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My Party, 'Tis of Thee. Heretic Winston Smith not only commits the crime of sexual pleasure with Julia, he also drags her with him into the underground movement—only to find that it is being run by the Oceanian bosses precisely as a trap for would-be rebels. In the torture chambers of the Ministry of Love he discovers how refined totalitarian dogma has become since the primitive days of Hitler and Stalin. No longer do party leaders pretend that they seized power for idealistic reasons and in the hope of creating a better world. Power is now frankly an end in itself. "God is power," explains the smiling, priestly torturer. Thus, to be Godlike, the man of 1984 must have such power over himself as to be capable of nothing but "utter submission" to the invisible Big Brother. By practising the Newspeak art of doublethink, he must learn to believe in the very core of his being that even "the stars can be near or distant, according as we [the party] need them." Only then can he become "immortal"—his identity lost in the deathless unity of the party.
Most novels about an imaginary world (e.g., Gulliver's Travels, Erewhon) have as their central character, or interpreter, a man who somehow strays out of the author's own times and finds himself in a world he never made. But Orwell, like
Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, builds his nightmare of tomorrow on foundations that are firmly laid today. He needs no contemporary spokesman to explain and interpret — for the simple reason that any reader in 1949 can uneasily see his own shattered features in Winston Smith, can scent in the world of 1984 a stench that is already familiar.