mind that anything would be needed except 
courage. The actual writing would be easy. All he had to 
do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for 
years. At this moment, however, even the monologue had 
dried up. Moreover his varicose ulcer had begun itching 
unbearably. He dared not scratch it, because if he did so it 
always became inflamed. The seconds were ticking by. He 
was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page 
in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the 
blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the 
gin.
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:
April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films. One 
very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed 
somewhere in the Mediterranean. Audience much amused 
by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away with 
a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along 
in the water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the 
helicopters gunsights, then he was full of holes and the sea 
round him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though 
the holes had let in the water, audience shouting with laughter 
12 198
when he sank. then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a 
helicopter hovering over it. there was a middle-aged woman 
might have been a jewess sitting up in the bow with a little 
boy about three years old in her arms. little boy screaming 
with fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he 
was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting 
her arms round him and comforting him although she was 
blue with fright herself, all the time covering him up as much 
as possible as if she thought her arms could keep the bullets 
off him. then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in among 
them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood. then 
there was a wonderful shot of a child’s arm going up up up 
right up into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose 
must have followed it up and there was a lot of applause from 
the party seats but a woman down in the prole part of the 
house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting they 
didnt oughter of showed it not in front of kids they didnt it 
aint right not in front of kids it aint until the police turned 
her turned her out i dont suppose anything happened to her 
nobody cares what the proles say typical prole reaction they 
never——
Winston stopped writing, partly because he was suffering from cramp. He did not know what had made him pour 
out this stream of rubbish. But the curious thing was that 
while he was doing so a totally different memory had clarified itself in his mind, to the point where he almost felt 
equal to writing it down. It was, he now realized, because 
of this other incident that he had suddenly decided to come 
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home and begin the diary today.
It had happened that morning at the Ministry, if anything so nebulous could be said to happen.
It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where Winston worked, they were dragging the 
chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for 
the Two Minutes Hate. Winston was just taking his place 
in one of the middle rows when two people whom he knew 
by sight, but had never spoken to, came unexpectedly into 
the room. One of them was a girl whom he often passed in 
the corridors. He did not know her name, but he knew that 
she worked in the Fiction Department. Presumably—since 
he had sometimes seen her with oily hands and carrying a 
spanner—she had some mechanical job on one of the novel-writing machines. She was a bold-looking girl, of about 
twenty-seven, with thick hair, a freckled face, and swift, 
athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the 
Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round 
the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the 
shapeliness of her hips. Winston had disliked her from the 
very first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was 
because of the atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths 
and community hikes and general clean-mindedness which 
she managed to carry about with her. He disliked nearly all 
women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were 
the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers 
of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unortho-
14 1984
doxy. But this particular girl gave him the impression of 
being more dangerous than most. Once when they passed 
in the corridor she gave him a quick sidelong glance which 
seemed to pierce right into him and for a moment had filled 
him with black terror. The idea had even crossed his mind 
that she might be an agent of the Thought Police. That, it 
was true, was very unlikely. Still, he continued to feel a peculiar uneasiness, which had fear mixed up in it as well as 
hostility, whenever she was anywhere near him.
The other person was a man named O’Brien, a member 
of the Inner Party and holder of some post so important 
and remote that Winston had only a dim idea of its nature. 
A momentary hush passed over the group of people round 
the chairs as they saw the black overalls of an Inner Party 
member approaching. O’Brien was a large, burly man with 
a thick neck and a coarse, humorous, brutal face. In spite of 
his formidable appearance he had a certain charm of manner. He had a trick of resettling his spectacles on his nose 
which was curiously disarming—in some indefinable way, 
curiously civilized. It was a gesture which, if anyone had 
still thought in such terms, might have recalled an eighteenth-century nobleman offering his snuffbox. Winston 
had seen O’Brien perhaps a dozen times in almost as many 
years. He felt deeply drawn to him, and not solely because 
he was intrigued by the contrast between O’Brien’s urbane 
manner and his prize-fighter’s physique. Much more it was 
because of a secretly held belief—or perhaps not even a belief, merely a hope—that O’Brien’s political orthodoxy was 
not perfect. Something in his face suggested it irresistibly. 
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And again, perhaps it was not even unorthodoxy that was 
written in his face, but simply intelligence. But at any rate 
he had the appearance of being a person that you could 
talk to if somehow you could cheat the telescreen and get 
him alone. Winston had never made the smallest effort to 
verify this guess: indeed, there was no way of doing so. At 
this moment O’Brien glanced at his wrist-watch, saw that it 
was nearly eleven hundred, and evidently decided to stay in 
the Records Department until the Two Minutes Hate was 
over. He took a chair in the same row as Winston, a couple 
of places away. A small, sandy-haired woman who worked 
in the next cubicle to Winston was between them. The girl 
with dark hair was sitting immediately behind.
The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some 
monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the 
big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set 
one’s teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one’s 
neck. The Hate had started.
