---
title: "Nineteen Eighty-Four"
author: "George Orwell"
languages: [en]
shelf: "Literature"
section: 15 of 25
url: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-nineteen-eighty-four-fp20120511/15/
cite: "George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, section 15. Scriptura (scriptura.si), https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-nineteen-eighty-four-fp20120511/15/"
---

# Nineteen Eighty-Four

*George Orwell*

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> Title: 1984 [Nineteen Eighty-Four]
Date of first publication: 1949
Author: Eric Arthur Blair (as George Orwell) (1903-1950)
Date first posted: May 17, 2012
Date last updated: June 26, 2026
Faded Page eBook #20120511

> This eBook was produced by: David T. Jones, Mary Meehan, Al Haines
& the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net

> NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR

> A NOVEL BY

> George Orwell

> SECKER & WARBURG                         LONDON

> S. J. REGINALD SAUNDERS & CO. LTD.      TORONTO

> COPYRIGHT, CANADA, 1949
    S. J. REGINALD SAUNDERS AND COMPANY LIMITED

> _All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce
    this book or portions thereof in any form._

> _first Canadian edition_

> PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
    BY THE HADDON CRAFTSMEN, SCRANTON, PA.

> *       *       *       *       *

> _Books by George Orwell_

> NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR
    ANIMAL FARM
    DICKENS, DALI AND OTHERS
    COMING UP FOR AIR
    BURMESE DAYS
    DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON
    HOMAGE TO CATALONIA
    THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER

> [The end of _1984 [Nineteen Eighty-Four]_ by Eric Arthur Blair (as George Orwell)]

## 15. VII

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-nineteen-eighty-four-fp20120511/15/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-nineteen-eighty-four-fp20120511/15/#p-N

[¶0] Winston had woken up with his eyes full of tears. Julia rolled sleepily
against him, murmuring something that might have been "What's the
matter?"

[¶1] "I dreamt--" he began, and stopped short. It was too complex to be put
into words. There was the dream itself, and there was a memory connected
with it that had swum into his mind in the few seconds after waking.

[¶2] He lay back with his eyes shut, still sodden in the atmosphere of the
dream. It was a vast, luminous dream in which his whole life seemed to
stretch out before him like a landscape on a summer evening after rain.
It had all occurred inside the glass paperweight, but the surface of the
glass was the dome of the sky, and inside the dome everything was
flooded with clear soft light in which one could see into interminable
distances. The dream had also been comprehended by--indeed, in some
sense it had consisted in--a gesture of the arm made by his mother, and
made again thirty years later by the Jewish woman he had seen on the
news film, trying to shelter the small boy from the bullets, before the
helicopters blew them both to pieces.

[¶3] "Do you know," he said, "that until this moment I believed I had
murdered my mother?"

[¶4] "Why did you murder her?" said Julia, almost asleep.

[¶5] "I didn't murder her. Not physically."

[¶6] In the dream he had remembered his last glimpse of his mother, and
within a few moments of waking the cluster of small events surrounding
it had all come back. It was a memory that he must have deliberately
pushed out of his consciousness over many years. He was not certain of
the date, but he could not have been less than ten years old, possibly
twelve, when it had happened.

[¶7] His father had disappeared some time earlier; how much earlier, he could
not remember. He remembered better the rackety, uneasy circumstances of
the time: the periodical panics about air raids and the sheltering in
Tube stations, the piles of rubble everywhere, the unintelligible
proclamations posted at street corners, the gangs of youths in shirts
all the same color, the enormous queues outside the bakeries, the
intermittent machine-gun fire in the distance--above all, the fact that
there was never enough to eat. He remembered long afternoons spent with
other boys in scrounging round dustbins and rubbish heaps, picking out
the ribs of cabbage leaves, potato peelings, sometimes even scraps of
stale breadcrust from which they carefully scraped away the cinders; and
also in waiting for the passing of trucks which traveled over a certain
route and were known to carry cattle feed, and which, when they jolted
over the bad patches in the road, sometimes spilt a few fragments of
oilcake.

