CHAPTER 1

He did not know where he was. Presumably he was in the
Ministry of Love, but there was no way of making certain.
He was in a high-ceilinged windowless cell with walls of
glittering white porcelain. Concealed lamps flooded it with cold
light, and there was a low, steady humming sound which he
supposed had something to do with the air supply. A bench, or
shelf, just wide enough to sit on ran round the wall, broken only by
the door and, at the end opposite the door, a lavatory pan with no
wooden seat. There were four telescreens, one in each wall.
There was a dull aching in his belly. It had been there ever
since they had bundled him into the closed van and driven him
away. But he was also hungry, with a gnawing, unwholesome kind
of hunger. It might be twenty-four hours since he had eaten, it
might be thirty-six. He still did not know, probably never would
know, whether it had been morning or evening when they arrested
him. Since he was arrested he had not been fed.
He sat as still as he could on the narrow bench, with his hands
crossed on his knee. He had already learned to sit still. If you made
unexpected movements they yelled at you from the telescreen. But
the craving for food was growing upon him. What he longed for
above all was a piece of bread. He had an idea that there were a few
breadcrumbs in the pocket of his overalls. It was even possible —

he thought this because from time to time something seemed to
tickle his leg — that there might be a sizeable bit of crust there. In
the end the temptation to find out overcame his fear; he slipped a
hand into his pocket.
‘Smith!’ yelled a voice from the telescreen. ‘6079 Smith W.!
Hands out of pockets in the cells!’
He sat still again, his hands crossed on his knee. Before being
brought here he had been taken to another place which must have
been an ordinary prison or a temporary lock-up used by the patrols.
He did not know how long he had been there; some hours at any
rate; with no clocks and no daylight it was hard to gauge the time.
It was a noisy, evil-smelling place. They had put him into a cell
similar to the one he was now in, but filthily dirty and at all times
crowded by ten or fifteen people. The majority of them were
common criminals, but there were a few political prisoners among
them. He had sat silent against the wall, jostled by dirty bodies, too
preoccupied by fear and the pain in his belly to take much interest
in his surroundings, but still noticing the astonishing difference in
demeanour between the Party prisoners and the others. The Party
prisoners were always silent and terrified, but the ordinary
criminals seemed to care nothing for anybody. They yelled insults
at the guards, fought back fiercely when their belongings were
impounded, wrote obscene words on the floor, ate smuggled food
which they produced from mysterious hiding-places in their
clothes, and even shouted down the telescreen when it tried to
restore order. On the other hand some of them seemed to be on
good terms with the guards, called them by nicknames, and tried to
wheedle cigarettes through the spyhole in the door. The guards,
too, treated the common criminals with a certain forbearance, even
when they had to handle them roughly. There was much talk about the forced-labour camps to which most of the prisoners expected to
be sent. It was ‘all right’ in the camps, he gathered, so long as you
had good contacts and knew the ropes. There was bribery,
favouritism, and racketeering of every kind, there was
homosexuality and prostitution, there was even illicit alcohol
distilled from potatoes. The positions of trust were given only to
the common criminals, especially the gangsters and the murderers,
who formed a sort of aristocracy. All the dirty jobs were done by
the politicals.
There was a constant come-and-go of prisoners of every
description: drug-peddlers, thieves, bandits, black-marketeers,
drunks, prostitutes. Some of the drunks were so violent that the
other prisoners had to combine to suppress them. An enormous
wreck of a woman, aged about sixty, with great tumbling breasts
and thick coils of white hair which had come down in her struggles,
was carried in, kicking and shouting, by four guards, who had hold
of her one at each corner. They wrenched off the boots with which
she had been trying to kick them, and dumped her down across
Winston’s lap, almost breaking his thigh-bones. The woman
hoisted herself upright and followed them out with a yell of ‘F——
bastards!’ Then, noticing that she was sitting on something
uneven, she slid off Winston’s knees on to the bench.
