Ch2

• 3.2

  O’Brien tortures Winston and tries to convince Winston that he has a defective mind and that 2+2=5.
• It was O’Brien who was directing everything. It was he who set the guards on to Winston and who prevented them from killing him. It was he who decided when Winston should scream with pain, when he should have a respite, when he should be fed, when he should sleep, when the drugs should be pumped into his arm.
• He was the tormentor, he was the protector, he was the inquisitor, he was the friend.
• ‘Don’t worry, Winston; you are in my keeping. For seven years I have watched over you. Now the turning-point has come. I shall save you, I shall make you perfect.’
• He did not remember any ending to his interrogation.
• ‘I told you,’ said O’Brien, ‘that if we met again it would be here.’
• He had the air of a doctor, a teacher, even a priest, anxious to explain and persuade rather than to punish.
• You suffer from a defective memory. You are unable to remember real events and you persuade yourself that you remember other events which never happened.
• ‘Ashes,’ he said. ‘Not even identifiable ashes. Dust. It does not exist. It never existed.’ 

  ‘But it did exist! It does exist! It exists in memory. I remember it. You remember it.’

  ‘I do not remember it,’ said O’Brien.
• He not only did not know whether ‘yes’ or ‘no’ was the answer that would save him from pain; he did not even know which answer he believed to be the true one.
• ‘Then where does the past exist, if at all?’

  ‘In records. It is written down…In the mind. In human memories.’

  ‘In memory. Very well, then. We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?’
• ‘you have not controlled it…You are here because you have failed in humanity, in self discipline…You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one.’
• ‘Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.’
• ‘How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?’

  ‘Four.’
• For a moment he clung to O’Brien like a baby, curiously comforted by the heavy arm round his shoulders. He had the feeling that O’Brien was his protector, that the pain was something that came from outside, from some other source, and that it was O’Brien who would save him from it.
• ‘You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.’
• He opened his eyes and looked up gratefully at O’Brien…He had never loved him so deeply as at this moment, and not merely because he had stopped the pain. The old feeling, that at bottom it did not matter whether O’Brien was a friend or an enemy, had come back…Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood…In some sense that went deeper than friendship, they were intimates
• ‘Shall I tell you why we have brought you here? To cure you! To make you sane! Will you understand, Winston, that no one whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands uncured?
• The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them.
• ‘In the first place, because the confessions that they had made were obviously extorted and untrue. We do not make mistakes of that kind. All confessions that are uttered here are true. We make them true.’
• ‘Nothing will remain of you, not a name in a register, not a memory in a living brain. You will be annihilated in the past as well as in the future. You will never have existed.’
• ‘You are a flaw in the pattern, Winston. You are a stain that must be wiped out.’
• ‘Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you…You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.’
• There was undoubtedly a blinding flash…but somewhere or other there was a large patch of emptiness, as though a piece had been taken out of his brain.
• but who was at war with whom he did not know. In fact he had not been aware that there was any war.
• ‘Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Since the beginning of your life, since the beginning of the Party, since the beginning of history, the war has continued without a break, always the same war.’
• ‘No such piece of paper ever existed. You invented it, and later you grew to believe in it. You remember now the very moment at which you first invented it. Do you remember that?’
• And he did see them, for a fleeting instant, before the scenery of his mind changed. He saw five fingers, and there was no deformity. Then everything was normal again, and the old fear, the hatred, and the bewilderment came crowding back again.
• But there had been a moment…of luminous certainty, when each new suggestion of O’Brien’s had filled up a patch of emptiness and become absolute truth, when two and two could have been three as easily as five.
• ‘it did not matter whether I was a friend or an enemy, since I was at least a person who understood you and could be talked to? You were right. I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.’
• ‘Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of the Party…’You do not exist,’ said O’Brien.
• ‘I think I exist,’ he said wearily. ‘I am conscious of my own identity. I was born and I shall die. I have arms and legs. I occupy a particular point in space. No other solid object can occupy the same point simultaneously.’
• ‘Does the Brotherhood exist?’

  ‘That, Winston, you will never know…As long as you live it will be an unsolved riddle in your mind.’