Characters

Winston Smith

The protagonist — a 39-year-old Outer Party member who rewrites history at the Ministry of Truth while privately loathing the regime. Winston is deliberately ordinary: physically frail (a varicose ulcer, a hacking cough), intellectually alive, and doomed by his need to hold onto what is true. He is less a hero than a test case. Orwell uses him to ask whether a single honest mind can survive a system built to unmake it — and answers, devastatingly, no.

Julia

Winston's lover, a mechanic in the Fiction Department, roughly 26. Where Winston rebels with his mind, Julia rebels with her body: she breaks rules for pleasure and comfort but is bored by theory and cynical about whether the Party can ever be overthrown. "I'm not interested in the next generation," she tells him. Her private, appetite-driven rebellion is in some ways more durable than Winston's — and just as thoroughly crushed.

O'Brien

An Inner Party member Winston believes to be a secret dissident; in fact his interrogator and torturer. O'Brien is the novel's intellect and its horror — he understands Winston completely, even shares his tastes, and uses that intimacy to dismantle him. He voices the Party's true creed ("The object of power is power") and embodies the book's coldest idea: that cruelty here has no hidden purpose beyond itself.

Big Brother

The Party's mustachioed figurehead, gazing from every poster. He may not exist as a person at all — he is the face the Party gives to its own power so that citizens can love an image rather than an institution. He cannot die, be voted out, or be proven wrong.

Emmanuel Goldstein

The regime's designated Enemy of the People, object of the daily Two Minutes Hate and supposed author of the forbidden book. Like Big Brother, he is likely a Party fabrication — a manufactured heretic who gives the state's hatred a target and may even run the "Brotherhood" as a trap.

Supporting figures

• Mr. Charrington — the kindly antique-shop owner who rents Winston the refuge above his shop. He is a member of the Thought Police; the sanctuary is the snare.
• Syme — a brilliant, doomed philologist perfecting Newspeak. Too intelligent and too orthodox out loud, he is "vaporized" — erased as if he never existed.
• Parsons — Winston's dull, enthusiastically loyal neighbor, undone when his own young daughter denounces him for talking against Big Brother in his sleep. He is almost grateful.
• Winston's mother — remembered from childhood, she represents a vanished world of private loyalty and love the Party has since made impossible.