Part five.

Winston had talked with Julia about the connection he felt to O'Brien earlier. And now they both were standing in O'Brien's home.

””Shall I say it, or will you?” he said.

”I will say it,” said Winston promptly. ”That thing is really turned off?”

”Yes, everything is turned off. We are alone.”

”We have come here because--”

He paused, realizing for the first time the vagueness of his own motives. Since he did not in fact know what kind of help he expected from O'Brien, it was not easy to say why he had come here. He went on, conscious that what he was saying must sound both feeble and pretentious:

”We believe that there is some kind of conspiracy, some kind of secret organization working against the Party, and that you are involved in it: We want to join it and work for it. We are enemies of the party. We disbelieve in the principles of Ingsoc. We are thought-criminals. We are also adulterers. I tell you this because we want to put ourselves at your mercy. If you want us to incriminate ourselves in any other way, we are ready.””

O'Brien asked them some questions about how far they were willing to go in effort to fight the Party. He also had it arranged that Winston would get his hands on Goldstein's book.

“The Brotherhood cannot be wiped out because it is not an organization in the ordinary sense. Nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible. You will never have anything to sustain you, except the idea. You will get no comradeship and no encouragement. When finally you are caught, you will get no help. We never help our members. At most, when it is absolutely necessary that someone should be silenced, we are occasionally able to smuggle a razor blade into a prisoner's cell. You will have to get used to living without results and without hope. You will work for a while, you will be caught, you will confess, and then you will die. Those are the only results that you will ever see. There is no possibility that any perceptible change will happen within our own lifetime. We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing. It might be a thousand years. At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation after generation. In the face of the Thought Police there is no other way. “

“”We shall meet again-- if we do meet again--”

Winston looked up on him “In the place where there is no darkness?” he said hesitantly.

O'Brien nodded without appearance of surprise. “in the place where there is no darkness,” he said, as though he had recognized the allusion.”

All of the workers in The Ministry of truth had busy week of altering all written records to say that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia and an ally with Eurasia, after a flip-flop from the party. Winston had worked 18-hours a day for the past week and did not have a chance to read Goldstein's book until now. He had arrived to the rented room, Julia was yet to be present, so he began reading the book.

“The book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already. “

In the first chapters of the book, it explains the party's slogan:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGHT

It explains the doublethink and true meaning behind it all.

Bit later on Julia arrives to the room, they lied down on the bed and Winston started to read the book aloud from the start. A good bit into the first chapter he noticed Julia had fallen asleep, so he put the book down and did the same, mumbling the words “sanity is not statistical” as he fell asleep.

Winston had awakened and was dozing for a while until he started hearing the same old prole woman, that he had at many other times hear, start singing. The song woke up Julia. They stood at the window looking at her and listening to her singing.

“The birds sang, the proles sang, the Party did not sing. All round the world – everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable figure, made monstrous by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death and still singing. Out of those mighty loins a race of conscious beings must one day come. You were the dead; theirs was the future. But you could share in that future if you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the body, and passed on the secret doctrine that two plus two make four.”

“We are the dead” he said.

“We are the dead,” echoed Julia dutifully.

“You are the dead,” said an iron voice behind them.

It was the end of the line, Winston and Julia both knew it, they did not resist or even move when the black uniformed men stormed into the room. Mr Charrington, the old man whose room they had rented, was a member of the thought-police. Julia was taken out of the room first, and that was the last Winston would see of her.

“He did not know where he was. Presumably he was in the Ministry of Love; but there was no way of making certain. He was in a high-ceilinged windowless cell with walls of glittering white porcelain. Concealed lamps flooded it with cold light, and there was a low, steady humming sound which he supposed had something to do with the air supply. A bench, or shelf, just wide enough to sin on ran round the wall, broken only by the door and, at the end opposite the door, a lavatory pan with no wooden seat. There were four telescreens, one in each wall.”

For a while Winston sat in the room while other prisoners came and went, some to the mysterious “room 101”, which seemed like a fate worse than death by the reactions of the other prisoners. After being alone in the cell room for a while, but then the door opened and O'Brien stepped in.

“The shock of the sight had driven all caution out of him. For the first time in many years he forgot the presence of the telescreen.

“They've got you too!” he cried.