‘Beg pardon, dearie,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t ’a sat on you, only
the buggers put me there. They dono ’ow to treat a lady, do they?’
She paused, patted her breast, and belched. ‘Pardon,’ she said, ‘I
ain’t meself, quite.’
She leant forward and vomited copiously on the floor.
‘Thass better,’ she said, leaning back with closed eyes. ‘Never
keep it down, thass what I say. Get it up while it’s fresh on your
stomach, like.’ She revived, turned to have another look at Winston and
seemed immediately to take a fancy to him. She put a vast arm
round his shoulder and drew him towards her, breathing beer and
vomit into his face.
‘Wass your name, dearie?’ she said.
‘Smith,’ said Winston.
‘Smith?’ said the woman. ‘Thass funny. My name’s Smith too.
Why,’ she added sentimentally, ‘I might be your mother!’
She might, thought Winston, be his mother. She was about the
right age and physique, and it was probable that people changed
somewhat after twenty years in a forced-labour camp.
No one else had spoken to him. To a surprising extent the
ordinary criminals ignored the Party prisoners. ‘The polITS,’ they
called them, with a sort of uninterested contempt. The Party
prisoners seemed terrified of speaking to anybody, and above all of
speaking to one another. Only once, when two Party members,
both women, were pressed close together on the bench, he
overheard amid the din of voices a few hurriedly-whispered words;
and in particular a reference to something called ‘room one-ohone’, which he did not understand.
It might be two or three hours ago that they had brought him
here. The dull pain in his belly never went away, but sometimes it
grew better and sometimes worse, and his thoughts expanded or
contracted accordingly. When it grew worse he thought only of the
pain itself, and of his desire for food. When it grew better, panic
took hold of him. There were moments when he foresaw the things
that would happen to him with such actuality that his heart
galloped and his breath stopped. He felt the smash of truncheons
on his elbows and iron-shod boots on his shins; he saw himself
grovelling on the floor, screaming for mercy through broken teeth. He hardly thought of Julia. He could not fix his mind on her. He
loved her and would not betray her; but that was only a fact, known
as he knew the rules of arithmetic. He felt no love for her, and he
hardly even wondered what was happening to her. He thought
oftener of O’Brien, with a flickering hope. O’Brien might know that
he had been arrested. The Brotherhood, he had said, never tried to
save its members. But there was the razor blade; they would send
the razor blade if they could. There would be perhaps five seconds
before the guard could rush into the cell. The blade would bite into
him with a sort of burning coldness, and even the fingers that held
it would be cut to the bone. Everything came back to his sick body,
which shrank trembling from the smallest pain. He was not certain
that he would use the razor blade even if he got the chance. It was
more natural to exist from moment to moment, accepting another
ten minutes’ life even with the certainty that there was torture at
the end of it.
Sometimes he tried to calculate the number of porcelain bricks
in the walls of the cell. It should have been easy, but he always lost
count at some point or another. More often he wondered where he
was, and what time of day it was. At one moment he felt certain
that it was broad daylight outside, and at the next equally certain
that it was pitch darkness. In this place, he knew instinctively, the
lights would never be turned out. It was the place with no
darkness: he saw now why O’Brien had seemed to recognize the
allusion. In the Ministry of Love there were no windows. His cell
might be at the heart of the building or against its outer wall; it
might be ten floors below ground, or thirty above it. He moved
himself mentally from place to place, and tried to determine by the
feeling of his body whether he was perched high in the air or
buried deep underground. There was a sound of marching boots outside. The steel door
opened with a clang. A young officer, a trim black-uniformed figure
who seemed to glitter all over with polished leather, and whose
pale, straight-featured face was like a wax mask, stepped smartly
through the doorway. He motioned to the guards outside to bring
in the prisoner they were leading. The poet Ampleforth shambled
into the cell. The door clanged shut again.
