Reading and Literature Studies · Reading Literary TextsNovel Study, Part 3: The Ending, Critical Lenses and Evaluating Nineteen Eighty-Four Beside Canadian and Indigenous Dystopias
1.7 1.8 1.5About 75 minutes
Learning goals- I can explain how the ending of Nineteen Eighty-Four completes its themes.
- I can apply historical, Marxist and feminist lenses to the novel and support each with evidence.
- I can evaluate the novel using explicit criteria, including its limitations.
- I can compare it with Canadian and Indigenous dystopian novels and explain how each draws on different histories.
Words to know
evaluation
A reasoned judgment of how well a text achieves its purposes, based on criteria and evidence.
criteria
The standards used to judge something (singular: criterion).
Indigenous futurism
Speculative fiction by Indigenous creators that imagines futures centring Indigenous knowledge, survival and sovereignty.
allegory
A story in which characters and events stand for real people, ideas or events.
retelling
A new work that tells an existing story from a different perspective or setting.
survivance
A term from the Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor, combining survival and resistance: an active Indigenous presence, not just endurance.
Hook: two plus two
Early in the novel, Winston writes in his diary that freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four, and that If that is granted, all else follows. It seems like the simplest truth there is.
In Part 3, the Party sets out to make him believe something else. This lesson finishes the novel, then steps back to ask the questions a university seminar would ask: What does the novel argue? Whose experience does it centre? How well does it work? And what do other dystopias, including Canadian and Indigenous ones, see that Orwell did not?
Remember from Lesson 2
You learned the major critical lenses: formalist, historical, feminist, Marxist, postcolonial, Indigenous-centred and reader-response. Here you will use three of them on one novel and then evaluate it. In ENG3U you evaluated Gatsby and its films with criteria; Grade 12 evaluation must also weigh limitations and perspectives.
Part 3 in brief
(Content note: Part 3 describes imprisonment, interrogation and torture. This summary does not give details.)
Winston is held in the Ministry of Love. O'Brien is not a rebel: he is the Party official in charge of Winston's "cure." Over a long period of pain and interrogation, O'Brien works to make Winston accept that reality is whatever the Party says, including that two plus two can make five. He explains that the Party does not seek power for any good purpose but for its own sake, and offers a chilling image of the future: a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.
In Room 101, which contains the worst thing in the world for each prisoner, Winston is faced with his deepest fear (rats) and, to save himself, begs for it to be done to Julia instead. His last private loyalty breaks.
Released, Winston sits in the Chestnut Tree Café. He meets Julia once; they admit they betrayed each other, and feel nothing. Listening to a news bulletin about a victory, he weeps, and the novel ends: He loved Big Brother.
How the ending completes the themes
- Control of the mind: the Party's final target was never Winston's behaviour but his inner self, the few cubic centimetres inside your skull he once believed were safe. The ending shows they were not.
- Love and loyalty: Room 101 destroys the one bond that was truly his. The Party does not just punish betrayal; it requires it.
- The past: Winston, who wanted to preserve the true past, now accepts the Party's version of everything.
- Hope: the plot offers none. Lesson 9's appendix argument is the only structural hope, and it is outside the story.
The last sentence is deliberately short and flat. He loved Big Brother uses the word love for the Party, the one emotion the novel had reserved for Julia, for his mother and for the past.
Worked exampleLet's read the novel through three lenses
Apply historical, Marxist and feminist lenses to Nineteen Eighty-Four, with a claim for each.
- Historical: the novel draws on Stalin's Soviet Union (show trials, rewritten photographs, a leader's face everywhere) and Nazi Germany (mass rallies, the Hate), plus wartime Britain (rationing, bombed London, the BBC). Claim: Orwell combines real 20th-century methods of control to show that totalitarianism is a set of techniques that could appear in any society, including a democracy.
- Marxist / class: Oceania has a tiny Inner Party, a watched Outer Party and a vast, poor, distracted working class. Goldstein's book argues that permanent war uses up goods so the masses stay poor. Claim: the novel shows how a ruling class can use scarcity and distraction to stay in power; ironically, Ingsoc claims to be socialist while betraying socialist ideals of equality (Orwell himself was a democratic socialist).
- Feminist: Julia is lively and brave, but we see her only through Winston, who once fantasized about hurting her and later calls her a rebel from the waist downwards. She is not interested in ideas, the novel tells us. Claim: the novel's resistance is imagined as male and intellectual, while its central woman is defined by body and pleasure. In 2023 the novelist Sandra Newman published Julia, a retelling authorized by Orwell's estate, from Julia's point of view, a sign that readers feel her story was left untold.
- Combine: a strong essay might argue that the novel's analysis of power is brilliant (historical, Marxist), while its imagination of who resists is limited (feminist).
