OBSERVATION: CONTAINS SPOILERS!!

Characters

🧍‍♂️ Winston Smith

• Protagonist of the novel.
• A 39-year-old man who works at the Ministry of Truth, altering historical records to match Party propaganda.
• Quietly rebellious, he begins to question the Party and seeks truth and personal freedom.
• Starts a secret love affair with Julia and dreams of overthrowing Big Brother.

🧍‍♀️ Julia

• Winston’s lover and co-conspirator.
• Works in the Fiction Department of the Ministry of Truth.
• Outwardly loyal to the Party but secretly rebellious.
• More pragmatic than Winston—her rebellion is more about personal pleasure than ideology.

🧓 O'Brien

• A member of the Inner Party.
• Pretends to be part of the resistance to lure Winston in.
• Eventually betrays Winston and is instrumental in his psychological torture and re-education.
• Represents the terrifying intelligence and manipulation of the Party.

Plot Summary

🧠 Part One: Rebellion Begins

Winston Smith lives in Airstrip One (formerly Britain), under the rule of the Party led by Big Brother. The government monitors everyone through telescreens and enforces loyalty via the Thought Police.

• Winston works at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting historical records to match the Party’s narrative.
• Disillusioned, he secretly begins writing in a diary—an illegal act of rebellion.
• He becomes increasingly aware of the Party’s manipulation of truth, language (Newspeak), and even personal relationships.
• Winston starts to suspect that others, like the mysterious O’Brien and a dark-haired girl (Julia), might also be rebels.

❤️ Part Two: Love and Hope

Winston begins a secret love affair with Julia, the dark-haired girl from the Ministry. Their affair is both emotional and political—an act of defiance against the Party’s repression of sexuality and individuality.

• They meet secretly in a rented room above Mr. Charrington's shop in the prole district.
• Julia is more practical, rebelling for personal pleasure; Winston is more ideological.
• O’Brien appears to be part of a secret resistance (the Brotherhood) and gives Winston a forbidden book by Emmanuel Goldstein, the Party’s enemy.
• The book explains the mechanics of Party control, including perpetual war, class hierarchy, and control of truth.
• Just as Winston and Julia feel safe, they are betrayed and arrested—Mr. Charrington is revealed to be a member of the Thought Police.

🧨 Part Three: Torture and Submission

Winston is imprisoned in the Ministry of Love, where he undergoes brutal interrogation and psychological torture at the hands of O’Brien, who was never a rebel.

• O’Brien explains the Party’s true goal: power for power’s sake.
• Winston is subjected to Room 101, where he faces his greatest fear—rats.
• To save himself, he betrays Julia, crying out for the punishment to be given to her instead.
• After “re-education,” Winston is released. He has lost his rebellious spirit.
• In the end, Winston sits at a café, empty and broken, loving Big Brother.

Power

Why and What

• "We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”
• "The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power.Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power."
• • [MYTAKE] why would anyone ever want to be a manager? It sounds like a terrible job. The answer is power, because that's what they want.
• “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
• • [MYTAKE] It's crazy that I was only able to understand that in this book oh my god. It's so simple, but so true

No one can serve two masters

• Each state recognises that science is responsible for its over-production,[25] so science must be carefully controlled lest the proles or Outer Party expect an increased standard of living.[26] From this analysis stems the policy of permanent warfare: by focusing production on arms and materiel (rather than consumer goods) each state can keep its population impoverished and willing to sacrifice personal liberties for the greater good.

How

• [MYTAKE] It is interesting how much our body impacts our mind. For example, if I keep screaming "Bolsonaro is the myth," it is impossible not to have some deep liking for him
• We as humans definitely need rituals—a way to bond us over something, like a family dinner.
• It is quite interesting how keeping the facts is important. If you change the facts, if you change reality, it doesn’t matter how good your logic is; you will eventually arrive at the conclusion that the Party wants
• • It is as if you working on a logical system, where the axioms and the logical steps are defined by party, by doing so their conclusion will always be correct
• The level of control is crazy. They are literally removing words from the dictionary so that we can’t even easily construct a reasoning beyond Big Brother’s will.
• Big Brother has this habit of rewriting history, rewriting books, speeches, and newspapers.
• "Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end, we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible."

