O’Brien and the Betrayal of Truth

Winston's connection with O'Brien is strong, and one might even go so far as to call it an intimacy. O'Brien seems to have an irresistible pull on Winston, and he appears highly intelligent and very physically capable. Winston senses a "political unorthodoxy" about O'Brien, or "simply intelligence" (Orwell

Next, Winston is taken to a room where he is attached to a machine that causes horrible pain whenever he fails to answer O'Brien's questions correctly. In this way O'Brien has become Winston's destroyer: he breaks down everything Winston thinks is sacred such as reality and his memory of the past, and replaces it with government approved delusions meant to control Winston and reduce him to a blind believer of Big Brother. Yet despite all this, Winston still sees O'Brien as a reverent being: "He was the protector, he was the inquisitor, he was the friend" (Orwell 201). This shows how successful O’Brien was at deceiving Winston. O'Brien next explains in great detail the procedure of re-education. He takes unnecessarily great pains to inform Winston of the procedure, and even the motives behind Winston's cure. He explains that “You are a flaw in the pattern, Winston. You are a stain that must be wiped out...It is intolerable that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be” (Orwell 200), and also that "The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about" (209). This reveals the goal of the Party’s “reeducation” of Winston. They do not want to simply execute him, for that would turn him into a martyr. Yee Teck comments on how “At one point during his torture, he realized that the party was not going to kill him, because if they did, freedom would have triumphed, because Winston Smith would have died a free man with his beliefs intact.” Instead, in order to succeed in defeating Winston’s resolve, the Party must change his beliefs and values into blind obedience of Big Brother.

O’Brien was bound by duty to the Party to both like and hate Winston at the same time. This concept of believing in two opposing viewpoints at the same time was referred to by party members as “doublethink”. Though O’Brien admitted to practicing doublethink, his apparent liking of Winston was merely a deception, aimed at converting him into an obedient party member. While Winston respected O’Brien and felt that he could relate to him, O’Brien himself was merely fulfilling his duty to the party by lying to, torturing, and brainwashing Winston. His success demonstrates the party’s absolute power to control the minds of every one of its citizens, completing Orwell’s negative description of this totalitarian state.

13). Through the eyes of Winston, O'Brien appears "as a person that you could talk to" (Orwell 13). O'Brien has an aura of trustw

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