As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of 
the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses 
here and there among the audience. The little sandy-haired 
woman gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust. Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago 
(how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of 
the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big 
Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had 
mysteriously escaped and disappeared. The programmes of 
the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was 
16 198
none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He 
was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party’s purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, 
acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out 
of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and 
hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the 
sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps 
even—so it was occasionally rumoured—in some hidingplace in Oceania itself.
Winston’s diaphragm was constricted. He could never 
see the face of Goldstein without a painful mixture of emotions. It was a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of 
white hair and a small goatee beard—a clever face, and yet 
somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair 
of spectacles was perched. It resembled the face of a sheep, 
and the voice, too, had a sheep-like quality. Goldstein was 
delivering his usual venomous attack upon the doctrines 
of the Party—an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a 
child should have been able to see through it, and yet just 
plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that 
other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken 
in by it. He was abusing Big Brother, he was denouncing 
the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating 
freedom of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, he was crying hysterically that 
the revolution had been betrayed—and all this in rapid 
polysyllabic speech which was a sort of parody of the ha-
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bitual style of the orators of the Party, and even contained 
Newspeak words: more Newspeak words, indeed, than any 
Party member would normally use in real life. And all the 
while, lest one should be in any doubt as to the reality which 
Goldstein’s specious claptrap covered, behind his head on 
the telescreen there marched the endless columns of the 
Eurasian army—row after row of solid-looking men with 
expressionless Asiatic faces, who swam up to the surface 
of the screen and vanished, to be replaced by others exactly similar. The dull rhythmic tramp of the soldiers’ boots 
formed the background to Goldstein’s bleating voice.
Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half 
the people in the room. The self-satisfied sheep-like face on 
the screen, and the terrifying power of the Eurasian army 
behind it, were too much to be borne: besides, the sight or 
even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically. He was an object of hatred more constant than 
either Eurasia or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at war 
with one of these Powers it was generally at peace with the 
other. But what was strange was that although Goldstein 
was hated and despised by everybody, although every day 
and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, 
in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, 
ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were—in spite of all this, his influence never 
seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes waiting 
to be seduced by him. A day never passed when spies and 
saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked 
18 1984
by the Thought Police. He was the commander of a vast 
shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators 
dedicated to the overthrow of the State. The Brotherhood, 
its name was supposed to be. There were also whispered 
stories of a terrible book, a compendium of all the heresies, 
of which Goldstein was the author and which circulated 
clandestinely here and there. It was a book without a title. 
People referred to it, if at all, simply as THE BOOK. But one 
knew of such things only through vague rumours. Neither 
the Brotherhood nor THE BOOK was a subject that any ordinary Party member would mention if there was a way of 
avoiding it.
In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People 
were leaping up and down in their places and shouting 
at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen. The 
little sandy-haired woman had turned bright pink, and 
her mouth was opening and shutting like that of a landed 
fish. Even O’Brien’s heavy face was flushed. He was sitting 
very straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling and 
quivering as though he were standing up to the assault of a 
wave. The dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out ‘Swine! Swine! Swine!’ and suddenly she picked up 
a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen. It 
struck Goldstein’s nose and bounced off; the voice continued inexorably. In a lucid moment Winston found that he 
was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair. The horrible thing about 
the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act 
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a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid 
joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always 
unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, 
a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people 
like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will 
into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that 
one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could 
be switched from one object to another like the flame of a 
blowlamp. Thus, at one moment Winston’s hatred was not 
turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against 
Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at such 
moments his heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic 
on the screen, sole guardian of truth and sanity in a world 
of lies. And yet the very next instant he was at one with the 
people about him, and all that was said of Goldstein seemed 
to him to be true. At those moments his secret loathing of 
Big Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed 
to tower up, an invincible, fearless protector, standing like 
a rock against the hordes of Asia, and Goldstein, in spite 
of his isolation, his helplessness, and the doubt that hung 
about his very existence, seemed like some sinister enchanter, capable by the mere power of his voice of wrecking the 
structure of civilization.
It was even possible, at moments, to switch one’s hatred this way or that by a voluntary act. Suddenly, by the 
sort of violent effort with which one wrenches one’s head 
away from the pillow in a nightmare, Winston succeeded 
in transferring his hatred from the face on the screen to 
20 198
the dark-haired girl behind him. Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind. He would flog her to death 
with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a stake 
and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would 
ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax. Better than before, moreover, he realized WHY it was that he 
hated her. He hated her because she was young and pretty 
and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and 
would never do so, because round her sweet supple waist, 
which seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there 
was only the odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chastity.
The Hate rose to its climax. The voice of Goldstein had 
become an actual sheep’s bleat, and for an instant the face 
changed into that of a sheep. Then the sheep-face melted into 
the figure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed to be advancing, 
huge and terrible, his sub-machine gun roaring, and seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen, so that some 
of the people in the front row actually flinched backwards 
in their seats. But in the same moment, drawing a deep sigh 
of relief from everybody, the hostile figure melted into the 
face of Big Brother, black-haired, black-moustachio’d, full 
of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that it almost 
filled up the screen. Nobody heard what Big Brother was 
saying. It was merely a few words of encouragement, the 
sort of words that are uttered in the din of battle, not distinguishable individually but restoring confidence by the fact 
of being spoken. Then the face of Big Brother faded away 
again, and instead the three slogans of the Party stood out 
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in bold capitals:
WAR IS PEACE 
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY 
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
But the face of Big Brother seemed to persist for several seconds on the screen, as though the impact that it had 
made on everyone’s eyeballs was too vivid to wear off immediately. The little sandy-haired woman had flung herself 
forward over the back of the chair in front of her. With a 
tremulous murmur that sounded like ‘My Saviour!’ she extended her arms towards the screen. Then she buried her 
face in her hands. It was apparent that she was uttering a 
prayer.