Why normal people like to be controlled

• "He knew in advance what O'Brien would say. That the Party did not seek power for its own ends, but only for the good of the majority. That it sought power because men in the mass were frail cowardly creatures who could not endure liberty or face the truth, and must be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who were stronger than themselves. That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better. That the party was the eternal guardian of the weak, a dedicated sect doing evil that good might come, sacrificing its own happiness to that of others. The terrible thing, thought Winston, the terrible thing was that when O'Brien said this he would believe it."
• [MYTAKE] This is probably one of the most obscure and sad parts of the book, specially because it has a lot to do with the world we live in. After all, when we see the wealth concentration, we can only conclude that for a few people to have a few more millions, millions of people need to stay in poverty. Therefore, this "destruction fof resources" is not something theorethical, it's real. Showing how much power pursuit can be stupid, but still nonetheless that's the world we live in

Knowledge

• "“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
• [MYTAKE] I think it is quite interesting the relationship of the character with the past, but also our species with the past. For example, when it comes to politics, most historians are left-wing, so people that remember history have a certain bias/beliefs, whereas the rest of us don't know much of what we are doing. It is very hard to understand anything when you don't have enough context.
• But definitely, we can't lose our history, because if we do, it is like missing the git history.
• For me, it is quite astonishing that historians don’t have that much power in politics. To a certain extent, they control the past; they are the authorities about how we got here. This only shows that western society doesn’t have much love for intellectual authorities. Maybe that’s why religion is still a big thing. It is very impressive how much opinião própria people actually have.
• This book also reveals how important our memory is, because nobody actually reads history books. So the best way for us to see the contradictions is through our own memory.

Surveillance

• "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."
• [MYTAKE] It is interesting because Google or other tech companies do that. Are we in a dystopian future?
• "It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen."
• • [MYTAKE] That's exactly what my mom thinks about the current world we live in

Ending

• "Winston is starved, beaten and physically tortured. Worse than that, however, is the mental anguish inflicted to convince him Big Brother and the Party are right. O’Brien explains that the martyrs of old died clutching their beliefs, but that the Party would not allow anyone to die unconverted. In session after session, O’Brien tries to convince Winston that reality exists only in his own mind. If Winston tries hard enough, he can make himself believe what the Party preaches. Winston is finally sent to room 101, where each prisoner meets his deepest fear. Winston’s is rats. When faced with the prospect of being eaten alive by them, he betrays Julia and begs O’Brien to torture her instead of him. Eventually, Winston is completely brainwashed into loving Big Brother and sent back into the world where the Party finds him completely harmless. He encounters Julia once more. They confess their betrayals and no longer have any interest in one another"
• [MYTAKE] For me the ending of this book feels brutal. Conquering the mind of Winston through intense and long torture may not seem like a big deal, but when you understand the objective function of this world is power, and that power is in fact power over other people, then we realize that they conquered another mind, so in some sense that is very big victory from the state, in mathematics an analogy would be that a very hard problem was solved, this problem may seem useless, but the fact that even a hard problem like that was able to get solved is an accomplishment for mathemathics

The Ministry of Truth

• "“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
• • [MYTAKE] From a formal logic perspective, if you allow A and !A to be true, then anything is true, so as long as the government is able to convince people of one contradiction, then they convince them of anything.
• 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."
• It is quite asymptomatic that the name of the book is 1984, when they don’t even know whether the year is 1984. Because even the most basic truth like which year has been corrupted
• It is interesting how to avoid thinking, they also have to avoid loneliness.

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 barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests."
• KKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK this is one of the most important trademarks of a fascist rhethoric, they normalize logical contradictions
• 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.
• KKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK
• "For a second, two seconds, they 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."
• Desire (sexual) was considered thoughtcrime (lembra aquele tempo amor, quando a gente se encontrou).
• When Winston talked about his wife, he said that there wasn’t a thought in her head that wasn’t a slogan.
• KKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK isn't every one like this?
• "One of these days," thought Winston with sudden deep conviction, "Syme will be vaporized. He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly. The Party does not like such people. One day he will disappear. It is written in his face."

Big Brother

• 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 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 hiding-place in Oceania itself.

Julia

• I like Julia as a character, especially because she is not nice, which in some contexts would be meaningless. But since we are in a world where everyone is supposed to be, according to the definition of the Party, "good," she wants to be the opposite of the Party, even if that means being "bad."
• It is crazy that sex is the thing that made Winston break the marriage, and that his wife called it "our duty with the Party." The privacy of sex is just a way for the Party to control the people because they can direct their energy toward the Party. It is very hard to have all that hate after having sex, and they don’t love it to happen because then they would love something more than the Party.
• Winston has no hope that they will eventually get rid of the Party. Julia doesn’t have that hope.