Floating Fortress

The Floating Fortress is the signature instrument of Oceania's endless war: a colossal sea stronghold whose appearance in Winston Smith's world is announced by a military voice on the telescreen, reading out the armaments of a new fortress anchored between Iceland and the Faroe Islands with a sort of brutal relish. Throughout the novel it stands as the concrete emblem of a war machine built to consume labour rather than to serve any human end, and its cycle of construction, obsolescence and replacement becomes the book's clearest image of the Party's economy of waste.

Appearance and Military Role

In the theoretical account preserved in Emmanuel Goldstein's forbidden book, the Floating Fortresses guard strategic spots on the sea lanes, and the evolution of naval warfare has seen the fragile movable battleship give way to the almost unsinkable Floating Fortress. The fortress is woven into the routine exhortations of Oceania: the Physical Jerks instructress reminds her audience of the sailors in the Floating Fortresses and tells them to think of what those sailors have to put up with. It functions, in other words, as an exemplary object of state publicity, a symbol of sacrifice and strength invoked to push ordinary Party members through their exercises.

The Economics of the Fortress

Goldstein's analysis treats the Floating Fortress as a demonstration of what continuous war is really for. The essential act of war is the destruction of the products of human labour, and a single Floating Fortress, he argues, has locked up in it the labour that would build several hundred cargo ships. It is ultimately scrapped as obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody, and with further enormous labours another Floating Fortress is built. The war effort is so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after the bare needs of the population are met, because goods that made the masses too comfortable would in the long run make them too intelligent. The fortress is thus not an instrument of conquest in any ordinary sense but a device for maintaining a hierarchical society through permanent, purposeless expenditure.

Narrative Role and Propaganda

The fortress also passes through the machinery of official publicity and forgery. Big Brother's Order for the Day once singled out an organisation called FFCC for supplying cigarettes and other comforts to the sailors in the Floating Fortresses and awarded a decoration to a Comrade Withers; three months later FFCC had been dissolved with no reasons given, and the clue in the records was that Withers had become an unperson. Winston's work in the Records Department is to erase such traces, rewriting the speech so that it commemorates an invented hero. The Floating Fortress therefore exists in the novel on two levels at once: as a physical object anchored in the northern seas, and as an item of news that can be silently altered until it no longer testifies to anything that happened.