[¶8] When his father disappeared, his mother did not show any surprise or any
violent grief, but a sudden change came over her. She seemed to have
become completely spiritless. It was evident even to Winston that she
was waiting for something that she knew must happen. She did everything
that was needed--cooked, washed, mended, made the bed, swept the floor,
dusted the mantelpiece--always very slowly and with a curious lack of
superfluous motion, like an artist's lay-figure moving of its own
accord. Her large shapely body seemed to relapse naturally into
stillness. For hours at a time she would sit almost immobile on the bed,
nursing his young sister, a tiny, ailing, very silent child of two or
three, with a face made simian by thinness. Very occasionally she would
take Winston in her arms and press him against her for a long time
without saying anything. He was aware, in spite of his youthfulness and
selfishness, that this was somehow connected with the never-mentioned
thing that was about to happen.

[¶9] He remembered the room where they lived, a dark, close-smelling room
that seemed half filled by a bed with a white counterpane. There was a
gas ring in the fender, and a shelf where food was kept, and on the
landing outside there was a brown earthenware sink, common to several
rooms. He remembered his mother's statuesque body bending over the gas
ring to stir at something in a saucepan. Above all he remembered his
continuous hunger, and the fierce sordid battles at mealtimes. He would
ask his mother naggingly, over and over again, why there was not more
food, he would shout and storm at her (he even remembered the tones of
his voice, which was beginning to break prematurely and sometimes boomed
in a peculiar way), or he would attempt a sniveling note of pathos in
his efforts to get more than his share. His mother was quite ready to
give him more than his share. She took it for granted that he, "the
boy," should have the biggest portion; but however much she gave him he
invariably demanded more. At every meal she would beseech him not to be
selfish and to remember that his little sister was sick and also needed
food, but it was no use. He would cry out with rage when she stopped
ladling, he would try to wrench the saucepan and spoon out of her hands,
he would grab bits from his sister's plate. He knew that he was starving
the other two, but he could not help it; he even felt that he had a
right to do it. The clamorous hunger in his belly seemed to justify him.
Between meals, if his mother did not stand guard, he was constantly
pilfering at the wretched store of food on the shelf.

[¶10] One day a chocolate ration was issued. There had been no such issue for
weeks or months past. He remembered quite clearly that precious little
morsel of chocolate. It was a two-ounce slab (they still talked about
ounces in those days) between the three of them. It was obvious that it
ought to be divided into three equal parts. Suddenly, as though he were
listening to somebody else, Winston heard himself demanding in a loud
booming voice that he should be given the whole piece. His mother told
him not to be greedy. There was a long, nagging argument that went round
and round, with shouts, whines, tears, remonstrances, bargainings. His
tiny sister, clinging to her mother with both hands, exactly like a baby
monkey, sat looking over her shoulder at him with large, mournful eyes.
In the end his mother broke off three-quarters of the chocolate and gave
it to Winston, giving the other quarter to his sister. The little girl
took hold of it and looked at it dully, perhaps not knowing what it
was. Winston stood watching her for a moment. Then with a sudden swift
spring he had snatched the piece of chocolate out of his sister's hand
and was fleeing for the door.

[¶11] "Winston, Winston!" his mother called after him. "Come back! Give your
sister back her chocolate!"

[¶12] He stopped, but he did not come back. His mother's anxious eyes were
fixed on his face. Even now she was thinking about the thing, he did not
know what it was, that was on the point of happening. His sister,
conscious of having been robbed of something, had set up a feeble wail.
His mother drew her arm round the child and pressed its face against her
breast. Something in the gesture told him that his sister was dying. He
turned and fled down the stairs, with the chocolate growing sticky in
his hand.

[¶13] He never saw his mother again. After he had devoured the chocolate he
felt somewhat ashamed of himself and hung about in the streets for
several hours, until hunger drove him home. When he came back his mother
had disappeared. This was already becoming normal at that time. Nothing
was gone from the room except his mother and his sister. They had not
taken any clothes, not even his mother's overcoat. To this day he did
not know with any certainty that his mother was dead. It was perfectly
possible that she had merely been sent to a forced-labor camp. As for
his sister, she might have been removed, like Winston himself, to one of
the colonies for homeless children (Reclamation Centers, they were
called) which had grown up as a result of the civil war; or she might
have been sent to the labor camp along with his mother, or simply left
somewhere or other to die.

[¶14] The dream was still vivid in his mind, especially the enveloping,
protecting gesture of the arm in which its whole meaning seemed to be
contained. His mind went back to another dream of two months ago.
Exactly as his mother had sat on the dingy white-quilted bed, with the
child clinging to her, so she had sat in the sunken ship, far
underneath him and drowning deeper every minute, but still looking up at
him through the darkening water.

