1984

At the end of the novel, the Party has completely broken Winston Smith. After he and Julia are arrested in the room above Mr. Charrington’s shop, Winston is imprisoned in the Ministry of Love, where O’Brien tortures him. O’Brien explains that the Party does not want mere obedience; it wants total control over reality and over the human mind itself. He tells Winston, “The object of power is power.” Throughout the torture, Winston is forced to abandon his belief in objective truth and eventually accepts contradictions like “two and two make five.”

The final stage of Winston’s destruction happens in Room 101, where each prisoner faces what they feel is “the worst thing in the world.” For Winston, this is rats. O’Brien straps him down and threatens to let starving rats devour his face. In terror, Winston betrays Julia, screaming, “Do it to Julia! [...] Not me! Julia!” In that moment, the Party destroys the last part of Winston that had remained independent: his love and loyalty.

Afterward, Winston is released back into society, but he is no longer the same person. He spends his days drinking gin at the Chestnut Tree Café, emotionally numb and intellectually defeated. When he later meets Julia again, they both admit they betrayed each other under torture, and they agree that they no longer feel the same love they once did.

The novel ends with Winston sitting alone, listening to news of a military victory and gazing at a picture of Big Brother. Earlier in the novel, Winston believed that “to die hating them, that was freedom.” By the final page, even that inner freedom is gone. Orwell closes with the devastating sentence: “He loved Big Brother.” The Party succeeds where Winston once believed it could never succeed: it gets “inside you.” Though Winston technically survives his imprisonment, the novel’s final horror is the destruction of his ability to think, love, and remain himself.