Nineteen Eighty-Four (Literature)



""If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever.""

Warning: Spoilers Ahead

This is the book. One of the most horrifying and depressing codifiers for the Dystopian genre, ever.

After reading Yevgeny Zamyatin's dystopian thriller We, George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four as a Pragmatic Adaptation of the novel for non-Russian audiences. It became one of the most iconic stories in the English language, and introduced the phrases "Big Brother Is Watching You", "Thoughtcrime," "Thought Police," and "doublethink" into the English lexicon (but not "doublespeak").

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." The year is 1984... maybe. All that's definitively understood is that we are on what used to be the British Isles, now known as Airstrip One, a few decades after a Revolution that took place during the global nuclear wars following World War II and left the world in the hands of three superpowers called Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia, or so everyone seems to remember; in reality, only four years ago Oceania was at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia... but in this world, reality is a very malleable concept.

As everyone in Oceania knows, there is only one Party and only one leader, the omnipresent godlike Big Brother. Oceania's rigid society is divided into the Inner Party, the ruling elite; the Outer Party, the lower government officials and bureaucrats, the closest thing there is to a middle class; and the 'proles', the poor and uneducated lower classes who make up the vast majority of the population, monitored for signs of unrest but otherwise left contemptuously alone ("proles and animals are free", runs the relevant Party slogan). Everyone is conditioned through a carefully manipulated mixture of fear and gratitude to love their leader, Big Brother, as their only protector against total chaos.

Opposition to the Party is discouraged by keeping everyone outside the Inner Party constantly on the brink of starvation and exhaustion. Any resultant discontent is easily answered since "there's a war on, after all." The proles are kept sedated with mindless entertainment and cheap booze, and the Outer Party members survive on a principle called 'doublethink' - a defense mechanism that consciously suppresses the idea that there might be any differences between the Party line and reality. There are no longer any laws, but everyone in the Party is hyper-aware that the faintest glimmer of discontent or even individualism, known as "thoughtcrime," might lead to becoming an "Unperson", which is not only to be destroyed but to have one's life rewritten out of existence.

The Party's ideology, called IngSoc, or English Socialism, has moved beyond the social experiments of past totalitarian regimes, and aims to completely reshape people's ability to perceive the world around them. History is continually rewritten - often outright made up - by the Party so that Big Brother is always right, has always made the right predictions, and always implemented the right policies, for which the citizenry are always appropriately grateful. No evidence to the contrary, in any media, is allowed to remain. As part of this effort, a new language, Newspeak, is being constructed, with the express intent of removing all "superfluous" shades of meaning, especially concepts related to political freedom. The ultimate goal is the elimination of the ability even to think about an anti-authority concept, let alone express it in words.

Winston Smith, a seasoned member of the Outer Party, is also a secret rebel -- although since his dreams of defiance are the mundane ones typical of the common man, they apparently haven't yet been discovered. What finally drives him over the edge into becoming the hero of our story is his constant, instinctive feeling that there must be more to life than the uniformly dull and dreary present and the nightmarish future. If the Party can constantly reshape the collective memory, including your very existence, on an ever-changing whim...what meaning is there in anything? As the novel opens, Winston commits a decisive act of thoughtcrime: writing all of this down in a secret diary.

His heresy next expands to take in a boldly attractive, down-to-earth young woman named Julia, who one day passes him a note that changes his life: I love you. Sexually eager and shrewd in all the small day-to-day methods of rebellion, she joins him on secret trysts in an upstairs room he rents from what he thinks is a nice old pawnbroker. For a few months the lovers meet and live like a heartbreakingly teenage-like couple.

Partly through Julia's influence and partly out of his own fierce longing, Winston dares to hold on to the belief that the Party can somehow be toppled. The major hope lies in the Brotherhood, a rumored underground organization seeking to overthrow Big Brother. Winston's golden opportunity seems to come in the form of O'Brien, an extremely powerful member of the Inner Party who through various subtle signals to Winston appears to be harboring rebellious thoughts of his own. Alas, it's only a cruel delusion: soon after Winston and Julia believe they have enlisted in the Brotherhood through O'Brien, it is revealed that the Party had known of their defection all along. They are arrested by the Thought Police and sent to the Ministry of Love.

Winston is imprisoned for weeks and then tortured by O'Brien, whose only loyalty turns out to be to the Party, into believing that two plus two make five and that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, because Big Brother says so. Gradually Winston becomes the perfect Big Brother devotee -- on the outside at least; but still clinging desperately to the hope that "they can't get inside you." That spark is smashed out from him once and for all by a scarring visit to the dreaded Room 101, where his worst fear is cruelly used against him. He betrays Julia, and with that relinquishes the last of his humanity. After his public confession and release, while awaiting his inevitable execution, Winston realizes that he loves Big Brother.