[¶15] He told Julia the story of his mother's disappearance. Without opening
her eyes she rolled over and settled herself into a more comfortable
position.

[¶16] "I expect you were a beastly little swine in those days," she said
indistinctly. "All children are swine."

[¶17] "Yes. But the real point of the story--"

[¶18] From her breathing it was evident that she was going off to sleep again.
He would have liked to continue talking about his mother. He did not
suppose, from what he could remember of her, that she had been an
unusual woman, still less an intelligent one; and yet she had possessed
a kind of nobility, a kind of purity, simply because the standards that
she obeyed were private ones. Her feelings were her own, and could not
be altered from outside. It would not have occurred to her that an
action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved
someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still
gave him love. When the last of the chocolate was gone, his mother had
clasped the child in her arms. It was no use, it changed nothing, it did
not produce more chocolate, it did not avert the child's death or her
own; but it seemed natural to her to do it. The refugee woman in the
boat had also covered the little boy with her arm, which was no more use
against the bullets than a sheet of paper. The terrible thing that the
Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings,
were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over
the material world. When once you were in the grip of the Party, what
you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing, made
literally no difference. Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you
nor your actions were ever heard of again. You were lifted clean out of
the stream of history. And yet to the people of only two generations
ago, this would not have seemed all-important, because they were not
attempting to alter history. They were governed by private loyalties
which they did not question. What mattered were individual
relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a
word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself. The proles, it
suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition. They were not
loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one
another. For the first time in his life he did not despise the proles or
think of them merely as an inert force which would one day spring to
life and regenerate the world. The proles had stayed human. They had not
become hardened inside. They had held onto the primitive emotions which
he himself had to relearn by conscious effort. And in thinking this he
remembered, without apparent relevance, how a few weeks ago he had seen
a severed hand lying on the pavement and had kicked it into the gutter
as though it had been a cabbage stalk.

[¶19] "The proles are human beings," he said aloud. "We are not human."

[¶20] "Why not?" said Julia, who had woken up again.

[¶21] He thought for a little while. "Has it ever occurred to you," he said,
"that the best thing for us to do would be simply to walk out of here
before it's too late, and never see each other again?"

[¶22] "Yes, dear, it has occurred to me, several times. But I'm not going to
do it, all the same."

[¶23] "We've been lucky," he said, "but it can't last much longer. You're
young. You look normal and innocent. If you keep clear of people like
me, you might stay alive for another fifty years."

[¶24] "No. I've thought it all out. What you do, I'm going to do. And don't be
too downhearted. I'm rather good at staying alive."

[¶25] "We may be together for another six months--a year--there's no knowing.
At the end we're certain to be apart. Do you realize how utterly alone
we shall be? When once they get hold of us there will be nothing,
literally nothing, that either of us can do for the other. If I confess,
they'll shoot you, and if I refuse to confess they'll shoot you just the
same. Nothing that I can do or say, or stop myself from saying, will put
off your death for as much as five minutes. Neither of us will even know
whether the other is alive or dead. We shall be utterly without power of
any kind. The one thing that matters is that we shouldn't betray one
another, although even that can't make the slightest difference."

[¶26] "If you mean confessing," she said, "we shall do that, right enough.
Everybody always confesses. You can't help it. They torture you."

[¶27] "I don't mean confessing. Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do
doesn't matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving
you--that would be the real betrayal."

[¶28] She thought it over. "They can't do that," she said finally. "It's the
one thing they can't do. They can make you say anything--_anything_--but
they can't make you believe it. They can't get inside you."

[¶29] "No," he said a little more hopefully, "no; that's quite true. They
can't get inside you. If you can _feel_ that staying human is worth
while, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them."

[¶30] He thought of the telescreen with its never-sleeping ear. They could spy
upon you night and day, but if you kept your head you could still outwit
them. With all their cleverness they had never mastered the secret of
finding out what another human being was thinking. Perhaps that was less
true when you were actually in their hands. One did not know what
happened inside the Ministry of Love, but it was possible to guess:
tortures, drugs, delicate instruments that registered your nervous
reactions, gradual wearing-down by sleeplessness and solitude and
persistent questioning. Facts, at any rate, could not be kept hidden.
They could be tracked down by inquiry, they could be squeezed out of you
by torture. But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human,
what difference did it ultimately make? They could not alter your
feelings; for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you
wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you
had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were
mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.