“They got me a long time ago,” said O'Brien with a mild, almost regretful irony. He stepped aside. From behind him there emerged a broad-chested guard with a long black truncheon in his hand.

“You knew this, Winston” said O'Brien

“Don't deceive yourself.” You did know it – you have always known it.”

Yes, he saw now, he had always known it. But there was no time to think of that. All he had eyes for was the truncheon in the guard's hand. It might fall anywhere: on the crown, on the tip of the ear, on the upper arm, on the elbow –

The elbow! He had slumped to his knees, almost paralyzed, clasping the stricken elbow with his other hand. Everything had exploded into yellow light. Inconceivable, inconceivable that one blow could cause such pain!

The light cleared and he could see the other two looking down at him. The guard was laughing at his contortions.”

A process begun that started with beatings from the guards and then moves on to torture and confessions, and then to more torture to rewrite Winston to an orthodox party member. The last part is done by O'Brien.

“Do not imagine that you will save yourself, Winston, however completely you surrender to us. No one who has once gone astray is ever spared. And even if we chose to let you live out the natural term of your life, still you would never escape from us. What happens to you here is for ever. Understand that in advance. We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you could not recover, if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves. “

““There are three stages in your reintegration,” said O'Brien. “There is learning, there is understanding, and there is acceptance. It is time for you to enter upon the second stage.”

O'Brien goes into explaining why the Party does what it does.

“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. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. “

Winston tries to argue for objective reality, only to be met with more torture and humiliation.

“There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever. “

"Tell me," Winston said, "how soon will they shoot me?"
"It might be a long time," said O'Brien. "You are a difficult case. But don't give up hope. Everyone is cured sooner or later. In the end we shall shoot you."

The tortures had stopped and they were giving him food regularly and letting him take care of his hygiene. All he cared about right now was to sleep and feel his strength regaining. He was still after all the torture and reprogramming deep down rejecting the doublethink, and tried to do exercises to keep it from surfacing.

“How easy it all was! Only surrender, and everything else followed. It was like swimming against a current that swept you backwards however hard you struggled, and then suddenly deciding to turn round and go with the current instead of opposing it. Nothing had changed except your own attitude: the predestined thing happened in any case. He hardly knew why he had ever rebelled. “

He had a hallucination about Julia, strong enough to register on the telescreens, and he ponders how many years of servitude his moment of weakness added.

“For the first time he perceived that if you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that could be given a name. From now onwards he must not only think right; he must feel right, dream right. And all the while he must keep his hatred locked up inside him like a ball of matter which was part of himself and yet unconnected with the rest of him, a kind of cyst.”

Winston constructed a plan that when he knew they were going to shoot him, he would take down all the mental barriers he had built up to discard the truth, at the last seconds so that he would die hating them.

“To die hating them, that was freedom.”

“You asked me once,” said O'Brien, “what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The think that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.”

And the worst thing in the world for Winston, was rats. So they had a mask with rats inside, with a switch to release the rats on the person wearing the mask. O'Brien put the a mask on Winston.

“The mask was closing on his face. The wire brushed his cheek. And then – no, it was not relief, only hope, a tiny fragment of hope. Too late, perhaps too late. But he had suddenly understood that in the whole world there was just one person tho whom he could transfer his punishment – one body that he could thrust between himself and the rats. And he was shouting frantically, over and over:

“Do it to Julia!

Do it to Julia!

Not me! Julia!

I don't care what you do to her.

Tear her face off, strip her to the bones.

Not me! Julia!

Not me!”

“He was falling backwards, into enormous depths, away from the rats. He was still strapped in the chair, but he had fallen through the floor, through the walls of the building, through the earth, through the oceans, through the atmosphere, into outer space, into the gulfs between the stars – always away, away, away from the rats. He was light-years distant, but O'Brien was still standing at his side. There was still the cold touch of a wire against his cheek. But through the darkness that enveloped him he heard another metallic click, and knew that the cage door had clocked shut and not open.”

"They can't get inside you," she had said. But they could get inside you. "What happens to you here is forever," O'Brien had said. That was a true word. There were things, your own acts, from which you could never recover. Something was killed in your breast: burnt out, cauterized out. “

But it was all right, everything was all right,

the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself.

He loved Big Brother.