At this moment the entire group of people broke into a 
deep, slow, rhythmical chant of ‘B-B!...B-B!’—over and over 
again, very slowly, with a long pause between the first ‘B’ 
and the second—a heavy, murmurous sound, somehow 
curiously savage, in the background of which one seemed 
to hear the stamp of naked feet and the throbbing of tomtoms. For perhaps as much as thirty seconds they kept it 
up. It was a refrain that was often heard in moments of 
overwhelming emotion. Partly it was a sort of hymn to the 
wisdom and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was 
an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise. Winston’s entrails seemed 
to grow cold. In the Two Minutes Hate he could not help 
sharing in the general delirium, but this sub-human chant-
22 19
ing of ‘B-B!...B-B!’ always filled him with horror. Of course 
he chanted with the rest: it was impossible to do otherwise. 
To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what 
everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction. But 
there was a space of a couple of seconds during which the 
expression of his eyes might conceivably have betrayed him. 
And it was exactly at this moment that the significant thing 
happened—if, indeed, it did happen.
Momentarily he caught O’Brien’s eye. O’Brien had stood 
up. He had taken off his spectacles and was in the act of 
resettling them on his nose with his characteristic gesture. 
But there was a fraction of a second when their eyes met, 
and for as long as it took to happen Winston knew—yes, he 
KNEW!—that O’Brien was thinking the same thing as himself. An unmistakable message had passed. It was as though 
their two minds had opened and the thoughts were flowing 
from one into the other through their eyes. ‘I am with you,’ 
O’Brien seemed to be saying to him. ‘I know precisely what 
you are feeling. I know all about your contempt, your hatred, your disgust. But don’t worry, I am on your side!’ And 
then the flash of intelligence was gone, and O’Brien’s face 
was as inscrutable as everybody else’s.
That was all, and he was already uncertain whether it had 
happened. Such incidents never had any sequel. All that they 
did was to keep alive in him the belief, or hope, that others besides himself were the enemies of the Party. Perhaps 
the rumours of vast underground conspiracies were true 
after all—perhaps the Brotherhood really existed! It was 
impossible, in spite of the endless arrests and confessions 
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and executions, to be sure that the Brotherhood was not 
simply a myth. Some days he believed in it, some days not. 
There was no evidence, only fleeting glimpses that might 
mean anything or nothing: snatches of overheard conversation, faint scribbles on lavatory walls—once, even, when 
two strangers met, a small movement of the hand which 
had looked as though it might be a signal of recognition. It 
was all guesswork: very likely he had imagined everything. 
He had gone back to his cubicle without looking at O’Brien 
again. The idea of following up their momentary contact 
hardly crossed his mind. It would have been inconceivably 
dangerous even if he had known how to set about doing it. 
For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story. But even that 
was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which 
one had to live.
Winston roused himself and sat up straighter. He let out 
a belch. The gin was rising from his stomach.
His eyes re-focused on the page. He discovered that 
while he sat helplessly musing he had also been writing, as 
though by automatic action. And it was no longer the same 
cramped, awkward handwriting as before. His pen had slid 
voluptuously over the smooth paper, printing in large neat 
capitals—DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH 
BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN 
WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
over and over again, filling half a page.
He could not help feeling a twinge of panic. It was absurd, since the writing of those particular words was not 
24 198
more dangerous than the initial act of opening the diary, 
but for a moment he was tempted to tear out the spoiled 
pages and abandon the enterprise altogether.
He did not do so, however, because he knew that it was 
useless. Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, 
or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference. Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did 
not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police 
would get him just the same. He had committed—would 
still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper—the essential crime that contained all others in itself. 
Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing 
that could be concealed for ever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they 
were bound to get you.
It was always at night—the arrests invariably happened 
at night. The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of 
hard faces round the bed. In the vast majority of cases there 
was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed 
from the registers, every record of everything you had ever 
done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied 
and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: VAPORIZED was the usual word.
For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria. He began writing in a hurried untidy scrawl:
theyll shoot me i don’t care theyll shoot me in the back of the 
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neck i dont care down with big brother they always shoot you 
in the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother——
He sat back in his chair, slightly ashamed of himself, and 
laid down the pen. The next moment he started violently. 
There was a knocking at the door.
Already! He sat as still as a mouse, in the futile hope that 
whoever it was might go away after a single attempt. But no, 
the knocking was repeated. The worst thing of all would be 
to delay. His heart was thumping like a drum, but his face, 
from long habit, was probably expressionless. He got up and 
moved heavily towards the door.