Ampleforth made one or two uncertain movements from side
to side, as though having some idea that there was another door to
go out of, and then began to wander up and down the cell. He had
not yet noticed Winston’s presence. His troubled eyes were gazing
at the wall about a metre above the level of Winston’s head. He was
shoeless; large, dirty toes were sticking out of the holes in his
socks. He was also several days away from a shave. A scrubby beard
covered his face to the cheekbones, giving him an air of ruffianism
that went oddly with his large weak frame and nervous
movements.
Winston roused himself a little from his lethargy. He must
speak to Ampleforth, and risk the yell from the telescreen. It was
even conceivable that Ampleforth was the bearer of the razor blade.
‘Ampleforth,’ he said.
There was no yell from the telescreen. Ampleforth paused,
mildly startled. His eyes focused themselves slowly on Winston.
‘Ah, Smith!’ he said. ‘You too!’
‘What are you in for?’
‘To tell you the truth —’ He sat down awkwardly on the bench
opposite Winston. ‘There is only one offence, is there not?’ he said.
‘And have you committed it?’
‘Apparently I have.’ He put a hand to his forehead and pressed his temples for a
moment, as though trying to remember something.
‘These things happen,’ he began vaguely. ‘I have been able to
recall one instance — a possible instance. It was an indiscretion,
undoubtedly. We were producing a definitive edition of the poems
of Kipling. I allowed the word “God” to remain at the end of a line.
I could not help it!’ he added almost indignantly, raising his face to
look at Winston. ‘It was impossible to change the line. The rhyme
was “rod”. Do you realize that there are only twelve rhymes to “rod”
in the entire language? For days I had racked my brains. There
WAS no other rhyme.’
The expression on his face changed. The annoyance passed out
of it and for a moment he looked almost pleased. A sort of
intellectual warmth, the joy of the pedant who has found out some
useless fact, shone through the dirt and scrubby hair.
‘Has it ever occurred to you,’ he said, ‘that the whole history of
English poetry has been determined by the fact that the English
language lacks rhymes?’
No, that particular thought had never occurred to Winston.
Nor, in the circumstances, did it strike him as very important or
interesting.
‘Do you know what time of day it is?’ he said.
Ampleforth looked startled again. ‘I had hardly thought about
it. They arrested me — it could be two days ago — perhaps three.’
His eyes flitted round the walls, as though he half expected to find
a window somewhere. ‘There is no difference between night and
day in this place. I do not see how one can calculate the time.’
They talked desultorily for some minutes, then, without
apparent reason, a yell from the telescreen bade them be silent.
Winston sat quietly, his hands crossed. Ampleforth, too large to sit in comfort on the narrow bench, fidgeted from side to side,
clasping his lank hands first round one knee, then round the other.
The telescreen barked at him to keep still. Time passed. Twenty
minutes, an hour — it was difficult to judge. Once more there was a
sound of boots outside. Winston’s entrails contracted. Soon, very
soon, perhaps in five minutes, perhaps now, the tramp of boots
would mean that his own turn had come.
The door opened. The cold-faced young officer stepped into the
cell. With a brief movement of the hand he indicated Ampleforth.
‘Room 101,’ he said.
Ampleforth marched clumsily out between the guards, his face
vaguely perturbed, but uncomprehending.
What seemed like a long time passed. The pain in Winston’s
belly had revived. His mind sagged round and round on the same
trick, like a ball falling again and again into the same series of slots.
He had only six thoughts. The pain in his belly; a piece of bread;
the blood and the screaming; O’Brien; Julia; the razor blade. There
was another spasm in his entrails, the heavy boots were
approaching. As the door opened, the wave of air that it created
brought in a powerful smell of cold sweat. Parsons walked into the
cell. He was wearing khaki shorts and a sports-shirt.
This time Winston was startled into self-forgetfulness.
‘YOU here!’ he said.
