1984 characters

Appears from the start

A thin, worn records clerk in the Ministry of Truth in Airstrip One (formerly Britain), a province of the super-state Oceania ruled by the Party and its all-seeing figurehead, Big Brother. His job is to rewrite old newspapers and documents so that the past always matches whatever the Party currently claims. Outwardly obedient, he is inwardly rebellious: he loathes the regime, distrusts the reality it manufactures, and begins keeping an illegal diary, an act punishable by death. He is haunted by fragments of a past the Party has erased and by a longing for truth, privacy, and genuine feeling in a world where even a facial expression can betray you. Constantly watched by the telescreens that see and hear everything, he is nonetheless driven to test how far a single person can resist.

First appears in chapter 9

A dark-haired young woman who works in the Fiction Department of the Ministry of Truth, operating the machines that mass-produce cheap novels. She wears the scarlet sash of the Junior Anti-Sex League and plays the part of a zealous Party member, which had made Winston fear and dislike her, until she secretly slips him a note saying that she loves him. Bold, practical, and sensual, she rebels not out of political theory but out of appetite for the pleasure and private life the Party forbids. Skilled at deception and at arranging secret meetings, she treats disobedience as a personal freedom to be enjoyed rather than a cause to be argued.

Appears from the start

A large, heavy-faced member of the Inner Party, the ruling elite, whom Winston knows only slightly. Despite O'Brien's power and polished, brutal charm, Winston senses a hidden kinship and becomes convinced that behind the loyal exterior lies a secret opponent of the Party who shares his own forbidden doubts. That conviction, half hope and half fantasy, draws Winston toward him. O'Brien is cultured and self-assured, able to speak the Party's language with an irony that seems to invite complicity, and Winston clings to the belief that here, at last, is an ally in a world where trusting anyone can be fatal.

Appears from the start

The mustachioed face on every poster and telescreen, the supposed leader of the Party and the object of Oceania's compulsory love and worship. His image is everywhere, above the warning that he is always watching. Whether he is a real man or purely a Party invention is never made clear; what matters is his function as the focus of the population's devotion and fear. He embodies the regime's total authority, and citizens are trained to feel gratitude and adoration toward him even as the state surveils, imprisons, and erases them.

Appears from the start

The Party's designated enemy of the people, a former leader said to have betrayed the revolution and now the supposed head of a shadowy resistance called the Brotherhood. His face is shown daily during the Two Minutes Hate so that citizens can scream their fury at him. Whether he and his organization truly exist, or are fabrications the Party uses to channel and control public hatred, is left uncertain. To Winston he represents the faint possibility of organized opposition, and a book attributed to Goldstein promises to explain how and why the Party's system of power really works.

First appears in chapter 8

The elderly, mild-mannered proprietor of a junk shop in the working-class prole quarter, from whom Winston buys a blank diary and later a glass paperweight he treasures as a relic of the vanished past. Seemingly a harmless widower with a fondness for old rhymes and forgotten objects, Charrington offers Winston the use of a small upstairs room that appears to hold no telescreen, a rare corner of privacy. His shop and his gentle manner suggest a quiet survivor of an earlier age.

First appears in chapter 5

A colleague of Winston's at the Ministry of Truth, a philologist working on the official dictionary of Newspeak, the Party's shrinking, engineered language designed to make disobedient thought impossible by removing the words for it. Enthusiastic and dangerously clever, Syme speaks with open relish about how the vocabulary is being cut down year by year. Winston privately judges him too intelligent and too candid to survive, certain the Party will one day decide he sees too clearly.

First appears in chapter 2

Winston's neighbor and fellow Ministry worker, a stout, sweaty, tirelessly cheerful man who embodies the ideal unthinking Party loyalist. He throws himself into community activities and swallows every slogan without question. His young son and daughter are fervent members of the Spies, the Party's youth organization, and behave like miniature informers eager to catch adults in disloyalty, so that Parsons lives contentedly under the watchful eyes of his own children.