In spite of it suffering from a bad case of Twenty Minutes Into the Future, as the title alone testifies, Nineteen Eighty-Four remains one of the best and most horrific dystopian works ever.

The BBC adapted the book for television in 1954 with Peter Cushing as Winston Smith. Questions were asked in the House of Commons when it was alleged that one viewer had actually died of shock while watching.

Two film versions were made, in 1956 and (appropriately) 1984. The 1956 version changed the ending, completely ignoring Orwell's point, (on purpose, it turns out), although to some extent proving it. The brilliant and depressing 1984 version of Nineteen Eighty-Four, starring John Hurt as Winston and Richard Burton in his final role as O'Brien, is far more true to the original novel, but is often compared unfavorably to Terry Gilliam's surreal dystopian movie Brazil (which came out one year later, in 1985), which takes a much more subversive and blackly humorous view of Orwell's themes. According to IMDb, Tim Burton is working on another adaptation of this movie.

Also, this book is frequently compared to Brave New World as a way of showing the perspectives of the dystopia-esque society. Note that Nineteen Eighty-Four shows that what we fear controls us, while Brave New World shows that what we love controls us.

Compare also with Jennifer Government, another Dystopian novel in which it's not the state or a single party, but corporations who control everything.

NOTE: Do not identify this book as being anti-communist or anti-fascist anywhere on this wiki. It's anti-totalitarianism. Orwell was personally a socialist, but thought that both extremes were bad and would inevitably lead to the same thing. The original political leaning of the Party is deliberately vague.

This novel named the following tropes:

 * Airstrip One
 * Big Brother Is Watching
 * Doublethink
 * Newspeak
 * Room 101
 * Thoughtcrime
 * Two Plus Torture Makes Five
 * Orwellian Editor
 * Orwellian Retcon
 * Unperson (possibly not the first use of the term, but certainly popularised it)

Tropes:
"He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future."
 * Adjusting Your Glasses: O'Brien constantly does this. The narrator remarks about the "curious, disarming friendliness that he always managed to put into the gesture".
 * Affably Evil: O'Brien is the most nightmarish version of this trope imaginable.
 * After the End: The Party has permanently stalled all human progress, and even history itself:

"WAR IS PEACE
 * Airstrip One: Trope Namer.
 * And I Must Scream/Fate Worse Than Death: The entire world. History and progress has been paralysed, and the inhabitants are dehumanized into mindless drones while being constantly tortured by the warmongering regime and being watched by Big Brother, having no private life whatsoever, spending every day as a form of Mind Rape. And you are fully aware of all of it.
 * It's worth noting that Doublethink is in itself a mental version of And I Must Scream, with Doublethink being essentially self-hypocrisy and the Doublethink practitioners being unconscious drones who sublimate themselves and do whatever Big Brother says as truth, while being fully conscious of the entire process and all the heresies and lies the Party imposes on the citizens. Even more chilling is that some people enjoy it.
 * Apathetic Citizens: The Proles.
 * Arc Words: "Big Brother is watching you", and on a different level:

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH"

""You know the Party slogan 'Freedom is Slavery." Has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible? Slavery is freedom. Alone -free- the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal."
 * Assimilation Plot: The Party claims to be doing this.

"Julia: She's a meter across the hips, easily.
 * Author Phobia: The Room 101 scene was inspired by Orwell's personal fear of rats, and the name "Room 101" itself was inspired by a conference room where Orwell had to sit though boring meetings.
 * Author Tract: Orwell was never the slightest bit shy in admitting that he wrote primarily in defense of democratic socialism and against totalitarianism.
 * A World Half Full: The index that Orwell insisted be added to all versions of the novel - the one containing the article explaining Newspeak. This confused a lot of people...
 * The Bad Guy Wins: The whole point of this book is that moral and/or ethical standards are irrelevant to Realpolitik, and thus the good guys never will remake the world in their image. Ever.
 * Banned in China: Banned in the Soviet Union for fairly obvious reasons.
 * Believing Their Own Lies: A key component of doublethink is to "tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them".
 * Big Beautiful Women: Winston finds the prole woman who sings the "Love Song" outside his apartment to be beautiful in her own way.

Winston: That is her style of beauty."

