1984 Chapter 11
1984
Chapter 11
The Last Man
"There are three stages in returning you to society," says O'Brien. "There is learning, there is understanding and there is acceptance. It is time for you to begin the second stage."
As always, Winston is lying flat on his back. He is still tied to the bed, but these days he is not tied so tightly. The machine, too, is less frightening. He can stop them using it if he thinks quickly enough. O'Brien pulls the lever only when he says something stupid.
Winston cannot remember how long this stage has lasted - weeks possibly - or how many times he has lain down on the bed, talking to O'Brien.
"You have read the book, Goldstein’s book, or parts of it," says O'Brien. "Did it tell you anything that you did not know already?"
"You have read it?" asks Winston.
"I wrote it. I was one of the people who wrote it. No book is written by one person, as you know."
"Is any of it true?"
"It describes our situation truthfully, yes. Its solutions make no sense at all. The proles will never attack the Party or even criticize it. Not in a thousand years or a million. They cannot. I do not have to tell you the reason: you know it already. The Party will rule for all time. Make that the starting point of your thoughts. Now, let us turn to the question of why we are ruling. What do you think?"
Winston says what he thinks O'Brien wants to hear. "You are ruling over us for our own good," he says. "You believe that people are not able to govern themselves and so…"
He screams. Pain shoots through his body. The machine shows thirty-five.
"That was stupid, Winston, stupid!" says O'Brien. "You should know better than to say a thing like that." He switches the machine off and continues. "Now I will tell you the answer to my question. The Party is only interested in power - not in the happiness of others, or money, or long life. We want power, only power, pure power. And we will never, never let it go. Now do you begin to understand me?"
Winston thinks how tired O'Brien looks. O'Brien moves forward in his chair, bringing his face close to Winston's.
"You are thinking," he says, "that my face is old and tired. You are thinking that I talk of power but I cannot stop my own body getting old. Can you not understand, Winston, that each person is only a very small part of something much bigger? And when the small part needs changing, the whole grows stronger. Do you die when you cut your hair?"
O'Brien turns away from the bed and begins to walk up and down. "You must understand that power belongs to the group, not to one person. An individual has power only when he belongs to a group so completely that he is not an individual any more. The Party says that ‘Freedom is Slavery’ but the opposite is also true. Slavery is Freedom. Alone - free - a human being will die in the end. But if he can be completely part of the Party, not an individual, then he can do anything and he lives for all time. The second thing is that power means power over the human body but, above all, power over the human mind. We already control everything else.”
For a moment Winston forgets about the machine. "How can you say that you control everything? You can't control the weather. You don't even control the Earth. What about Eurasia and Eastasia? You don't control them."
"Unimportant. We shall control them when we want to. And if we did not, what difference would it make? Oceania is the world. Have you forgotten doublethink?"
Winston lays back on the bed. He knows he is right. O'Brien is saying that nothing exists outside your own mind. There must be a way of showing this is wrong?
O'Brien is smiling. "The real power," he says, "is not power over things, but over men." He pauses and for a moment looks like a teacher talking to a clever schoolboy. "How does one man show that he has power over another man, Winston?"
Winston thinks. "By making him suffer," he says.
"Exactly. By making him suffer. Power means causing pain. Power lies in taking human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choice. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are making? It is the opposite of the stupid worlds which people used to imagine, worlds of love and pleasure. We have built a world of fear and suffering and hate. We shall destroy everything else - everything. We are destroying the love between child and parent, between man and man, and between man and woman. In the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers when they are born. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. Nobody will laugh, except at an enemy they have destroyed. There will be no art, no literature, no science. If you want a picture of the future, Winston, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever."
Winston cannot say anything. His heart seems frozen.O'Brien continues: "You are beginning, I can see, to understand what that world will be like. But in the end you will do more than understand it. You will accept it, welcome it, become part of it."Winston is still just strong enough to speak. "You can't," he
says weakly."What do you mean, Winston?""If a society were built on hate, it would fall to pieces.""No, no. You think that hating is more tiring than loving. Why should it be? And even if it was true, what difference would it make?"Winston is helpless again, unable to argue, unable to find the
words to explain the horror that he feels. "Something will beat you," he says, finally. "Life will beat you."
"We control life, Winston. And we control the way people are. People can be changed very easily, you know."
"No! I know that you will fail. There is something in all human beings that will beat you."
"And are you a human being, Winston? Are you a man?"
Yes."
"If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind of man is finished. Do you understand that you are alone? You are outside history, you do not exist." His voice changes as he gives Winston a hard look. “And you think you are better than us, because we hate and cause pain?"
"Yes, I think I am better."
O'Brien does not speak. Two other voices are speaking. After a moment Winston recognizes one of the voices as his own. It is the conversation he had with O'Brien on the night he joined the Brotherhood. He hears himself promising to murder another person, to cause the death of hundreds of innocent people, to make a child blind and destroy its face. O'Brien presses a switch and the voices stop.
"Get up from the bed," he says.
Winston gets off the bed and stands up with difficulty.
"You are the last man," says O'Brien. "Are you really better than us? You're going to see yourself as you are. Take off your clothes."
Winston takes his dirty overalls off and sees himself in a three-sided mirror at the end of the room. He cries out at the horrible sight.
"Move closer," says O'Brien. "Look at yourself closely in the three mirrors."
Winston has stopped walking towards the mirror because he is frightened. A bent, gray-colored thing is walking towards him in the mirror. His face is completely changed. He has very little hair, his back is bent, he is terribly thin. This looks like the body of an old, dying man.
"You have thought sometimes," says O'Brien, "that my face - the face of a member of the Inner Party - looks old and tired. What do you think of your own face?" He pulls out a handful of Winston's hair. "Even your hair is coming out in handfuls. Open your mouth. Nine, ten, eleven teeth left. How many did you have when you came to us? And they are dropping out of your head. Look here!"
He takes hold of one of Winston's few front teeth between his thumb and two fingers. Pain fills Winston's face. O'Brien pulls out the loose tooth. He throws it across the cell.
"You are falling to pieces," he said. "You are dirty. Did you know you smell like a dog? What are you? Just a dirty animal. Now look into that mirror again. That is the last man."
Before he knows what he is doing, Winston has sat on a small chair near the mirror and starts to cry. "You did it!" he says, through his tears. "You made me look like this."
O'Brien puts a hand on his shoulder, almost kindly. "No, Winston. You did it yourself when you stopped obeying the Party." He pauses for a moment and then continues. "We have beaten you, Winston. We have broken you. You have seen your body. Your mind is in the same state. There is nothing that we did not make you do."
Winston stops crying. "I have not betrayed Julia," he says. O'Brien looks down at him thoughtfully. "No," he says. "No, that is true. You have not betrayed Julia."
Winston thinks again how intelligent O'Brien is. Nothing, it seems, can stop him from admiring the man. O'Brien has understood that Winston still loves Julia and that means more than betraying the details of their meetings.
"Tell me," he says. "How soon will they shoot me?"
"It might be a long time," says 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."
