Rat

Rats appear in Nineteen Eighty-Four as both a literal infestation of the decaying city and the Party's ultimate instrument of psychological destruction. The same animals that scurry through the wainscoting of the room above Mr Charrington's shop reappear, starved and caged, in Room 101 of the Ministry of Love, where O'Brien tells Winston Smith that for him 'the worst thing in the world happens to be rats.' From a domestic nuisance to a nightmare made flesh, the rat traces the arc of Winston's rebellion and collapse.

Domestic Vermin and Urban Menace

Winston's first encounter with a rat in the novel occurs in the secret room above Mr Charrington's shop. Julia catches sight of a rat poking its nose out of the wainscoting, hurls a shoe at it, and remarks that she has given it a good fright. The interruption is casual to her, but it exposes a fault line in Winston. She explains that rats are everywhere: they have them in the hostel kitchen, and parts of London are swarming with them. The great huge brown ones, she says, attack children, and in some streets a woman daren't leave a baby alone for two minutes. She is about to add a further horror when Winston, his eyes tightly shut, begs her to stop. In the only room where he has felt safe, the rat establishes itself as the one thing that can unman him.

The Cage in Room 101

At the climax of Winston's interrogation, O'Brien straps him upright in a chair and has a guard bring in an oblong wire cage with a handle on top and, fixed to the front, something like a fencing mask with the concave side outwards. The cage is divided lengthways into two compartments, and in each compartment there is a rat. They are enormous rats, at the age when a rat's muzzle grows blunt and fierce and its fur brown instead of grey. O'Brien carries the cage to within two metres of Winston, then closer still. He explains its construction: the mask will fit over Winston's head leaving no exit, and when he presses the second lever the door will slide up and the starving creatures will shoot out like bullets. They will leap onto his face, sometimes attacking the eyes first, sometimes burrowing through the cheeks and devouring the tongue.

A Carnivore's Lesson

O'Brien delivers a short zoological lecture before he springs the trap. The rat, he says, although a rodent, is carnivorous. He reminds Winston of what happens in the poor quarters: in some streets a woman dare not leave her baby alone for even five minutes, because the rats will strip it to the bones; they also attack sick and dying people, and show astonishing intelligence in knowing when a human being is helpless. To this he adds, still in the same didactic tone, that the punishment about to be inflicted was a common punishment in Imperial China. The speech is addressed to an invisible audience, as though Winston were merely a demonstration object.

Terror and Betrayal

Winston's composure shatters as the cage approaches. He hears shrill cries, the foul musty odour of the brutes strikes his nostrils, and for an instant he is insane, a screaming animal. Yet out of the blackness he clutches one idea: there is one way to save himself, and it is to interpose another human body between himself and the rats. As the mask closes on his face, with the wire brushing his cheek, hope comes to him at last. He understands that in the whole world there is exactly one person to whom he can transfer his punishment, and he begins shouting 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!' This is his last coherent act of revolt, and it is a betrayal. A moment later he hears a metallic click and knows that the cage door has clicked shut and not open; the rats have not been released. O'Brien has not needed to use them.

The Rat in the Mind

What makes the rats so devastating to Winston is that they are not new to him. The horror had been lodged in his mind long before Room 101, in a recurring nightmare in which he stands before a wall of darkness behind which there is something unendurable. O'Brien, in the moments before the cage is brought out, recalls this dream and names what waits on the other side: the rats. The connection binds the creature to Winston's interior life as surely as to the Party's dungeon. And after the betrayal, the rat remains with him: in the Chestnut Tree Café, he cannot even name them in his thoughts, and the smell of gin is mixed in his mind with the smell of those creatures that hover close to his face. The animal has passed from the wainscoting to the cage to the inside of his skull.