Winston Smith: Character Analysis

The protagonist of 1984 is Winston Smith. Winston is the character that I found easiest to relate to, and i'm sure most people would. It is through Winston's point of view that the reader peers at the world created by Orwell, and it is through the character development of Winston that Orwell conveys his fears and warnings about a totalitarian society.

Right from the start Winston is portrayed as a seemingly ordinary man out of place in an extraordinary world. Even the contrast in his identity, his first and last name, provide a sense of duality; the commonplace surname Smith versus the implied heroicity of the name Winston, a name forever cemented to Churchill. As a reader I could not help but to identify parts of myself within him, he is ordinary in almost every sense of the word, yet he finds the courage and strength to attempt to improve his circumstances. He is the underdog struggling against the favored champion; the David to Big Brother's Goliath.

In a world where simply writing in a diary is reason for an execution, Winston's life is a miserable one excluding a brief interval of happiness and love in which the reader, as well as the character, are infused with a sense of hope for the end. However, Orwell makes certain that the false hope is soon diminished as such a society could not permit a happy ending. Winston is a representation of the emotions of human beings as a whole, and in order for Orwell's true vision of a totalitarian society to be portrayed Winston must be defeated; representing the defeat every person who had identified with him would most certainly face if such a society were ever allowed to come to fruition.

Winston's spirit and humanitarianism are in the end broken, the two characteristics of himself in which he fought the hardest to keep. By using such an identifiable character Orwell is insisting that Winston's fate could occur to anyone, the very reason the author must break his protagonist. Through Winston Smith's destruction comes the realization and explicit warning that none may survive a society like that in 1984, Orwell's intended communiqué.