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After Winston has been broken by the rats in Room 101 and has offered Julia up for torture in his place, the final chapter of 1984 follows Winston for an afternoon sometime following his release from the Ministry of Love. The reader learns that Winston now leads a life of easy, meaningless work, and that when he once spoke to Julia again, she admitted that she had also turned on Winston, and the two now feel nothing for each other. In the final moment of the novel, Winston encounters an image of Big Brother and experiences a sense of victory because he now loves Big Brother. Winston’s total acceptance of Party rule marks the completion of the trajectory he has been on since the opening of the novel. Despite Winston’s various forms of rejection and resistance toward the Party, he had always been realistic about how his choices would inevitably lead to his arrest, torture, and eventual death. It is only this last inevitability that the novel leaves somewhat murky. The novel’s penultimate paragraph describes Winston being shot in the head, but the inference is that this is just a dream. The final paragraph describes a living Winston pledging his love of Big Brother—although the value of life to such a diminished individual seems negligible. 

If the triumph of the Party over the individual seems pessimistic, that’s precisely because Orwell wanted it to be so. He wrote 1984 essentially as a warning to all against allowing totalitarian governments to achieve large scale control over the lives of their citizens. The ending of the novel is our confirmation that by the time its narrative began, it was already too late for anyone to stop the Party. While Orwell isn’t offering a happy ending, he is in his own way offering hope—since we can reasonably assume that as long as we are living an a society that allows book like 1984 to be read openly, it isn’t too late to prevent the dangers he portrays in in his novel (although the need to take some kind of action is at least implied).

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