Three lenses produce three claims: a warning about portable techniques of control; a portrait of class power through scarcity; and a limited, male-centred vision of resistance.
Comparing dystopias. Each imagines a future by exaggerating real methods of power. Asking which history each one draws on is a key critical-literacy move.Canadian and Indigenous dystopias
These novels are under copyright, so they are described here, not quoted.
**Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (1985). In the Republic of Gilead, a theocracy that has taken over part of the United States, fertile women are forced to bear children for powerful men. The narrator, Offred, tells her story in fragments. Atwood has said she included nothing that people had not already done somewhere in history. Like Orwell's, it ends with a historical document** set in a later time (Historical Notes), a direct echo of Orwell's appendix. It centres women's bodies and voices, the very area where Orwell's novel is weakest.
**Cherie Dimaline (Métis), The Marrow Thieves (2017). In a future damaged by climate disaster, most people have lost the ability to dream. Indigenous people still dream, and they are hunted so that their bone marrow can be harvested in institutions called schools**. A Métis teenager named Frenchie travels north with a small chosen family, led by an older man called Miig, sharing stories to stay alive. The novel won the Governor General's Literary Award for young people's literature (text) in 2017.
Critical-literacy point: Orwell imagines a future horror. For First Nations, Métis and Inuit readers, Dimaline's "schools" deliberately echo a real past: the residential school system, which removed Indigenous children from their families for over a century. A dystopia for one reader may be history for another. Dimaline's novel also centres survivance: language, story, kinship and connection to land as the means of survival, which is a different idea of resistance from Winston's lonely diary.
Worked exampleLet's evaluate the novel with criteria
Write a balanced evaluation of Nineteen Eighty-Four using at least four criteria.
- Purpose (warning): highly effective. Its vocabulary (Big Brother, doublethink, thoughtcrime, Room 101) entered everyday language, and it is still cited in debates about surveillance and misinformation.
- Craft: world-building is detailed and consistent; the three-part structure builds and destroys hope; the appendix adds a striking final twist. Weakness: Goldstein's book slows the novel down with long passages of essay.
- Characters: Winston is deeply realized and O'Brien is chilling; Julia and the proles are drawn mostly from outside, through Winston's eyes.
- Perspective: centres a white, male, English intellectual. Readers whose communities experienced state control historically (for example through colonial policy) may find other dystopias, such as The Marrow Thieves, more true to their experience.
- Relevance: remarkably strong more than 75 years later, especially regarding surveillance technology and the manipulation of facts.
- Overall judgment: a powerful, enduring warning whose limits of perspective are best understood by reading it alongside dystopias that centre other experiences.
Strongest on purpose, structure and relevance; weaker on secondary characters and breadth of perspective. Reading it beside Atwood and Dimaline shows both its achievement and its limits.
Just for funFunny-but-true: Orwell's working title for the novel was The Last Man in Europe. Somewhere there is an alternate universe in which the word everyone uses for creepy surveillance is Last-Man-in-European.
Hands-on activitySeminar at the kitchen table
You need: one or two people at home willing to talk for 20 minutes, a timer, and your notes on the novel (or this lesson's summaries).
- Choose one seminar question: Does the novel leave any hope? or Is O'Brien right that power is its own goal? or Is Orwell's warning more or less relevant in the age of smartphones?
- Explain the question and give your position in two minutes, with two pieces of evidence.
- Ask your listeners to push back. Write down their best objection.
- Respond to the objection in one minute, using evidence or conceding part of the point.
- Afterward, write a short reflection: How did the objection change or sharpen my view?
What to look for: a clear position, real evidence from the novel, a fair hearing of the other side, and a reflection that shows a refined argument (for example, I still think there is hope, but only outside the plot, in the appendix).
Your turn
1What does O'Brien say the Party wants power for?
Power for its own sake: not for the good of anyone, and not as a means to any other goal.
2What is Room 101, and why is it the turning point for Winston?
A room containing each prisoner's worst thing in the world; faced with rats, Winston begs for the torture to be done to Julia, betraying the last private loyalty he had.
3Explain the effect of the final sentence He loved Big Brother.
It is short and flat, and it applies the word love, which the novel had reserved for Julia, his mother and the past, to the Party. It shows the Party's victory is complete: it has taken even his emotions.
4Apply a historical lens in one sentence.
Orwell combines methods of control from Stalin's Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and wartime Britain to warn that totalitarianism is a set of techniques any society could adopt.
5What is the main criticism of the novel from a feminist lens?
Julia is seen only through Winston, defined by body and pleasure rather than ideas, and resistance is imagined as male and intellectual; her own perspective is missing.
6Describe The Marrow Thieves in two sentences and explain how its "schools" connect to history.
