Main characters of the plot:
Winston. The principle character of the novel – Winston Smith – is a man of 39 years old. He was born in London in 1944 or 1945 – he doesn’t know it clearly. He is a member of the middle-class, the Outer Party. At some point his parents and sister disappeared, and he was left alone face to face with the changing world. He lives an existence in a one-room flat on a weekly ration of black bread and synthetic meals. From the very young age he has been working in the Ministry of Truth, in the documentary section. Making changes in the documents with the facts contradictory to the Party propaganda is a part of his responsibility. He is very good at doing his job and also at imagining the slogans and ideas that the Party would propagate.
Secretly Winston hates the Party and its ideology, daily overcoming the daily desire to show his protest against the system. To pacify his anger, he keeps a journal where all his negative thoughts about the Party are put together, which, if uncovered by the Thought Police, would warrant death. On public he stays a respectable member of the Outer Party, but he suspects his collaborator in the Ministry Of Truth, the girl with the dark hair, of spying on him. He also supposes that another Inner Party member O’Brien is engaged in the Brotherhood – the organization founded to realize the protest against the Party and to pull it down.
One day Winston approached the proles city district to find out what the world was like before the Party had started its existence. It was dangerous, because if the Thought Police saw him, it would suspicious to see a blue-collar worker in this area. Winston failed in collecting the data about the gone world before the revolution, but he didn’t go away without any surprises. The girl with the black hair appeared to have been pursuing him.
Over a week Winston was planning how to get rid of the girl that had caught him in the thought crime. But one day, walking face to face with the girl down the corridor of the Ministry of Love, she falls down with the bandage over her hand. As a honest member of the Party, Winston helps her to stand up, feeling a tiny paper note in his hand, secretly given by the girl. It was written in it: “I LOVE YOU”, and this inscription shocked Winston. From that moment, he wasn’t thinking about killing her, but wanted to have a contact with her.
By common efforts, he has made her acquaintance, her name was Julia. They have started to date several times a month, hiding from the gaze of the telescreens. Their romance has begun unnoticeable for the Thought Police, but he couldn’t escape from the feeling that they are already dead.
Inspired by the success of hiding the relation between Julia, Winston made an effort to contact O’Brien, the potential member of the Brotherhood. Doing that was surprisingly real, and soon he got from O’Brien a book that was considered to be the property of the leader of the Brotherhood, Emmanuel Goldstein. Winston discovered the truth about the present condition of the world super-states, which aim is to wage a war against two other super-states to reduce the level of goods consumption. In that way, all the warfare turns out to be a conspiracy of country Parties, including Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia.
While reading the book in their shelter, Winston and Julia are caught and separated by the Thought Police and delivered in the Ministry of Love. Winston thought he would be tortured after his confession, but the things could get worse: he realizes that the Ministry of Love was found to “cure” the mind of a patient from the thought disease in purpose to send the individual back in the society. O’Brien turns out to be the member of the Thought Police and Winston’s executioner.
Winston wanted to save his tender feelings to Julia from O’Brien, but finally the last has made Winston confess to his love with the girl with the black hair. He has been “cured” from the feeling of love, so has been Julia. After they were set free, their meeting didn’t arouse in them any feelings. Henceforth, the society adores all-seeing and powerful Big Brother, and so does Winston.
Julia. The girl that is in love with Winston – Julia – is 26 years old, she has brown hair and brown eyes, a thin waist, with a red sash of Junior Anti-sex union. She works in a Ministry of Truth, in the section of literature. She is very skillful at pretending to be a fierce supporter of the Party, but in fact she continuously violates the laws. She also teaches Winston how to cheat on the methods of Party surveillance.
She doesn’t believe that the Brotherhood exists. She takes the Party existence for granted as she is young and is capable to adjust to the living conditions of the present society.
As it turns out, Julia is a thought criminal as Winston, and hates the Party as much as he does. Winston and Julia begin a love affair, at first meeting in the country, at a clearing in the woods, then in a ruined church, and afterwards in a rented room at the antiques shop in a proletarian district of London. There, they think themselves safe and unobserved, because the rented bedroom has no apparent telescreen. Unknown to Winston and Julia, the Thought Police were already aware of their love affair.
After the confession in the Ministry of Love, Julia says to Winston she has betrayed him and this doesn’t arouse any feelings in her. They both have realized that betraying each other in words to stop the torture means also to betray by heart too.
O’Brien. He is a member of the Inner Party of approximately 45 years old with tall and burly body, a thick neck but with a coarse mocking face. However, he has enough charm to win anyone over: he has a smart appearance in combination with good manners and a body of a heavyweight boxer.
O’Brien poses himself as a member of The Brotherhood, the counter-revolutionary resistance, in order to deceive, trap, and capture Winston and Julia. In his turn, Winston keeps the journal to write In the novel he represents the antagonist to Winston: though he had given Winston the book of the Party’s enemy Emmanuel Goldstein, he turned out to be the Thought Police serviceman.
It is mentioned in the novel that O’Brien sympathizes Winston because of his way to comprehend the rules of the Party and its drawbacks. So does Winston because of O’Brien’s greatness of Party spirit and his ability to read Winston’s mind. He acts as a father to Winston, instead of one who he lacked in the childhood, and re-educates him in the manner that the Party demands.
O’Brien’s destiny in the end of the novel is not cleared up. He may continue the service at the Thought Police chasing the thought criminals.
Big Brother. Big Brother is a dark-eyed man with mustaches; his appearance resembles to the one of Stalin. He is the head of The Party who rule Oceania (territory of North and South America, Australia, the Oceanic Isles and the British Isles). He must have been an abstract person who was created by The Party as a symbol of power and a chief of the people. Maybe he existed, but had died long time ago. Nobody has seen him alive making a speech.
From the very young age people bring their children to love Big Brother and to be engaged in the work of the Party in his honor. They are signed up in the Junior Antisex Union, taught to spy on their relatives and neighbors with the elementary methods of espionage to reveal the strange behavior of thought criminals.
All the characters not from the Inner-Party are afraid of the image of Big Brother that is placed all over the city in any street. Even when Winston and Julia had been caught, they couldn’t move a muscle to run away from the Thought Police – that was a result of daily psychological influence through the mass media.
Emmanuel Goldstein. Goldstein is considered to be the number one Oceania’s enemy. Once he was one of the leaders of the Revolution, even fought shoulder to shoulder with Big Brother, but later, according to the Party propaganda, he betrayed it and escaped from the state. He is a national symbolic enemy who ideologically unites the people of Oceania with the Party, especially during the Two Minutes Hate when people are obliged to shout at the image of Goldstein wishing him torture and death.
He is reputed a founder of the Brotherhood which purpose was to fight against the Party system. He is the author of The Book, the one and only code of rules of the organization, but according to the words of O’Brien, it was a fabrication of the Party itself for the purpose of snaring a trap for criminals.
Winston thinks Goldstein is his secret thoughts rescuer, and hopes that he really exists. He dreams of finding him and telling all the things that have been in his mind for a long time. But the ideology of the Party forces him to hate him, and sometimes he goes mad from contradictory feelings of hatred and hope at the same time.
In the end of the novel Goldstein doesn’t appear, and it seems that we’ll never know whether his identity was real or not.