""You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.""
 * Big Brother Is Watching: Trope Namer.
 * Bigger Bad:.
 * Blatant Lies: The whole purpose of the Ministry of Truth and the scary thing is no one questions them.
 * Blind Idiot Translation: The original Finnish translation, but it was later remedied by a much better and accurate one.
 * Bread and Circuses: The Proles. The Ministry of Truth has a section that produces crappy entertainment for them: newspapers that only contain crime, sports and horoscopes, sensationalistic novels, films "oozing with sex", sentimental songs made by machines and porn.
 * Break the Cutie: The rats finally break Winston. Break the Cutie is pretty much the philosophy of Ingsoc in a nutshell -- it allows Wide Eyed Idealists to exist so that the Party will have the sadistic pleasure of torturing them For the Evulz.
 * Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu: Winston against the Party's dictatorship. Specifically, version 2.
 * Card-Carrying Villain/For the Evulz/Despotism Justifies the Means/Dystopia Justifies the Means: In discussions with Winston during his "re-education", O'Brien drops all pretense that the Party is out for anything other than pure, unrestrained Power. See the page quote for a sampler.
 * There are few purer examples of For the Evulz in literature. In material terms, Inner Party members live not much better than the Outer Party and Proles. O'Brien states plainly that what they want is not luxury or long life or happiness, but only power. "How does one man prove his power over another?" he asks. Winston, after a moment's thought, answers, "By making him suffer." Exactly. The Mind Rape that Winston is put through is not merely a necessary measure to preserve the state, it is the whole point of the system -- that the Party shall have the sadistic pleasure of breaking down resistant minds and reshaping them.
 * O'Brien explicitly states that "Goldstein and his heresies will live forever. Every day, at every moment, they will be defeated, discredited, ridiculed, spat upon- and yet they will always survive". The Party creates its own enemies just so it can have the Evulz of defeating them.
 * Chekhov's Gun: Winston's freakout when a rat shows up in the hiding place.
 * The Chessmaster: O'Brien.
 * Conditioned to Accept Horror: Everyone in the end.
 * Conveniently Interrupted Document: Winston is reading Goldstein's book, and is just about to learn why the Party is so brutal and totalitarian - upon which he falls asleep, preventing both him and the reader from learning the reason (until later).
 * Crapsack World: Living in the world of 1984 is worse than living in a Cosmic Horror Story. At least most Cosmic Horror Stories have an apathetic universe where you still have privacy and can think whatever you want.
 * Despair Event Horizon: The entire world, although Winston doesn't realize this until Room 101.
 * Diesel Punk: The tech level of Oceania at least is permanently stuck here.
 * Disproportionate Retribution: The hell Winston is put through is astonishing, considering that his rebellious acts -- keeping a diary, having an affair and enjoying it -- are so trivial and furtive that he would pose no threat to the Party at all if he were only left alone. Very likely he would not agitate, or publish samizdat tracts, or even whisper thoughtcrime to his acquaintances. He would just go on and on, writing lies for the Ministry of Truth and meeting up with Julia and wondering wistfully if there is a Brotherhood, until his natural death. But for the Party, mere obedience is not enough.
 * O'Brien seems to imply that what they make Winston go through is not retribution, but rather a twisted sort of intervention. Winston is not actually being punished for a crime; he is being tortured so that he does not grow to commit an actual crime.
 * And as O'Brien explains, they also put him through his ordeal because they can.
 * An even more terrifying possibility: Winston's rebellion started when he saw a picture that directly contradicted established party dogma (even more so than what he usually saw), that appeared to have been passed to him by accident. It's strongly implied that the party intentionally arranged for him to get this. One interpretation is that the Party felt that its existence required opposition to exist, so they intentionally conditioned some people to rebel, JUST SO THEY COULD CRUSH THEM!
 * Doomed Moral Victor: Cruelly, relentlessly, absolutely subverted. The Ministry of Love's methodology is specifically crafted to prevent it.
 * Downer Ending:
 * For the protagonists, at least; besides the aforementioned appendix, there just may be a single spot of hope left for the world as indicated subtly by the fact that the proletarian woman's symbolic recurring love song outlasts the popularity of the Hate Song. The Party might fall after all, eventually.
 * And also within the 'Oranges and Lemons' motif. When O'Brien continues Winston's recitation of the rhyme a couple of lines beyond Winston's recollection of it, he exclaims 'You knew the last line!', and O'Brien agrees. But the rhyme as normally told continues a little more ("I'm sure I don't know, said the great bell of Bow", -- that is, interestingly, Bow Bells, the Cockney Londoner's central point.) suggesting that the Inner Party is not as omniscient as it believes.
 * The Michael Radford movie ended with a subtler bleak ending, forgoing the, and instead has   Meanwhile, the CIA-funded version of 1984 had Winston and Julia rebelling in a hail of gunfire. Not surprisingly, the Orwell family and everyone else pretended it never existed. Talk about irony.
 * Actually, the book ends as the movie ends; the  only occur in Winston's imagination, and represent his complete demolition. The events of the book (and 1984 movie version) end with him in the Chestnut Tree Cafe, realizing he 'loves' Big Brother.
 * The Brotherhood is this. Although O'Brien implies that it's a myth, it must be borne in mind that O'Brien is lying - the party is not known for its truthfulness. Also possible is a resistance movement that the party does not control (although O'Brien rejects this notion as impractical).
 * The following passage (which, incidentally, comes from the narration): "It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same--everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same--people who had never learned to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world."
 * Dystopia: Trope Codifier.
 * Dystopia Is Hard: Interestingly, though, there are shades of this in the book as well (which makes the book an example of using an Unbuilt Trope, since that didn't become popular until 1984 had affected the zeitgeist). Nothing is efficient in Oceania except for the Thought Police, and the few Hope Spots in the book come from the Proles, whom the Party can't really control (or even understand, for that matter). And during Winston's interrogation, O'Brien does - briefly - voice an opinion that the endless war with the other superpowers can't be maintained in perpetuity, and when the breaking point comes, it'll be bad news for the Party.
 * It should be noted that part of this is intentional on the party's part since they want the lower ranked party members to be exhausted and unable to rebel
 * The Eighties: Subverted. Orwell was writing in the 1940s, with the book being published in 1948, and using the year 1984 as a Twenty Minutes Into the Future setting.
 * As revealed in the book Why Not Catch-21?, Orwell really didn't set the story in 1984, nor did he have any particular attachment to the date in question, as one of the titles he was considering for the book up to the publishing date was The Last Man in Britain. He even told foreign publishers that if they wanted to change the title to something other than 1984, he didn't really care.
 * In the book Winston himself isn't entirely sure what year it is, because Minitrue has screwed with history so much. Why the Party would keep a dating system based upon the birthdate of Jesus Christ (someone the Party would like very much for people to forget) as opposed to resetting the calendar completely, is another issue, especially since they've gone out of their way to alter everything else about life in former Britain (including the language itself).
 * Electric Torture: And pretty much every other kind of torture you can think of.
 * The Empire: Oceania, and how!
 * Though Winston does at one point wonder if the Empire really exists and perhaps Airstrip One is all there is to Oceania. It's kept ambiguous.
 * Empty Shell: The Ministry of Love mass manufactures these out of dissenters.

