But the dream says differently. Even though Winston now has an ally in Julia, he is still essentially alone in his thinking. He let what he judged to be ten minutes go by, tormented all the while by the fear that some accident -- a sudden draught blowing across his desk, for instance -- would betray him. But today, supposing that it could be somehow resurrected from its ashes, the photograph might not even be evidence. Winston reflects on what makes people human and decides that it is loyalty to one another and their inner thought and feelings.
He knew, with more certainty than before, that O'Brien was on his side. Winston suspects that these claims are untrue, but he has no way to know for sure, since history has been written entirely by the Party. All the events thus far in the novel have led to this moment. The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering -- a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons -- a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting -- three hundred million people all with the same face. The Party could not be overthrown from within. A police helicopter hovers near the windows of a distant building, spying on people, which reminds Winston that the Thought Police can see and hear him through the telescreen, so he keeps his back turned to it. By 1970 none of them was left, except Big Brother himself.
They talk of the war, which Julia believes is not truly happening, and they talk of people being vaporized. He writes what he believes to be the date—April 4th, 1984—in the diary, but this is only a guess, as dates can no longer be known with certainty. The proles, as they are called, are so impoverished and insignificant that the Party does not consider them a threat to its power. Though a simple woman, Winston admires her because her feelings were her own and unchangeable. But this was concrete evidence; it was a fragment of the abolished past, like a fossil bone which turns up in the wrong stratum and destroys a geological theory. Winston suspects that history to be false, but then begins to doubt himself.
Glossary bunting a thin cloth used in making flags, streamers, etc. Depressed and oppressed, he starts a journal of his rebellious thoughts against the Party. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working-hours or shorter rations.
They make up 85% of the population and can easily overpower the police. Winston was ten or 12 years old when he last saw his mother. George Orwell's classic dystopian science fiction novel 1984 deals with a totalitarian future in which speech, privacy and thought is all totally controlled by the government. With the feeling that he was speaking to O'Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote: Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. In this case, the oppressor is The Party. Winston thinks that the people of a couple of generations before, and even the proles now, were loyal to one another within individual relationships rather than a specific party. One day, a chocolate ration was issued to the citizens who hadn't had chocolate in a long time.
This is still London, though. There was a photograph of the three men attending a prominent Party function on the same date they were said to have been launching conspiracies on Eurasian soil. When any ordinary person spoke to a capitalist he had to cringe and bow to him, and take off his cap and address him as 'Sir'. Winston recollected pictures and statistics of these monstrous capitalists in the history textbooks issued by the Party. Still writing in his diary, Winston records his belief that the Party will be overthrown by the proles, who make up 85 percent of the population of Oceania.
Disgusted, he considers the Party's attitude towards sex, which is that it should only occur between married people for the purpose of procreation, and should not be pleasurable. And for the first time he noticed, with a kind of inward shudder, and yet not knowing at what he shuddered, that both Aaronson and Rutherford had broken noses. When he had reached the spot it was to see a mob of two or three hundred women crowding round the stalls of a street market, with faces as tragic as though they had been the doomed passengers on a sinking ship. That morning, at a routine political rally called the Two Minutes Hate, O'Brien, a charismatic Inner Party member whose body language suggests to Winston that he secretly hates the Party, had entered the Records Department with an attractive dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department whom Winston suspects is an agent of the Thought Police. To keep your face expressionless was not difficult, and even your breathing could be controlled, with an effort: but you could not control the beating of your heart, and the telescreen was quite delicate enough to pick it up.
Terrified, Winston destroyed the photograph, but it remains embedded in his memory as a concrete example of Party dishonesty. This decision is the turning point, or climax, in the story. The capitalists owned everything in the world, and everyone else was their slave. When she wakes up it takes her a while to remember where she is; she looks at Constantin asleep next to her — she had never slept next to a man before. He describes a scene in which a middle-aged Jewish woman ineffectually covers a child with her body in order to protect him from bullets and notes the audience's delighted reaction to their deaths and a lone prole woman's outraged protest.
He picked up the children's history book and looked at the portrait of Big Brother which formed its frontispiece. Luckily, when he unrolled it, it had been upside-down from the point of view of the telescreen. Then, without uncovering it again, he dropped the photograph into the memory hole, along with some other waste papers. He realizes that whether he writes them down or not, his disloyal thoughts constitute thoughtcrime, and that he will eventually be discovered, arrested by the Thought Police, and vaporized. What Makes a Human a Human? The monotonousness of the broadcast on the telescreen emphasizes its irritating and oppressive presence.