1984 Chapter 1
1984
PART ONE
Thoughtcrime
Chapter 1
Big Brother Is Watching You
It is a bright, cold day in April and the clocks are ringing thirteen. Winston Smith walks home quickly to Victory Mansions with his head down to escape the terrible wind. He does not close the door fast enough, and dust comes inside with him. The hall smells of yesterday's food.
At the end of the hall, there is a poster that covers one wall. There is an enormous face on it. It is more than a meter across. The poster shows the face of a handsome man of about forty-five years old, with a large, black mustache. The man’s eyes seem to follow Winston as he moves. Below the face are the words BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.
Winston goes up the stairs. He does not take the elevator. It does not work very often and at the moment the electricity is turned off during the day to save money for Hate Week. The apartment is on the seventh floor. Winston is thirty-nine years old and he has a bad knee. He goes up the stairs slowly. Winston is a small man and looks much smaller in the blue overalls that Party members must wear. His hair is blond and the skin on his face is red from cheap soap, old razor blades and the cold winter that just ended.
Inside his apartment, Winston can hear a voice. It is reading numbers from a list: the amount of iron produced last year. The voice comes from a metal square on one of the walls, a telescreen. Winston turns down the volume, but it is impossible to turn the sound off completely.
He walks to the window. Outside, the world looks cold. There seems to be no color in anything, except in the posters that are everywhere. The face with the black mustache watches from every corner. There is one on the wall of the house opposite his window. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, it says, and the eyes look into Winston's eyes.
Behind him the voice from the telescreen is still talking about iron. The telescreen has a microphone too, so the Thought Police can listen to Winston at any time of the day or night. They can also watch him through the telescreen. Nobody knows when they actually watch you, but everybody behaves correctly all the time. The Thought Police might be watching you and listening to you.
Winston does not look at the telescreen. It is safer that way - they can't see your face. He looks out the window at the city of London, the biggest city in this part of Oceania. The old houses are all falling down. There are holes in the streets from the bombs. Winston asks himself if it was always this way? He tries to think about when he was a boy, but he cannot remember anything.
He looks at the Ministry of Truth, where he works. It is one kilometer away. It is an enormous white building, three hundred meters high. The building is much taller than the houses around it. From Winston's apartment, it is possible to see the three slogans of the Party that are written in enormous letters on the side of the building:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
The Ministry of Truth is called Minitrue in Newspeak, the new language of Oceania. They say that the Minitrue has more than three thousand rooms above the ground and a similar number below the ground. The people who work there work mainly on news and entertainment.
There is another building that is much taller than the other buildings around it: the Ministry of Peace, where they focus on war. It is called Minipax in Newspeak. And the Ministry of Plenty - Miniplenty - which is responsible for the economy. And he can see the Ministry of Love - Miniluv - which is responsible for law and order.
The Ministry of Love is the really terrifying ministry. The building has no windows. Nobody is permitted to go near it if they do not have business there. There are guards with guns in black uniforms in the streets all around the building.
Winston turns around quickly. He smiles. It is a good idea to look happy when you are facing the telescreen. He goes into his small kitchen. He didn't eat lunch before he left work, but there is no food in the kitchen. There is only a piece of hard bread. The bread is for breakfast tomorrow. He pours some gin into a dirty cup and drinks it quickly, like medicine. It burns him inside, but he feels happier afterwards.
He goes back to the living room and sits down at a small table to the left of the telescreen. It is the only place in the room where the telescreen cannot see him. From a drawer in the table he takes out a pen and a big diary with beautiful white paper. He bought the diary in a shop that sells antiques, in a poor part of the town. Party members like Winston are not allowed to go into ordinary shops, but many Party members do. It is the only way to get things like razor blades.
Winston opens the diary. This is not illegal. Nothing is illegal, because there are no laws now. But if the diary is found they will punish him with death or they will put him in prison for twenty-five years. He picks up the pen, then he stops. He feels sick. It is a decisive act to start writing.
Earlier that morning, a terrible noise from the big telescreen at the Ministry of Truth called all the workers to the center of the hall for the Two Minutes Hate. The face of Emmanuel Goldstein, Enemy of the People, was on the telescreen. It was a thin, intelligent face, with white hair and a small beard. But there was something unpleasant about it. Goldstein began to speak in his strange voice. He criticized the Party and verbally attacked Big Brother.
In the past (nobody knew exactly when), Goldstein was almost as important in the Party as Big Brother himself, but then he worked against the Party. Before he could be punished with death, he had escaped - nobody knew how, exactly. Somewhere he is still alive, and all crimes against the Party come from his teaching.