""The more men you've had, the more I love you.""
 * Enfant Terrible: Parson's kids. They're little hellians whom Winston believes will kill their own mother one way or another within a couple of years.
 * Equal Opportunity Evil: Goldstein's book tells that the Party accepts Jews, blacks and Indios in their ranks, if only to avoid that some people feel oppressed by other races / cultures / nationalities.
 * The Everyman: Winston Smith. See Meaningful Name.
 * Evil Will Fail: This book is an infamous aversion of this trope: the evil Big Brother governments of the world have things so completely under control and so tightly locked into their plans, that the book ends with
 * The Evils of Free Will: This seems to be one of the few things that O'Brien and the Party actually believe in, besides their utterly cynical For the Evulz motivation.
 * False Friend: O'Brien.
 * Fan Service: In the film. Julia is quite clearly naked in some scenes.
 * Fat Bastard: Subverted with Parsons, who seems to be pretty affable.
 * Faux Affably Evil:
 * Female Misogynist: Julia says that she hates women.
 * Fictional Political Party: 'The Party'. Simply 'The Party' since they've long since gotten rid of the competition, forming a totalitarian regime. Judging from what little history we can discern, they were originally a far left/communist party which formed in Britain or Europe, eventually succeeding in revolution. Of course, their communist beliefs about social equality were all just a sham, or have long since become one - the only thing The Party wants is power.
 * Bear in mind that even this little snippet comes from a document that is very probably a fabrication by the party themselves. It is heavily implied that the original "Party" was simply a clique of amoral intellectuals who took power via a coup d'etat.
 * Fictionary: The Newspeak dictionary.
 * Foe Yay: Invoked. The purpose of the Two Minutes' Hate is to channel the citizens' sexual impulses into their hatred for the state's enemies.
 * Foreshadowing:
 * Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me...
 * Forever War: causes a totalitarian Hell.
 * Four Eyes, Zero Soul: O'Brien.
 * Freud Was Right: Invoked. Julia theorizes that the Party keeps people in a state of warlike hysteria and power hunger though subjecting them to sexual deprivation. She even calls it "sex gone sour."
 * Genius Bruiser: O'Brien.
 * Genre Blind: Winston.
 * Good Bad Girl: Julia.
 * Heel Face Mole: O'Brien.
 * Hope Spot: Pretty much the entire second part.
 * In the third part there is one caused by a typo:
 * Huge Holographic Head: The face of Big Brother is displayed on huge screens to comfort the citizens after the Two Minutes' Hate is over.
 * Industrialized Evil: While the party has very specifically created tortures for dissidents, the entire apparatus is one huge example of human degradation for its own sake.
 * Info Dump: Goldstein's book.
 * Internal Reformist: Julia, who works for the Party to survive but does things considered illegal when she is not being monitored. Winston tries to be this, but fails.
 * Internal Retcon: Winston's job is to receive reports of new articles that do not match the current party line, and to fix the mistakes or to write a new article as a replacement of the Unperson. He also notices the same being applied to announcements on telescreens, where some rations are cut back but still shown to be greater than last year.
 * At one point during a rally, the Party, having always been at war with Eurasia, suddenly has always been at war with Eastasia. As in mid-speech (the speaker is handed a note with the change). And -- as Winston notes with horror -- his audience instantly goes along with it, because Big Brother is watching them and Big Brother is always right.
 * The rally in question took tons of preparation, which involved creating banners damning Eurasia, among other propaganda. Once Eastasia has been named as the enemy, the crowd becomes aghast that their banners now falsely name Eurasia and believe Goldstein's heretical group is to blame for them being wrong.
 * I Reject Your Reality: On a society-wide scale.
 * Ironic Echo: "We shall meet again in the place where there is no darkness."
 * Ironic Nickname: The Ministry of Truth (the past is rewritten), The Ministry of Peace (in charge of the armed forces), and The Ministry of Plenty (rationing to maintain Perpetual Poverty) and worst of all (on a personal basis) The Ministry of Love (torture and brainwashing).
 * Fridge Brilliance: They may be ironic names, but from a certain POV (that's what doublethink is for, after all) they are actually truthful names:
 * The Ministry of Truth publishes the truth according to the Party and the Big Brother.
 * The Ministry of Peace makes sure that there is no peace.
 * The Ministry of Plenty makes sure that there is never plenty of anything.
 * The Ministry of Love makes sure everybody loves Big Brother more than anything else.
 * For that matter, Big Brother himself. The friendly, protective family member stereotype is so completely subsumed by the bullying one that, due to the novel's term being a pervasive Ascended Meme in its own right, the term on its own has no meaning: you can't tell whether someone's using it affectionately or making a reference to 1984 without context.
 * Ironic Nursery Tune: "Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head!"
 * Similarly "Under the spreading chestnut tree/I sold you and you sold me."
 * Jail Bake: Winston, after being imprisoned, thinks that the Brotherhood might send him a razor blade hidden in his food, not to escape but to kill himself with. It doesn't happen.
 * Just the First Citizen: Big Brother, according to the Party's faux-egalitarian ideology. It's unclear whether he exists at all, but if he did, he would be near-omnipotent.
 * Karma Houdini: See The Bad Guy Wins. The Party, O'Brien, and Big Brother all go off scot free due to the way the system is set up.
 * Kick the Dog
 * Kicked Upstairs: After getting arrested, tortured and brainwashed unorthodox Party members are allowed to hang around for several years, and are allowed to spend as much time drinking in the Chestnut Tree Cafe as they can while given jobs which sound important but are really sinecures.
 * Kids Are Cruel: Winston, in his youth. During a flashback he remembers how he was driving his family (mother and little sister) out of house and home and was generally a greedy brat.
 * The children of Oceania are brought up to mistrust and spy on their own parents. Family values and loyalty are discouraged in favor of sadistically ratting out the other members of one's family.
 * Knight Templar: Subverted. The party claims that they have the people's best interests at heart, but in reality, they pursue power for its own sake.
 * La Résistance: The Brotherhood, led by Emmanuel Goldstein,.
 * Language Equals Thought: The entire purpose of Newspeak is to reconfigure the way people think by controlling the language in which they express their thoughts; the intended logical conclusion of this is that thoughtcrime will eventually be impossible, because there will no longer be any words in which to express it.
 * Lie Back and Think of England: Party women are encouraged to do this when they have sex. "Goodthinkful" women are taught to call it "our duty to the Party."
 * Men aren't really encouraged to enjoy it either. The Party wants sex to be seen as a dirty but necessary act, like vomiting or getting an enema.
 * At one point, O'Brien claims the Party plans to abolish the orgasm, making sex a purely reproductive act devoid of pleasure for anyone.
 * Light Is Not Good: "The place where there is no darkness" is not a place you ever want to end up. Ever.
 * Malevolent Mugshot
 * Manipulative Bastard: O'Brien, and by extensive the entire Party.
 * Meaningful Name: Winston Smith, from "Winston Churchill" and "Smith", The Everyman. Julia from Romeo and Juliet. Emmanuel Goldstein from "Bronstein" (Trotsky's given surname) and anarchist Emma Goldman, who was prominent in Orwell's time.
 * The Metric System Is Here to Stay: Some focus is given to everybody having to use the metric system. Orwell was against the complete scrapping of Imperial units, though he supported the use of the metric system in scientific work.
 * The prole's diatribe against the half-litre is meant to highlight the proles' small-mindedness and lack of vision. The prole in the pub is overworked, underfed, and completely without hope of a better life, yet his main complaint about Ingsoc is the difference between the half-litre and the pint. This is reinforced by the fact that there's almost no difference between the two. A half-litre is 0.9 Imperial pints, or 1.05 American pints.
 * Mind Rape: The last third of the novel may be the the most disturbing and prolonged Mind Rape ever put to paper.
 * The Party is subjecting the entire Oceanian population to a form of Mind Rape, with the goal of making them mindless and obedient like cattle.
 * More Than Mind Control
 * My Girl Is a Slut: Winston to Julia.
 * More Than Mind Control
 * My Girl Is a Slut: Winston to Julia.

