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Winston Smith is a fictional character and the protagonist of George Orwell's 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. His name has become a metaphor for the man in the street, the unwitting and innocent victim of political machination. In the book, Winston is a clerk for the Ministry of Truth, where his job is to rewrite historical documents so that they match the current party line, which changes daily. This involved retyping and reprinting newspaper articles and retouching photographs—mostly to remove individuals who had become "unpersons." The original (more accurate) document was dropped into a "memory hole", which supposedly led to an incinerator.

In the novel, Winston is lured into joining a secret organization whose aim is to undermine the dictatorship of "Big Brother". He does not realize that he is being set up by O'Brien, a government agent. When captured and tortured, he eventually betrays his only accomplice, Julia, the woman he loves. He also discovers that the Brotherhood, an underground movement which he and Julia believed themselves to have joined, may not exist.

Smith is both excited and disgusted by Julia's fervor and has fantasies of raping and then murdering her. Winston also fears that Julia is a member of the Thought Police prepared to denounce him.

Months later, Smith bumps into Julia on her way from the Fiction Department and receives a small paper from her. After assuring his privacy in his cubicle at work (no easy feat due to the omnipresent two-way telescreens), he unfolds the note and reads what Julia wrote: "I love you." Smith makes arrangements with Julia to meet in the crowd at Victory Square; over the next several months, they arrange to meet and make love in a variety of places outside London.

Smith finds in Julia a fellow thoughtcriminal (as well as a sex criminal); they decide to live life to the fullest while dodging the Party whenever possible.

This is mortally dangerous, for sexual love between Party members is strictly forbidden: even within marriage, sex is to be viewed as something disgusting, a duty performed only to beget children for the service of the Party. A woman should never derive any pleasure from the act. Julia believes the Party tries to bottle down the sex drive and transform it into hysteria and leader-worship: very desirable qualities in the ultimate totalitarian state that is Oceania. Also, men and women must not be allowed to form personal loyalties beyond state control.

The lovers know fully well that they will soon be detected and arrested, and Julia observes that "everybody always confesses. You can't help it. They torture you." But Smith argues that "confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter: only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you - that would be the real betrayal." Julia believes this is "the one thing they can't do...they can't get inside you". The lovers are able to derive some comfort from this, believing that their love will remain intact even when they are arrested and tortured: "If the object was not to stay alive but to stay human," Smith reflects, "what difference it ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings."

When Inner Party member O'Brien drops a hint that he is a member of the mysterious anti-Party Brotherhood, Smith and Julia come to meet him. When O'Brien tests their willingness to do whatever the Brotherhood asks, Julia shouts "No!" when he asks whether she and Smith are prepared to separate and never see each other again. Smith agrees with a heavy heart. Days later, when Smith and Julia are staying in the room above Mr. Charrington's shop and have read parts of Goldstein's book, they are arrested by the Thought Police.

O'Brien is really a faithful Party member, a torturer who brainwashes those who have gone astray (in order to "make them perfect" before they are executed). He claims that Smith had been under surveillance for as much as seven years.

According to O'Brien during Smith's interrogation, Julia caved in immediately to the Party's pressure: "She betrayed you, Winston. Immediately - unreservedly. I have seldom seen anyone come over to us so promptly. You would hardly recognise her if you saw her. All her rebelliousness, her deceit, her folly, her dirty-mindedness - everything has been burned out of her. It was a perfect conversion, a textbook case." Smith (and the reader) obviously cannot know if O'Brien is telling the truth.

During months of torture and brainwashing, Smith surrenders intellectually, but strives to keep his innermost heart inviolate: He knows he will eventually be killed, but secretly he intends to continue hating Big Brother (the embodiment of the Party) - and loving Julia. One tiny victory he reserves for his moment of death: The Party could not change his feelings and make him betray Julia in his heart.

However, Smith's resolve to continue loving Julia is burned away when he finally enters Room 101. Smith has a particular horror of rats. Knowing this, O'Brien threatens to let rats devour Smith's face, and in utter desperation he finally begs his torturers that they do this to Julia instead.

Julia is seen one last time in the novel, when she meets Smith after they have both been processed by the Party and restored to orthodox thought. They agree nothing matters any more - even having sex again would not matter - because what they felt for each other is gone. Julia explains to Smith that "sometimes...they threaten you with something - something you can't stand up to, can't even think about. And then you say, 'Don't do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to so-and-so.' ... And after that, you don't feel the same towards the other person any longer." It seems, then, that her experience exactly mirrors Smith's own: she was taken to Room 101 and betrayed him there. (It is not revealed what she was threatened with; she did not share Smith's particular horror of rats.)

As the novel closes, Smith discovers that his love for Julia has been replaced by being Big Brother - the only form of love that is approved in Oceania. Tragically, Julia was ultimately wrong: "he" could indeed "be" Big Brother.

The character was born about 1945 and Orwell chose his name from Winston Churchill with Smith being used because it is a very common surname.

The character of Smith has appeared on television and in film in various adaptations of the novel. The first actor to play the role would be David Niven in an August 27, 1949 radio adaptation of the novel for NBC's NBC University Theater. In the BBC's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954) he was played by Peter Cushing, and eleven years later in another BBC adaptation, by David Buck. In the 1956 film, Edmond O'Brien took the role and, in the more faithful adaptation 1984 (1984), John Hurt played Winston. In a dramatisation broadcast on BBC Home Service radio in 1965, Patrick Troughton voiced the part.

External links

• NBC University Theater recording of 1984

• Articles lacking sources from December 2007
• Nineteen Eighty-Four characters
• Characters in written fiction
• Fictional civil servants