Parsons gave Winston a glance in which there was neither
interest nor surprise, but only misery. He began walking jerkily up
and down, evidently unable to keep still. Each time he straightened
his pudgy knees it was apparent that they were trembling. His eyes
had a wide-open, staring look, as though he could not prevent
himself from gazing at something in the middle distance. ‘What are you in for?’ said Winston.
‘Thoughtcrime!’ said Parsons, almost blubbering. The tone of
his voice implied at once a complete admission of his guilt and a
sort of incredulous horror that such a word could be applied to
himself. He paused opposite Winston and began eagerly appealing
to him: ‘You don’t think they’ll shoot me, do you, old chap? They
don’t shoot you if you haven’t actually done anything — only
thoughts, which you can’t help? I know they give you a fair
hearing. Oh, I trust them for that! They’ll know my record, won’t
they? YOU know what kind of chap I was. Not a bad chap in my
way. Not brainy, of course, but keen. I tried to do my best for the
Party, didn’t I? I’ll get off with five years, don’t you think? Or even
ten years? A chap like me could make himself pretty useful in a
labour-camp. They wouldn’t shoot me for going off the rails just
once?’
‘Are you guilty?’ said Winston.
‘Of course I’m guilty!’ cried Parsons with a servile glance at the
telescreen. ‘You don’t think the Party would arrest an innocent
man, do you?’ His frog-like face grew calmer, and even took on a
slightly sanctimonious expression. ‘Thoughtcrime is a dreadful
thing, old man,’ he said sententiously. ‘It’s insidious. It can get
hold of you without your even knowing it. Do you know how it got
hold of me? In my sleep! Yes, that’s a fact. There I was, working
away, trying to do my bit — never knew I had any bad stuff in my
mind at all. And then I started talking in my sleep. Do you know
what they heard me saying?’
He sank his voice, like someone who is obliged for medical
reasons to utter an obscenity.
‘“Down with Big Brother!” Yes, I said that! Said it over and
over again, it seems. Between you and me, old man, I’m glad they got me before it went any further. Do you know what I’m going to
say to them when I go up before the tribunal? “Thank you,” I’m
going to say, “thank you for saving me before it was too late.”’
‘Who denounced you?’ said Winston.
‘It was my little daughter,’ said Parsons with a sort of doleful
pride. ‘She listened at the keyhole. Heard what I was saying, and
nipped off to the patrols the very next day. Pretty smart for a nipper
of seven, eh? I don’t bear her any grudge for it. In fact I’m proud of
her. It shows I brought her up in the right spirit, anyway.’
He made a few more jerky movements up and down, several
times, casting a longing glance at the lavatory pan. Then he
suddenly ripped down his shorts.
‘Excuse me, old man,’ he said. ‘I can’t help it. It’s the waiting.’
He plumped his large posterior into the lavatory pan. Winston
covered his face with his hands.
‘Smith!’ yelled the voice from the telescreen. ‘6079 Smith W.!
Uncover your face. No faces covered in the cells.’
Winston uncovered his face. Parsons used the lavatory, loudly
and abundantly. It then turned out that the plug was defective and
the cell stank abominably for hours afterwards.
Parsons was removed. More prisoners came and went,
mysteriously. One, a woman, was consigned to ‘Room 101’, and,
Winston noticed, seemed to shrivel and turn a different colour
when she heard the words. A time came when, if it had been
morning when he was brought here, it would be afternoon; or if it
had been afternoon, then it would be midnight. There were six
prisoners in the cell, men and women. All sat very still. Opposite
Winston there sat a man with a chinless, toothy face exactly like
that of some large, harmless rodent. His fat, mottled cheeks were so pouched at the bottom that it was difficult not to believe that he
had little stores of food tucked away there. His pale-grey eyes
flitted timorously from face to face and turned quickly away again
when he caught anyone’s eye.