"Winston: Sanity is not statistical."
 * Neologism: Invented terms like "Big Brother," "Thought Police," and "doublethink" and popularized "Unperson." Just look at all the tropes this book has named...
 * Newspeak: Trope Namer.
 * Necessarily Evil: If O'Brien is correct, the Brotherhood has no choice but to commit the most heinous of acts to defeat The Party.
 * Nietzsche Wannabe: O'Brien, who by doublethink, is also the Determinator of the story. Obviously, Ingsoc's motive (Will to Power) and worldview (Despair Event Horizon) reeks of extreme Nietzschean nihilism.
 * Ironic, since Nietzsche's ideas about the self would be just about the most subversive thing possible in the eyes of this regime.
 * No Celebrities Were Harmed: Aside from Big Brother being a clear Expy of Josef Stalin, Emmanuel Goldstein is pretty clearly based on Lev Trotsky. He even has a Jewish surname.
 * No Name Given: Julia's last name and O'Brien's first name are not revealed.
 * No Sex Allowed: All intercourse within the Outer Party is strictly regulated only for the development of children. There's a lecture in a part of the book talking about trying to remove the orgasm to prevent any pleasure being derived from sex.
 * Not So Different: The rival countries. Oceania may be bad, but the implication is that the two other superstates, Eurasia and Eastasia, are almost exactly identical to it. The three states are always at war with each other, with nobody ever winning. If you live in one of the areas the three states are always fighting over, you are a slave in both body and mind to whoever has power over the area at the current time.
 * It is heavily implied that an unspoken gentleman's agreement exists between the three states that they will never make a serious effort to destroy the others - this is the reason no state ever uses mass conscription or WM Ds - because the war is part of the Evil Plan for the three of them to keep the standard of living down and mobilize the hatred of the population. Goldstein's book even mentions that Oceania could probably conquer all of Europe up to the Polish frontier, or that Eastasia could likely seize Australia, but that neither state does so for fear of upsetting the Balance of Power.
 * Of course, we don't actually know anything of the other two powers, or indeed how finely balanced the Balance of Power actually is.
 * Oh Crap: Winston and Julia's reaction to
 * Only Sane Man


