The arrest

The arrest of Winston Smith and Julia in the room above Mr Charrington's shop is the hinge on which Nineteen Eighty-Four turns: the instant the lovers' secret rebellion, and their dream of a preserved pocket of the past, collapses into catastrophe. It comes at the moment of their greatest deluded security, when the room that seemed a sanctuary—chosen because it held no telescreen, hidden above a junk-shop—is suddenly exposed as a trap. An iron voice from behind the picture on the wall pronounces them the dead, hurling Winston's own private motto back at him, and the raid that follows delivers both captives to the windowless Ministry of Love, the building that had always stood in his mind as the terminus of every forbidden thought.

The Trap Springs

The room had been chosen because it appeared to stand outside the apparatus of control: no telescreen, a clock with a twelve-hour face, a mahogany bed, and the Glass Paperweight of rain-watery glass that Winston had called 'a little chunk of history that they've forgotten to alter'. In fact it had been the most carefully fitted trap in Oceania. When the picture crashed from the wall, uncovering the telescreen behind it, 'it was starting, it was starting at last'—and the one thing the lovers could not do was run; it was unthinkable to disobey the iron voice from the wall. 'You are the dead,' said the voice, repeating the phrase and commanding them to stand out in the middle of the room, back to back, their hands clasped behind their heads, and not to touch one another. Then a second voice—thin, cultivated, one that Winston had the impression of having heard before—struck in, completing the children's rhyme he had treasured as a relic of the lost past: 'Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head!' The rhyme's line about the chopper, which had always seemed the innocent ending of an old dance game, sounded for a moment like a death sentence. The deepest shock came when Mr Charrington appeared: his hair, which had been almost white, had turned black; he was not wearing his spectacles; his cockney accent had disappeared; his body had straightened and seemed to have grown bigger, so that the benevolent old man of the junk-shop resolved into the alert, cold face of a man of about thirty-five. It occurred to Winston that for the first time in his life he was looking, with knowledge, at a member of the Thought Police.

The Crushing of the Symbol

The room filled with solid men in black uniforms, with iron-shod boots on their feet and truncheons in their hands. Winston's single thought was to keep absolutely still, to give them no excuse to hit him; a man with a smooth prizefighter's jowl paused opposite him, balancing his truncheon meditatively between thumb and forefinger, licked the place where his lips should have been, and passed on. Then someone picked up the Glass Paperweight, the emblem of everything the lovers had tried to hold against the stream of history, and smashed it to pieces on the hearth-stone. The fragment of coral, 'a tiny crinkle of pink like a sugar rosebud from a cake', rolled across the mat, and Winston thought how small it always was. Julia, struck in the solar plexus so that she doubled up like a pocket ruler, was hoisted up by knees and shoulders and carried out of the room like a sack; the last Winston saw of her was her face, upside down, yellow and contorted, the eyes shut, a smear of rouge still on either cheek. He stood motionless, his hands behind his head, noticing that although the clock said nine—twenty-one hours—the light seemed far too strong, and wondering whether they had got Mr Charrington and what they had done to the woman in the yard. The raid was over in minutes; the violation it left behind was permanent.

Aftermath and Significance

The arrest completes what the whole apparatus of the Party was built to achieve: the destruction of any space in which private life might survive. The Ministry of Love into which Winston is now taken had always been the really frightening building—windowless, ringed with barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors and hidden machine-gun nests, its outer streets roamed by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms—and his capture is the first time he has ever been inside it, the place where there is no darkness, which the voice he had long identified as O'Brien's once promised they would meet in. The trap reveals the reach of the Party's claim upon memory: the room that had seemed a fragment of the abolished past was itself wired for sight and sound from the start, and the authorities knew the lovers' most private words before they were spoken aloud. Thomas Pynchon observes in his introduction to the novel that memory is relatively easy to deal with from the totalitarian point of view, since there is always some agency such as the Ministry of Truth to deny the memories of others and to rewrite the past; the raid turns that general observation into one couple's immediate terror. Nor was the rhyme's chopper line an idle threat: those who enter the Ministry of Love will, Winston comes to learn, be shot from behind, without warning, as they walk down a corridor from cell to cell. The arrest of Winston and Julia is thus the point where the novel's private romance passes fully into the machinery it defied, and where the couple's own repeated cry, 'We are the dead', changes from a gesture of defiance into a simple statement of fact.