In a climate-damaged future, Indigenous people, who alone can still dream, are hunted for their bone marrow; a Métis teen named Frenchie survives with a chosen family. Its marrow-harvesting "schools" echo the real residential school system, which removed Indigenous children from their families.
7Name three criteria for evaluating a novel.
Any three: purpose (does it achieve its aim?), craft (structure, style, world-building), characters, perspective (whose experience is centred), relevance.
More practice: warm-up
1Where is Winston held in Part 3?
2What is Winston's worst fear in Room 101?
3Who wrote The Handmaid's Tale, and when?
4Who wrote The Marrow Thieves, and when?
Cherie Dimaline (Métis), 2017.
5What is the novel's last sentence?
More practice: on your own
1Why does the Party need Winston to love Big Brother, not just obey?
Obedience leaves an inner self that could still resist; the Party's aim is total control of the mind, so it must replace Winston's private feelings, not just his actions. A loving convert is the proof of total power.
2Compare how Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Handmaid's Tale use a document at the end.
Both end with a later, scholarly text (the Newspeak appendix; the Historical Notes) that treats the regime as history, suggesting it ended. Atwood's echo of Orwell's device signals that she is writing in conversation with him.
3Explain the idea that "a dystopia for one reader may be history for another" using The Marrow Thieves.
For many readers its institutions are imagined horrors; for Indigenous readers, institutions that took children from their families (residential schools) are a real, recent history. The genre's "future" can reflect a past some communities already lived.
4How is Dimaline's idea of resistance different from Winston's?
Winston resists alone, through a private diary and ideas, and is broken. Dimaline's characters resist together, through story, language, kinship and land, an idea of survival rooted in community (survivance).
5Give one strength and one limitation of Nineteen Eighty-Four, with evidence.
Strength: its lasting relevance (its terms like doublethink and Big Brother are used in debates about surveillance and misinformation). Limitation: narrow perspective (Julia and the proles are seen only from outside, through Winston).
Challenge
1Does Nineteen Eighty-Four leave any hope? Use the plot, the appendix and one critical lens.
Model: the plot leaves none: Winston is broken and loves Big Brother. The appendix's past tense suggests the Party eventually fell and standard English survived. A reader-response lens adds that the novel's purpose is to create hope in readers, by warning them in time. So hope exists, but outside the story: in its structure and in its audience.
2Write a comparative thesis on Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Marrow Thieves.
Model: While Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four imagines total control as the destruction of an isolated mind, Dimaline's The Marrow Thieves, drawing on the real history of residential schools, imagines survival through community, story and land, suggesting that the most powerful resistance to domination is relational rather than individual.
3Evaluate this claim: Orwell's novel is outdated because governments today use technology he never imagined.
Model: disagree, mostly. The specific technology (telescreens) is dated, but the methods (surveillance, the rewriting of facts, doublethink, permanent conflict, language that hides meaning) are more relevant with smartphones, data collection and online misinformation. Concede: the novel imagines control by fear, whereas some modern control works through convenience and pleasure, which Huxley's Brave New World or later dystopias may capture better.
Quiz
1. According to O'Brien, the Party seeks power...
3. Which lens asks how Julia is represented and whose perspective is missing?
4. In The Marrow Thieves, Indigenous people are hunted because...
5. A fair evaluation of a novel...
6. The final sentence He loved Big Brother is powerful because it...
What this lesson teaches: ENG4U Reading 1.7 (evaluating a text with criteria), 1.8 (critical literacy: identifying perspectives and biases, and whose experience a text centres) and 1.5 (extending understanding by comparing texts, including Canadian and Indigenous works).
Content note: Part 3 of Nineteen Eighty-Four depicts torture; The Marrow Thieves and The Handmaid's Tale include violence and mature themes, and The Marrow Thieves deliberately recalls the history of residential schools. If your family has experienced residential schools, talk with your teen first. Support is available 24 hours a day through the Hope for Wellness Help Line (1-855-242-3310) and the national Indian Residential Schools Crisis Line (1-866-925-4419).
How to help at home:
- Join the kitchen-table seminar. Your objections help your teen sharpen an argument.
- Ask: Is the novel still relevant? Give me an example from this year's news.
Common difficulties:
- Treating lenses as accusations. A feminist critique does not mean the novel is bad; it shows a limit.
- Comparing plots instead of ideas. Comparisons should focus on how each novel imagines power and resistance.
Facts used: Sandra Newman's Julia was published in 2023 with the Orwell estate's authorization. The Marrow Thieves won the 2017 Governor General's Literary Award for young people's literature (text). Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985) ends with Historical Notes. Orwell's working title The Last Man in Europe is recorded in his letters. Gerald Vizenor is an Anishinaabe writer and scholar.