 * Peace and Love Incorporated: Minitrue, Miniluv, and Minipax.
 * Post-Mortem Conversion: Winston (who works for a propaganda office) pulls out a name and photo of a random dead guy and makes him a great war hero and party loyalist.
 * Pragmatic Adaptation: Since the movie obviously cannot devote itself to lengthy info breaks like the novel does, it spends more time cultivating atmosphere and showing just how miserable life is in Airstrip One. Also, many of Winston's thought processes are lost, making him more of an Audience Surrogate - the fact that he's magnificently played by John Hurt (who even looks like George Orwell) is an added bonus.
 * The ending is subtly different, changing the meaning but not the outcome. Downer Ending indeed.
 * Rage Within the Machine
 * Reality Subtext: The 1984 film. Richard Burton was dying during filming, and it shows.
 * Room 101: The Trope Namer, where.
 * Scary Shiny Glasses: Winston's duckspeaking colleague.
 * Schizo-Tech: The Party has a machine that writes trashy novels (to keep the proles happy) but farms are still worked by using horse plows.
 * Justified in that working the farms keeps the proles busy and poor and writing trashy novels the old fashioned way would potentially lead to dangerous thoughts in the writers.
 * Screens Are Cameras: The telescreens.
 * Secret Police: The Thought Police.
 * Sex Is Evil: The Party wants to supress the sex drive. O'Brien states that their neurologists are working on the abolition of the orgasm. One of The Party's prominent youth movements is the Junior Anti-Sex League, who want all reproduction done by artificial insemination.
 * Shadow Dictator: Big Brother.
 * Sinister Surveillance: Surveillance cameras, hidden microphones and two-way "telescreens" exist in every home and in every street, spying on citizens, monitoring their every move and showering them with propaganda slogans. The Proles are lucky in that they have no telescreens, and only members of the Inner Party are able to (temporarily) turn their telescreens off.
 * Space Filling Empire: The whole world has been split into three superpowers: Oceania (North and South America, Great Britain, South Africa and Australia), Eurasia (the Soviet Union, mainland Europe and North Africa), and Eastasia (China and surrounding Asian nations, down to India and the Pacific Islands).
 * Staged Populist Uprising: The "resistance's" book claims that all revolutions are just the middle class using the lower class as a tool to supplant the upper class. IngSoc is designed to prevent this with the meritocratic Inner Party selection process and intense surveillance of the Outer and Inner Parties.
 * Stockholm Syndrome: The Party imposes this on its members, including
 * Strange Syntax Speaker: Newspeak, though it isn't used often in the novel.
 * Strawman Political: The entire point of the book. Big Brother is the Strawman Totalitarian. He's also a Strawman Communist or a Strawman Fascist depending on what aspects of IngSoc you focus more on.
 * There's a sort of Lampshade Hanging on this when O'Brien explains that, unlike previous totalitarian regimes in history, the Party is knowingly out for power for itself without any delusions of Utopia Justifies the Means.
 * Super Fun Happy Thing of Doom: Played very un-comedically with the Ministries. The Ministry of Plenty's business is to maintain shortages; the Ministry of Truth concerns itself with censorship and propaganda; the Ministry of Peace maintains perpetual war; and the Ministry of Love is... housed in a windowless building with swaths of barbed wire all around it.
 * To the Pain:  explanation in the Ministry of Love of exactly what is going to happen to Winston is pretty discomfiting.
 * Torture Technician: O'Brien.
 * The Treachery of Images
 * Truth in Television: The Democratic People's Republic of Korea seems to have taken many, many cues from Orwell. In a bad way. Christopher Hitchens, after his visit to North Korea, described it by saying "it was as if someone had taken 1984 and said 'Can you make it as much like this as possible?'"
 * Even going so far as to build a giant pyramid building. And by law, North Korean libraries may not stock books older than fifteen years - the books must be re-edited and reprinted. Wonder where they got that idea...
 * During the Stalinist era in the USSR, children had to paste new pages into their history books as the official view changed. If any classmates were taken away and "vaporized", the kids had to scratch out their faces in all the yearbooks.
 * Big Brother is Stalin. Never say to a survivor of Stalin's regime, or even someone who had lived in the USSR when it was still Communist, that 1984 is an exaggeration of those times; children much like Winston's next door neighbors existed in droves, enjoyable sex was discouraged, and most importantly, thoughtcrime in its purest form existed -- it just wasn't called thoughtcrime.
 * The most terrifying part of all of this is that it is all plausible. There are no far-fetched sci-fi elements in it, and they had 30ish years in the book-- long enough to raise a generation who've never known anything else. Orwell lifted most of Big Brother's tactics from Stalin and Hitler and provided a reason (war) for otherwise rational men and women to accept the same tactics from their own government. Though this also provides some hope, as North Koreans flee to China all the time, and when the Soviet Union collapsed people lined up to leave, and they were a generation that knew nothing else.
 * Twenty Minutes Into the Future: Although apparently this was a case of Executive Meddling, Supposedly Orwell wanted to set the book in 1948, but was told he couldn't, so he just switched the last two digits around to arrive at the new date/title. The fact that Winston himself isn't sure what year it is is remarked on several times.
 * Two Plus Torture Makes Five: Though George Orwell used it before in essays, this is the book it's most remembered from.
 * Unnamed Parent: Winston's mother.
 * Unperson: Trope Codifier; Josef Stalin used the term long before this book was written.
