Part I — Chapter VII

Winston writes that hope lies in the proles, reasoning that only they have the numbers and relative freedom to topple the Party. He recalls a market riot over saucepans, hearing their collective power but seeing it diverted into trivial quarrels, and concludes consciousness and rebellion are mutually dependent but absent.

He analyzes how the Party neglects to indoctrinate proles, allowing vice and petty life to keep them harmless, while telescreens flood society with unverifiable statistics. Comparing a children’s textbook’s propaganda to the drab, hungry London he sees, Winston laments the bareness of modern life.

Turning to the past, he remembers the purged revolutionaries Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford, once released then rearrested. He recalls seeing them broken in the Chestnut Tree Café and, years later at work, discovering a Times photograph proving they were in New York on a date they “confessed” to being in Eurasia—concrete evidence their confessions were fabricated. Terrified, he destroyed the photo, then wonders whether the Party’s power over the past is lessened by evidence that no longer exists.

Winston recognizes that perpetual rewriting may have erased even the photo’s evidentiary value as alliances shifted, and he despairs at not understanding the ultimate purpose behind the imposture. He questions his sanity and the nature of reality itself under the Party’s doctrine that denies external truth.

Galvanizing himself, Winston imagines addressing O’Brien, resolves that the obvious must be defended, and asserts an axiom against the Party’s pressure: freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four; if that stands, everything else follows.