Winston loves Big Brother

At the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four, in the Chestnut Tree Café, Winston Smith completes the destruction of his own rebellion and discovers that he loves Big Brother. The moment arrives as a victory bulletin from the African front shatters the café's stale calm: beneath the table his feet make convulsive movements while he sits motionless, running in imagination with the cheering crowds, and the 'final, indispensable, healing change' that had never happened before suddenly happens. He is carried, in a blissful dream, back into the Ministry of Love, into the public dock where he confesses everything and implicates everybody, and down the white-tiled corridor where 'the long-hoped-for bullet was entering his brain.' When he looks up at the enormous face on the wall, two gin-scented tears trickle down his nose. 'He loved Big Brother.' The last rebel of Oceania has been converted, not merely silenced; the event is the novel's darkest proof that the Party does not destroy its enemies, it changes them.

The Café Before the News

The scene is staged in Winston's habitual corner of the Chestnut Tree Café, at the lonely hour of fifteen, with a tinny music trickling from the telescreens. He sits gazing into an empty glass, and an unbidden waiter keeps filling it with Victory Gin flavoured with saccharine and cloves, the café's speciality. Opposite him the vast face on the wall repeats 'BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU', and the chessboard is always laid out for him, with the current issue of the Times turned down at the chess problem. The waiting has a specific object: the telescreen has warned of an important announcement at fifteen-thirty, and the news from the African front is disquieting in the extreme. A Eurasian army is moving southward at terrifying speed, with Brazzaville and Leopoldville in danger, and for the first time in the whole war the territory of Oceania itself is menaced. He traces '2 + 2 = 5' with his finger in the dust on the table, and reflects, with a kind of cloudy mysticism, that in chess white always mates — an image of the Party's eternal triumph even before the bulletin arrives.

The Victory Bulletin and the Conversion

A shrill trumpet-call pierces the air, and in the café everyone knows what it means: a bulletin, and victory — always victory when a trumpet-call precedes the news. The telescreen's excited voice is almost drowned by the roar of cheering from outside, and fragments crowd in: 'Vast strategic manoeuvre — perfect coordination — utter rout — half a million prisoners... victory, victory, victory!' Winston does not stir from his seat, but under the table his feet make convulsive movements; in his mind he is running with the crowds outside, cheering himself deaf. He looks up at the portrait of Big Brother as 'the colossus that bestrode the world,' 'the rock against which the hordes of Asia dashed themselves in vain.' Only ten minutes before, there had still been equivocation in his heart as he wondered whether the news would be victory or defeat; now the 'final, indispensable, healing change' has happened. His imagination carries him back to the Ministry of Love, where everything is forgiven and his soul is white as snow, then to the public dock (confessing everything, implicating everybody), then to the white-tiled corridor with an armed guard at his back. The 'long-hoped-for bullet' is entering his brain, and the sensation is one of bliss.

The Mechanism: Conditioning and Doublethink

The conversion is not a sudden lapse but the terminus of a long-conditioned reflex. In the Two Minutes Hate, rage had already been shown to be an abstract, undirected emotion 'which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp'; at one moment Winston's hatred was directed against Big Brother, and in the next he was at one with the people about him. Doublethink taught him to hold two contradictory opinions in his mind simultaneously and believe both, to forget and then retrieve memories as needed, and, in its ultimate subtlety, 'consciously to induce unconsciousness.' The final scene applies that training in reverse: the emotion that once flowed against the Party now flows toward it. Contemporary readers, as Thomas Pynchon recalls in his introduction, recognized in Winston's lengthy and terrifying re-education something very much like brainwashing, a set of techniques popularly traced to Pavlovian conditioning; the love that fills the café is the conditioned response that replaces the capacity to judge.

The Price of Love

What the scene costs is measured by Julia's old promise, remembered here: 'They can't get inside you.' The book's final movement answers her: they could get inside you, and 'what happens to you here is for ever.' Something has been killed in Winston's breast, 'burnt out, cauterised out'; the man who once wrote 'DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER' now gazes at the enormous face and feels an 'O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast!' The 'loving breast' is Big Brother's, and the exile is his own long rebellion, now healed by surrender. 'But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.' The victory is precisely the annihilation of the self that had struggled; the love is the final form of defeat. That is why the novel ends not with his death but with his conversion — the Party's deepest ambition is not to kill the heretic but to make him love his killer, and Winston, in his last moment, does.