 * Unreliable Narrator: Do Eurasia and Eastasia actually exist, or are they made up by the Party, which actually controls the whole world? Alternatively, does Oceania even exist, and does the Party actually control less than it says does? The whole point is that the information given out by the Party is unreliable, and seeing how the only information the reader receives comes from the Party, nobody knows for sure any details about "the world" of 1984. The Party may not control any territory outside the British Isles. It may not even control the whole of the UK. Seeing as Winston never leaves London, we'll never know.
 * The Un-Reveal: is left completely ambiguous.
 * Utopia Justifies the Means: Inverted. Winston believes that despite the horrible atrocities the Party has done, its mission is this, but what the Party actually wants is only power.
 * We Will Use Wiki Words in the Future: One of the main purposes of Newspeak; condensing words makes it easier to utter them automatically without much thought, and to make communicating against the party impossible.
 * Being an Anglophile, this was one of Orwell's biggest fears.
 * Wham! Line: It Makes Sense in Context.
 * The book ends with a rather chilling one:
 * Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Winston is terrified of rats.
 * Wicked Cultured: O'Brien.
 * Wide-Eyed Idealist: Poor Winston. Apparently even falling in love is considered wide-eyed idealism in and on itself.
 * Wine Is Classy: Not only do the members of the Inner Party (the political elite of the totalitarian state) get assigned much better dwellings, clothes, food, coffee, chocolate and tobacco than the members of the Outer Party (i.e. the mere White Collar Workers), but also while the members of the Outer Party drink gin (and the blue-collar proles drink beer!), the members of the Inner Party drink... wine, what else?
 * With Us or Against Us: Why "War is Peace" literally works.
 * Working Class People Are Morons: The proles are completely useless and indeed, according to Goldstein's book, the poor lower classes always have been.
 * Despite his left-wing views, Orwell was often criticised for his negative views of the English working-class, in particular the idea that they would just naturally degrade into ignorance and filth. Chalk it up to that Eton College education...
 * The fact that Winston sees them as the best hope for the future says something.
 * Wrench Wench: Julia, who is a mechanic that works on the automatic writing machines that churn out prolefeed.
 * Wretched Hive: The prole neighbourhoods, in sharp contrast to the mechanistically controlled Party neighbourhoods.
 * Xanatos Gambit: Goldstein's Brotherhood . This also has precedent in real life, as the Cheka, forerunner of the KGB, did the same thing in the '20s when the party was cementing its power over everyday life.
 * You Are Worth Hell: This is Winston's attitude about Julia
 * You Cannot Kill an Idea:
 * You Keep Using That Word: Orwell preferred to use precise language when talking politics and didn't really like the (over)use of metaphors because they lost all their meaning and became just another way that thought was restricted. It's doubtful that he'd like the way his name gets thrown around by people today.
 * See also: Politics and the English Language.
 * For any proposed change in government policy, the opposing side will call it "Big Brother" or Orwellian, especially if it has anything to do with collecting information or regulating industry. An explanation is unlikely, a citation of the book even less so.
 * Zeerust: Inter-office communication is sent on paper in glass tubes (no computers).
 * The Ministry of Truth uses 'novel-writing machines' to keep churning out low-grade literature to keep the proles busy. You can tell who works in the Fiction Department by the oil-stains on their overalls.
 * This makes sense in the context of the story though: the Party doesn't encourage the development of labour-saving technology (except for surveillance/law-enforcement purposes and some plans for new weapons of war which really aren't likely to produce anything) because half their time is spent intentionally trying to burn resources to make the war seem more real.
 * Also a case of Truth in Television. Pneumatic Tube Transport (the system described in the novel) was used in many offices from the early twentieth century right up to the late nineties. It's still used in many banks and supermarkets to transport cash. E-mail has supplanted it completely for the transfer of documents, though.
 * When Julia and Winston meet in the woods, they know that they're safe from listening devices because the trees are too small to hide a microphone. By the actual year 1984, microphones were sufficiently miniaturized that they could be hidden even in small trees.
 * For any proposed change in government policy, the opposing side will call it "Big Brother" or Orwellian, especially if it has anything to do with collecting information or regulating industry. An explanation is unlikely, a citation of the book even less so.
 * Zeerust: Inter-office communication is sent on paper in glass tubes (no computers).
 * The Ministry of Truth uses 'novel-writing machines' to keep churning out low-grade literature to keep the proles busy. You can tell who works in the Fiction Department by the oil-stains on their overalls.
 * This makes sense in the context of the story though: the Party doesn't encourage the development of labour-saving technology (except for surveillance/law-enforcement purposes and some plans for new weapons of war which really aren't likely to produce anything) because half their time is spent intentionally trying to burn resources to make the war seem more real.
 * Also a case of Truth in Television. Pneumatic Tube Transport (the system described in the novel) was used in many offices from the early twentieth century right up to the late nineties. It's still used in many banks and supermarkets to transport cash. E-mail has supplanted it completely for the transfer of documents, though.
 * When Julia and Winston meet in the woods, they know that they're safe from listening devices because the trees are too small to hide a microphone. By the actual year 1984, microphones were sufficiently miniaturized that they could be hidden even in small trees.

We shall meet again in the place where there is no darkness.