There are many definitions of humanity different to each
person, group, or belief that separate us accordingly. In George Orwell’s 1984, what it means to be
human is brought to life in various scenarios through different
personalities. The protagonist, Winston,
seeks out humanity through individuality.
On the other end, the antagonist, O’Brian defines his humanity in terms
of the group. The focus of this novel is
the discovery of humanity in a world where people are little more than animals
to the powers in charge. Using this
totalitarian society allows Orwell to examine humanity in its basest forms
while crossing the group dynamic of the Party which serves as an antagonist
throughout the story.
Winston Smith, the protagonist for
this work, takes a strange, lonely journey to figure out what his humanity is
worth, what humanity even means in the larger scheme of things. The society Orwell creates for this dystopia
is oligarchical in nature, leaving little to the establishment of
individuality. Because of this, Winston
has to define himself as a human without knowing what it really means to be
human. In the beginning of the book, he
only understands humanity as its role in the collective, the Party, and not as
an individual state of being. He
struggles with his disdain of the Party and how it has, in his opinion, warped
society beyond compassion, which can be argued as a root of humanity. Winston records his observations,
experiences, and general horror regarding the totalitarian regime he’s stuck in
illegally in a diary. While this
practice does not necessarily span the entire novel, it does help the reader to
understand who Winston Smith is within the context of the dystopia he’s forced
to endure. “It was not by making
yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage,” Winston
realizes after briefly coming to terms with his own mortality in terms of a
legacy he’d leave after the Party inevitably killed him. Like most modern humans, Winston does not
want to die and does all he can to avoid that fate, his very existence
depending on his ability to hide his deepest thoughts. Winston notes on several occasions the
control of the Party over the perception of the populace. By extreme censorship, the Party is able to
control not only perceptions and observations, but the nature of truth and
history itself.
““Who controls the past,” ran the
Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the
past.”” The Party has made history an alterable state, leaving nothing to
contradict societal beliefs, in a sense destroying the legacy of humanity so
that only slaves to the Party are left. Staying
in third person limited, Orwell is able to focus wholly on Winston and his
journey to understanding and his inevitable fall. With this technique, Orwell is able to
express how Winston sees these orthodox Party followers, often debasing them to
speaking in animal noises or behaving as something less than human. To that end, the proletariats, or proles, are
seen as little better than animals by members of the Party, but to Winston they
seem like hope. To him, the freedom of
thought the proles seem to enjoy is the greatest luxury available in their
society. From the point of view of a
rebel inside the Party, the reader gets a true sense of how society really works,
and in the observation of childhood within the Party, Orwell is able to drive
home the point that humanity is a secondary or even tertiary role of the Party
members. In this respect, the definite
challenge of the protagonist is his struggle to define his humanity in terms of
himself and not the Party. When Winston
is captured and tortured by O’Brian, the reader gets a real sense of how his
journey has come to a head. He is
finally able to define his own humanity and in the end understands the
necessity of dehumanization within the context of the oligarchy.