The door opened, and another prisoner was brought in whose
appearance sent a momentary chill through Winston. He was a
commonplace, mean-looking man who might have been an
engineer or technician of some kind. But what was startling was
the emaciation of his face. It was like a skull. Because of its
thinness the mouth and eyes looked disproportionately large, and
the eyes seemed filled with a murderous, unappeasable hatred of
somebody or something.
The man sat down on the bench at a little distance from
Winston. Winston did not look at him again, but the tormented,
skull-like face was as vivid in his mind as though it had been
straight in front of his eyes. Suddenly he realized what was the
matter. The man was dying of starvation. The same thought
seemed to occur almost simultaneously to everyone in the cell.
There was a very faint stirring all the way round the bench. The
eyes of the chinless man kept flitting towards the skull-faced man,
then turning guiltily away, then being dragged back by an
irresistible attraction. Presently he began to fidget on his seat. At
last he stood up, waddled clumsily across the cell, dug down into
the pocket of his overalls, and, with an abashed air, held out a
grimy piece of bread to the skull-faced man.
There was a furious, deafening roar from the telescreen. The
chinless man jumped in his tracks. The skull-faced man had
quickly thrust his hands behind his back, as though demonstrating
to all the world that he refused the gift.
‘Bumstead!’ roared the voice. ‘2713 Bumstead J.! Let fall that piece of bread!’
The chinless man dropped the piece of bread on the floor.
‘Remain standing where you are,’ said the voice. ‘Face the
door. Make no movement.’
The chinless man obeyed. His large pouchy cheeks were
quivering uncontrollably. The door clanged open. As the young
officer entered and stepped aside, there emerged from behind him
a short stumpy guard with enormous arms and shoulders. He took
his stand opposite the chinless man, and then, at a signal from the
officer, let free a frightful blow, with all the weight of his body
behind it, full in the chinless man’s mouth. The force of it seemed
almost to knock him clear of the floor. His body was flung across
the cell and fetched up against the base of the lavatory seat. For a
moment he lay as though stunned, with dark blood oozing from his
mouth and nose. A very faint whimpering or squeaking, which
seemed unconscious, came out of him. Then he rolled over and
raised himself unsteadily on hands and knees. Amid a stream of
blood and saliva, the two halves of a dental plate fell out of his
mouth.
The prisoners sat very still, their hands crossed on their knees.
The chinless man climbed back into his place. Down one side of his
face the flesh was darkening. His mouth had swollen into a
shapeless cherry-coloured mass with a black hole in the middle of
it.
From time to time a little blood dripped on to the breast of his
overalls. His grey eyes still flitted from face to face, more guiltily
than ever, as though he were trying to discover how much the
others despised him for his humiliation.
The door opened. With a small gesture the officer indicated
the skull-faced man.

‘Room 101,’ he said.
There was a gasp and a flurry at Winston’s side. The man had
actually flung himself on his knees on the floor, with his hand
clasped together.
‘Comrade! Officer!’ he cried. ‘You don’t have to take me to that
place! Haven’t I told you everything already? What else is it you
want to know? There’s nothing I wouldn’t confess, nothing! Just
tell me what it is and I’ll confess straight off. Write it down and I’ll
sign it — anything! Not room 101!’
‘Room 101,’ said the officer.
The man’s face, already very pale, turned a colour Winston
would not have believed possible. It was definitely, unmistakably, a
shade of green.
‘Do anything to me!’ he yelled. ‘You’ve been starving me for
weeks. Finish it off and let me die. Shoot me. Hang me. Sentence
me to twenty-five years. Is there somebody else you want me to
give away? Just say who it is and I’ll tell you anything you want. I
don’t care who it is or what you do to them. I’ve got a wife and
three children. The biggest of them isn’t six years old. You can take
the whole lot of them and cut their throats in front of my eyes, and
I’ll stand by and watch it. But not Room 101!’
‘Room 101,’ said the officer.
