However, he is actually a member of the Thought Police, and ensures that the lovers are arrested. He lives in an area populated by proles, and with his mild-mannered exterior, discreet behaviour and apparent love and knowledge of the past, he appears trustworthy. The elderly, seemingly harmless owner of the antique shop where Winston buys the diary and paperweight, he rents out a room above his shop to Winston and Julia so that they can conduct their affair in private. Charrington in Nineteen Eighty-Four and what does he represent? Orwell purposefully shrouds Big Brother in mystery as a way of demonstrating the power of a figurehead – constructed or otherwise – in making individuals more loyal to a party, since it is easier to direct love towards an individual than an organisation. It is never fully addressed who precisely Big Brother is, even though his face appears on coins and posters throughout Oceania. Who is Big Brother in Nineteen Eighty-Four and what does he represent?Īs the leader of the Party, Big Brother is an all-knowing, all-powerful figure who is also intangible and shrouded in mystery. However, so powerful are O’Brien’s methods of manipulation that Winston comes to admire his intelligence and even worship him as a kind of saviour, even when O’Brien is inflicting horrible torture upon him. Through O’Brien, Winston and Julia incriminate themselves. He also explains many of the Party’s methods to maintain this power. Though Winston initially trusts O’Brien and believes that he is genuinely part of a resistance movement, O’Brien later reveals himself to be a corrupt bureaucrat and member of the Inner Party, a symbol of dehumanising and dehumanised desire for absolute power and control.
Who is O’Brien in Nineteen Eighty-Four and what does he represent?Ī member of the Inner Party, O’Brien is a figure of intrigue for Winston from the beginning, who believes that he might harbour similar anti-Party sentiments. However, like Winston, she ultimately bends under the weight of Party manipulation when she is tortured, and she and Winston discontinue their relationship.
She enjoys breaking the rules, which in turn encourages Winston to take increasingly significant risks. She believes that the Party is impossible to overthrow, and that personal rebellious behaviour and secret disobedience is the sole effective form of revolt. It is revealed that she has had a string of lovers from the Party, and has a place called the hideout where she takes them. Initially known as the ‘dark-haired girl’, Julia is Winston’s 26-year-old, sexually rebellious lover who works in the Fiction Department at the Ministry of Truth. Who is Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four and what does she represent? Ultimately, though Winston thinks that he can resist Party power, even in the face of torture, he is brainwashed into loving Big Brother, and has few independent thoughts of his own. He takes considerable personal risks, such as writing a diary and pursuing a relationship with Julia in the room above the antique shop. Orwell uses Winston’s internal, human, emotional reality as a foil against the external, collective identity that the totalitarian government seeks to enforce. Winston hates the Party and harbours revolutionary dreams but most importantly, he wants to maintain a feeling of humanity amongst a society that tries to strip away all humanity from its citizens. Winston realises that the Party ultimately wants to dominate them all by controlling access to the past and minds of its citizens, and by purposefully inciting hatred and war as a way of diffusing any rebellious behaviour. Thin, intellectual and fatalistic, he works in the Records Department in the Ministry of Truth rewriting news articles to conform with the Party’s current political angle. Protagonist Winston Smith is a 39-year-old minor member of the Outer Party from London. Who is Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four and what does he represent? Here is an analysis of the 6 key characters of the book – Winston Smith, Julia, O’Brien, Big Brother and Emmanuel Goldstein – touching on their roles in the novel, and what they each represent. A dystopian science fiction novel and so-called ‘cautionary tale’, it explores themes of mass surveillance, totalitarianism, the repressive regimentation of people and their behaviours, torture, the manipulation of history and facts and the class system. Published in 1949, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (also stylised as 1984) was Orwell’s ninth and final book completed in his lifetime.
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