Betrayal in Room 101

Betrayal in Room 101 is the culminating ordeal of Winston Smith's re-education inside the Ministry of Love, the moment when O'Brien turns his prisoner's deepest private terror into the lever that breaks his last intact loyalty. Strapped upright in a chair before a wire cage of starving rats, Winston is driven to howl "Do it to Julia!" and by that utterance he offers up the woman he loves as the price of his own survival. Julia had once insisted that they could make you say anything but could not make you believe it, and Winston had told her that confession was not betrayal; Room 101 is where that claim is annihilated, the novel's proof that the Party's power over the mind has no limit. The scene also makes possible everything that follows: the hollow release, the Park reunion, and the final love of Big Brother.

The worst thing in the world

By the time O'Brien brings the cage into the underground chamber, Room 101 has already accumulated its horror through the terror of other prisoners: Winston has seen a woman shrivel and turn a different colour at the words, and a starving man has begged on his knees to be shot, hanged or starved rather than sent there. O'Brien's explanation now refines the threat. The worst thing in the world, he says, varies from individual to individual — it may be burial alive, death by fire, drowning or impalement, or even something trivial and not fatal; for Winston the worst thing happens to be rats. The cage itself is an oblong wire box with a handle, divided lengthways into two compartments, with what looks like a fencing mask fixed to the front, concave side outwards, and with a rat in each compartment. As soon as the meaning of the mask reaches Winston, a premonitory tremor passes through him and his bowels turn to water. O'Brien then reminds him of the nightmare that has recurred throughout his life: a wall of blackness, a roaring sound, something terrible on the other side that he knew he knew but dared not drag into the open. It was the rats that were on the other side of the wall.

The apparatus of the torment

O'Brien's method is deliberately didactic. Speaking in the schoolmasterish manner he sometimes affected, and addressing an invisible audience somewhere behind Winston's back, he explains that pain by itself is not always enough: a human being can stand out against pain even to the point of death, but everyone has something unendurable, and courage and cowardice have nothing to do with it. For Winston the rats are such a pressure; he will do what is required. He describes the rats with clinical relish — a rodent, but carnivorous, capable of stripping a baby to the bones in the poor quarters of the town, and showing astonishing intelligence in knowing when a human being is helpless — and adds, as didactically as ever, that the punishment was common in Imperial China. The cage's construction makes the threat exact: the mask will fit over the head leaving no exit, and when the second lever is pressed the door will slide up and the starving brutes will shoot out like bullets, leaping onto the face and boring into it, sometimes attacking the eyes first, sometimes burrowing through the cheeks and devouring the tongue. Earlier, while the cage was still far away, Winston had heard the blood singing in his ears and had felt himself sitting in the middle of a great empty plain drenched with sunlight; now the wire door is a couple of hand-spans from his face, the mask shuts out everything else, and one of the rats stands up against the bars, fiercely snuffing the air.

The breaking point

With the mask closing on his face, Winston fights his panic with the single resolution that thinking, even with a split second left, was the only hope. The foul musty odour of the brutes strikes his nostrils; a violent convulsion of nausea inside him almost costs him consciousness, and for an instant he is insane, a screaming animal. Yet out of the blackness he emerges clutching one idea: there is only one way to save himself, and that is to interpose another human being, the body of another human being, between himself and the rats. The moment the wire brushes his cheek he understands that in the whole world there is just one body he can thrust in the way, and he shouts frantically, over and over: "Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!" Then the scene dissolves: he is falling backwards into enormous depths, away from the rats, still strapped in the chair but falling through the floor, through the walls of the building, through the earth, through the oceans, through the atmosphere, into the gulfs between the stars. Through the darkness he hears a second metallic click and knows that the cage door has clicked shut, not open.

The aftermath

The aftermath of Room 101 radiates through the rest of the novel. After his release, meeting Julia in the Park on a vile, biting day in March, Winston sees the physical record of their shared ruin: her face sallower, a long scar partly hidden by her hair across forehead and temple, her waist thickened and stiffened, her feet broader, her clumsy shoes. She says baldly, "I betrayed you," and he answers, "I betrayed you." She explains that at the moment it happens you do mean it, that you want it to happen to the other person and do not give a damn what they suffer; he echoes, "All you care about is yourself." They both acknowledge that after that you do not feel the same towards the other person any longer. Winston will later remember that he had not merely said the words about Julia but had meant them, had wished that she and not he should be delivered over to the rats. The novel makes the causal thread explicit: Julia had once insisted that they could make you say anything but could not make you believe it, could not get inside you. Room 101 had answered her, and O'Brien's promise that what happens to you here is for ever had been shown true.

Significance

In the architecture of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Room 101 is the inversion of the clearing in the wood and the bed above the junk-shop: those places promised a pocket of private life beyond the reach of the Party, and this one proves that no such pocket exists. It completes the progression of re-education that O'Brien has named to Winston — learning, understanding, acceptance — by supplying the final, unanswerable pressure that forces acceptance. A physical ordeal becomes a psychological one, and the moment of betrayal is what Winston later carries with him into the Chestnut Tree Café, where he traces 2 + 2 = 5 in the dust on the table, drinks Victory Gin, and finally learns what kind of smile is hidden beneath the dark moustache. He has been emptied and refilled; he loves Big Brother.