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Winston Smith
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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 In the book, Winston is a clerk for the Ministry of Truth, where his job is to rewrite historical documents so that they match the current party line, which changes on a daily basis.
In the novel, Winston is lured in joining a secret organisation whose aim is to undermine the dictatorship of "Big Brother". He does not realise 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, and discovers that the underground movement, the Brotherhood, which they believed themselves to have joined may not, in fact, exist.
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. Given the rewriting of history prevalent in Oceania (the fictional nation of which Winston Smith is a citizen), it seems quite possible that Smith would never have heard of Churchill.
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.
| Characters | Winston Smith | Julia | O'Brien | Big Brother | Emmanuel Goldstein |
|---|---|
| Places | Oceania | Eastasia | Eurasia | Airstrip One | Room 101 |
| Classes | Inner Party | Outer Party | Proles |
| Ministries | Ministry of Love | Ministry of Peace | Ministry of Plenty | Ministry of Truth |
| Concepts | Ingsoc | Newspeak (wordlist) | Doublethink | Goodthink | Crimestop Two plus two make five | Thoughtcrime | Prolefeed | Prolesec |
| Miscellaneous | Thought Police | Telescreen | Memory hole | Goldstein's book Two Minutes Hate | Hate week |
| Adaptations | 1956 film | 1984 film | 1953 US TV | 1954 BBC programme | Opera |
| Influence | Nineteen Eighty-Four in popular media Parody: Me and the Big Guy |