The man looked frantically round at the other prisoners, as
though with some idea that he could put another victim in his own
place. His eyes settled on the smashed face of the chinless man. He
flung out a lean arm.
‘That’s the one you ought to be taking, not me!’ he shouted.
‘You didn’t hear what he was saying after they bashed his face. Give
me a chance and I’ll tell you every word of it. HE’S the one that’s against the Party, not me.’ The guards stepped forward. The man’s
voice rose to a shriek. ‘You didn’t hear him!’ he repeated.
‘Something went wrong with the telescreen. HE’S the one you
want. Take him, not me!’
The two sturdy guards had stooped to take him by the arms.
But just at this moment he flung himself across the floor of the cell
and grabbed one of the iron legs that supported the bench. He had
set up a wordless howling, like an animal. The guards took hold of
him to wrench him loose, but he clung on with astonishing
strength. For perhaps twenty seconds they were hauling at him.
The prisoners sat quiet, their hands crossed on their knees, looking
straight in front of them. The howling stopped; the man had no
breath left for anything except hanging on. Then there was a
different kind of cry. A kick from a guard’s boot had broken the
fingers of one of his hands. They dragged him to his feet.
‘Room 101,’ said the officer.
The man was led out, walking unsteadily, with head sunken,
nursing his crushed hand, all the fight had gone out of him.
A long time passed. If it had been midnight when the skullfaced man was taken away, it was morning: if morning, it was
afternoon. Winston was alone, and had been alone for hours. The
pain of sitting on the narrow bench was such that often he got up
and walked about, unreproved by the telescreen. The piece of bread
still lay where the chinless man had dropped it. At the beginning it
needed a hard effort not to look at it, but presently hunger gave
way to thirst. His mouth was sticky and evil-tasting. The humming
sound and the unvarying white light induced a sort of faintness, an
empty feeling inside his head. He would get up because the ache in
his bones was no longer bearable, and then would sit down again
almost at once because he was too dizzy to make sure of staying on his feet. Whenever his physical sensations were a little under
control the terror returned. Sometimes with a fading hope he
thought of O’Brien and the razor blade. It was thinkable that the
razor blade might arrive concealed in his food, if he were ever fed.
More dimly he thought of Julia. Somewhere or other she was
suffering perhaps far worse than he. She might be screaming with
pain at this moment. He thought: ‘If I could save Julia by doubling
my own pain, would I do it? Yes, I would.’ But that was merely an
intellectual decision, taken because he knew that he ought to take
it. He did not feel it. In this place you could not feel anything,
except pain and foreknowledge of pain. Besides, was it possible,
when you were actually suffering it, to wish for any reason that
your own pain should increase? But that question was not
answerable yet.
The boots were approaching again. The door opened. O’Brien
came in.
Winston started to his feet. The shock of the sight had driven
all caution out of him. For the first time in many years he forgot
the presence of the telescreen.
‘They’ve got you too!’ he cried.
‘They got me a long time ago,’ said O’Brien with a mild, almost
regretful irony. He stepped aside. From behind him there emerged
a broad-chested guard with a long black truncheon in his hand.
‘You know this, Winston,’ said O’Brien. ‘Don’t deceive
yourself. You did know it — you have always known it.’
Yes, he saw now, he had always known it. But there was no
time to think of that. All he had eyes for was the truncheon in the
guard’s hand. It might fall anywhere; on the crown, on the tip of
the ear, on the upper arm, on the elbow ——
The elbow! He had slumped to his knees, almost paralysed, clasping the stricken elbow with his other hand. Everything had
exploded into yellow light. Inconceivable, inconceivable that one
blow could cause such pain! The light cleared and he could see the
other two looking down at him. The guard was laughing at his
contortions. One question at any rate was answered. Never, for any
reason on earth, could you wish for an increase of pain. Of pain you
could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world
was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes,
no heroes, he thought over and over as he writhed on the floor,
clutching uselessly at his disabled left arm.