Critical response In the
BBC Two series
Faulks on Fiction,
Robert Harris discussed the effectiveness of Winston as a character. Noting that Orwell had originally intended to call the novel "The Last Man in Europe", Harris emphasised that as the last survivor of a previous world Winston has a vague notion of what existed before the Party and this makes him a relatable character. Harris also felt that Winston displays similarities to the author in his physical ailments and his views on women. In his accompanying
BBC book,
Sebastian Faulks said that Orwell's skill was to give the reader the impression that Winston is not heroic. He is brave without knowing it and his small act of defiance in writing his diary appears hopeless, which makes him an
everyman character. Orwell then shows that even a small, powerless person like Winston can fight an oppressive regime. He considered Winston to be a different kind of hero, because he dares to have individual thought and love in the face of certain death. Winston's characterisation was critiqued by
Ben Pimlott, who commented that as a "loner and a loser" he generates sympathy but, "he never rises much above his own self-pity, and it is hard to feel the downfall of this unprepossessing fellow as a tragedy". In contrast, Erika Gottleib considered Winston to be a sympathetic character, describing him as "a true pilgrim on the journey to Truth, a man with an undeniably spiritual dimension". Gorman Beauchamp noted that Winston's ideological battle with O'Brien is a common element of fictional dystopias, being similar to D-503 in
We and John Savage in
Brave New World. He considered Winston's characterisation to be secondary to his ideological position and that indepth analysis was impractical. D. J. Taylor commented on the "terrible inevitability" of Winston's fate, noting that all of Orwell's novels involve a rebel that ultimately fails and resumes his or her previous circumstance. Dorian Lynskey said that Winston is not really "the last man", he is simply one in a long line of similar characters who are broken and rebuilt by the regime. Instead of fearing Winston, the Party needs him to renew its power by crushing him, which
Malcolm Muggeridge described as the "continuous performance" of power.
Margaret Atwood commented that Winston's surrender to Big Brother has been critically viewed as pessimistic, but she considered that the novel's essay on
Newspeak, which is written in standard English and in the past tense, is evidence that the regime reached an end and this showed Orwell's "faith in the resilience of the human spirit".
Dennis Glover's investigation into an error that appears in the second impression of the first edition, published in March 1950, in the passage where Winston writes in the dust "2 + 2 = 5", led him to question the possibility that Orwell intended to change the ending. The "5" in the equation had disappeared and was missing for almost four decades. Glover commented that the missing "5" suggests that Winston is still capable of thoughtcrime at the end of the novel. Despite being unable to ascertain the reason for the omission, he noted that Ingsoc would be defeated by "humanity's natural tendency towards freedom".
75th anniversary edition controversy A preface written by American novelist
Dolen Perkins-Valdez, which was added to the 75th anniversary edition published in the US in 2024 by
Berkley Books and approved by The Orwell Estate, was criticised for acting as a
trigger warning to readers over Winston's views of women. In the edition's introductory essay, Perkins-Valdez described Winston as a "problematic character", highlighting a passage in which Orwell wrote, "He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones." Her essay concluded that Orwell was expressing that Winston's misogyny was a symptom of totalitarian society. Novelist and critic
Walter Kirn criticised the preface on the podcast
America This Week, describing it as "the most 1984-ish thing I’ve ever f---ing read" and commented, "We’re getting somebody to actually convict George Orwell himself of thought crime in the introduction to his book about thought crime".
Impact and influence When the novel was published on 8 June 1949, it achieved phenomenal sales, with 50,000 copies sold in the UK and one third of a million sold in the US. In the following decades, millions of copies have been sold. Additionally, its language, such as "newspeak", "Big Brother", "Thought Police" and "
doublethink", has been adopted in published media to discuss contemporary issues. Richard Harris considered
Nineteen Eighty-Four to be the most influential novel of its time and described Winston as the most unlikely hero but the most compelling. He attributed the success of the novel to its protagonist, stating that by creating Winston as a believable character, Orwell makes the reader believe in his dystopian world.
Margaret Atwood was heavily influenced by
Nineteen Eighty-Four after reading it in high school a couple of years after it was published in 1949. She expressed an affinity with Winston Smith, as "a skinny person who got tired a lot" and being "silently at odds with the ideas and the manner of life proposed for him". Winston's diary of forbidden thoughts encouraged her to take up writing herself as a teenager. Later in life, she used Orwell as a model when, in 1984, she began writing the dystopian novel titled ''
The Handmaid's Tale''.
In popular culture The American punk artist
Winston Smith chose his name in reference to the character. In 2024, an art installation on the island of Jura, comprising 1,984 copies of the novel, was created by Scottish artist Hans K Clausen and titled "The Winston Smith Library of Victory and Truth". ==Adaptations==