Behind Goldstein’s face on the telescreen, there were thousands of Eurasian soldiers. Oceania is always at war with either Eurasia or Eastasia. The enemy changes, but the hate for Goldstein never changes. The Thought Police find his spies every day. They are called "the Brotherhood", people say. But Winston sometimes asks himself if the Brotherhood really exists. Goldstein also wrote a book, a terrible book, a book against the Party. It has no title; it is just known as The Book.
As Goldstein’s face filled the telescreen and Eurasian soldiers marched behind him, the Hate became stronger. People jumped up and down. They shouted and screamed. They could not hear Goldstein’s voice. Winston was shouting too; it was impossible not to shout. A girl behind him, with dark hair, was screaming "Pig! Pig!" at Goldstein, and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and threw it at the telescreen. It hit Goldstein on the nose and fell to the floor.
Winston often sees this girl at the Ministry but he never speaks to her. He does not know her name, but he knows she works in the Fiction Department. He sees her with tools so he guesses she is a mechanic who fixes the story-writing machines. She wears the thin red belt of the Young People's League tied around her waist.
Winston disliked her from the first moment he saw her. He dislikes nearly all women, especially young and pretty ones. The young women are always the most loyal to the Party and they are happy to spy on other people. But this girl is especially dangerous, he thinks. Once, when he saw her in the cafeteria, she looked at him in a way that terrified him. He even thought she was working for the Thought Police. As the screaming at Goldstein became louder, Winston's dislike of the girl turned to hate. He hated her because she was young and pretty.
Suddenly he noticed someone else, sitting near the girl, wearing the black overalls of an Inner Party member. O'Brien is a large man with a thick neck and glasses. Even though he looks scary, Winston is interested in him. His face sometimes seems intelligent. That intelligence in his face suggests that - maybe - he questions the official beliefs of the Party.
Winston has seen O'Brien about twelve times over the years. Many years ago he dreamed about O'Brien. He was in a dark room and O'Brien said to him, "We will meet in the place where there is no dark." Winston did not know what that meant, but he was sure it would happen, one day.
The Hate increased. The screaming increased. The voice and face of Goldstein became the voice and face of an animal - a sheep. Then the sheep-face became an enemy soldier, walking towards them with his gun. He came so close that some people were afraid and moved back in their seats. But at the same moment the soldier became the face of Big Brother, with black hair and a mustache. The face of Big Brother filled the telescreen. Nobody could hear what Big Brother said, but it did not matter. It was only important that he was speaking to them. Then the face of Big Brother disappeared from the telescreen and the Party slogans appeared:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
Then everybody started shouting "B-B! B-B!" again and again. It began slowly, with a long pause between the first B and the second. Of course Winston shouted too - you have to. But there was a second when the look on his face showed what he was really thinking. And at that exact moment, O'Brien looked into Winston's eyes.
O'Brien was adjusting his glasses on his nose. But Winston knew - yes he knew - that O'Brien was thinking the same thing as he was. "I am with you," O'Brien seemed to say to him with his eyes. "I hate all this too." And then the moment of intelligence was gone, and O'Brien's face looked like everybody else’s face.
Winston writes the date in his diary: April 4th, 1984. Then he stops. He does not know definitively that the year is 1984. He is thirty-nine, he believes - he was born in 1944 or 1945. But nobody can be sure of dates, not really.
"Who am I writing this diary for?" he asks himself suddenly. For the future, for the unborn. But if the future is like the present, it will not listen to him. And if it is different, his situation will have no significance.
The telescreen is playing marching music. What does he want to say? Winston looks at the page for a long time, then begins to write: Freedom is the freedom to say that two and two make four. If you have that, everything else follows... He stops. Should he go on? If he writes more or does not write more, the result will be the same. The Thought Police will get him.
Even before he writes anything, his crime is clear. THOUGHTCRIME, they call it.
It is always at night - the strong hand on your shoulder, the lights in your face. People simply disappear, always during the night. And then your name disappears, your existence is denied and then forgotten. You are, in Newspeak, vaporized. Suddenly he wants to scream. He starts writing, fast:
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
There is a knock on the door. Already! He sits as quietly as a mouse, hoping that they will go away. But no, there is another knock. He can not delay - that is the worst thing he can do. His heart is beating very fast, but even now his face, from habit, probably shows nothing.
He gets up and walks slowly towards the door.
