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Winston Smith Character Analysis

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Winston Smith is the main character of a novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four written by George Orwell and published in 1949. The novel presents an imaginary future of 1984 governed by a group known as the Party, whose ruler and dictator is a Big Brother. The Party controls all aspects of people’s lives, including their thoughts. The name of the state is Oceania where Winston is a resident. He loathes the social systems that govern the citizens therein. They are ruled by intense fear. They have no civil rights and liberties. The people are segregated into three different social classes: the Proles (poor), the Party (middle class) and the Inner Party (the rich). No one could however, question the Big Brother’s system of ruling. Thinking about questioning the government’s principles would also be a crime (Orwell 34). Winston secretly hates the Party and starts to rebel. He starts a diary in which he exposes his rebellious thoughts. He does this even though he knows that keeping a diary is a crime and that one day he will be caught by the police and most probably killed. This act of rebellion and others discussed below first reveal him as a hero. However, it ultimately denied of his heroism by his giving in to the party’s rule. He is a hero that fails. He does not fit properly in Orwell’s definition of a hero: an ordinary person doing whatever they can to change social systems that do not respect human decency, even with the knowledge that they can’t possibly succeed. Orwell’s

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