Chapter 9
Winston begins the chapter with a deep, unconscious sigh as his workday starts. He pulls his speak‑write toward him, cleans it, and puts on his spectacles. He unrolls four small cylinders of paper that have emerged from the pneumatic tube at his desk. The cubicle contains three slots: a small tube for written messages, a larger one for newspapers, and a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating—the “memory hole”—used for discarding waste paper. Winston reads the four terse, internally‑coded messages, which order him to “rectify” various past Times articles: a mis‑reported speech by Big Brother, incorrect output forecasts, a false chocolate‑ration pledge, and a cryptic directive concerning a Big Brother “dayorder.”
He orders the appropriate past issues of The Times via the telescreen, receives them through the pneumatic tube, and plans the necessary alterations. He explains the Ministry’s systematic process: after correcting a newspaper, the original copy is shredded, the corrected version reprinted, and the old version sent through the memory hole to hidden furnaces. This practice extends to all printed and recorded media, ensuring the Party’s past is constantly rewritten to match present doctrine. Winston describes the vast Records Department, its endless rows of cubicles, and the many workers: Tilotson, a dark‑skinned man in the opposite cubicle who whispers into his speak‑write; a sandy‑haired woman who tracks and deletes names of vaporized citizens; Ampleforth, a poetic clerk producing “definitive texts” of altered poems; and countless other sub‑departments handling printing, photography, audio, and propaganda production. He reflects that the Department’s true purpose is to supply the Party and, at a lower level, the proletariat with continually updated information, entertainment, and instruction.
Winston takes particular pleasure in the more complex forgery tasks, especially those requiring him to imagine what the Party would want to appear as truth. The final slip he set aside demands a rewrite of a Big Brother Order from 3 December 1983, described in Newspeak as “times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite ful wise upsub antefiling.” He translates the cryptic directive into ordinary English and examines the original article, which praises the FFCC organization and Commend‑er Withers, then notes that three months later FFCC was dissolved and Withers had become an “unperson.”
Unsure whether to merely reverse the original tone or to fabricate an entirely new narrative, Winston decides to create a wholly fictional hero, Comrade Ogilvy, who supposedly died gloriously in battle. He dictating a bombastic, question‑and‑answer style speech in Big Brother’s voice, detailing Ogilvy’s childhood devotion to the Party, his early enlistment, his denunciation of his uncle, his inventiveness of a hand‑grenade, and his heroic death diving from a helicopter over the Indian Ocean. Winston debates awarding Ogilvy the Order of Conspicuous Merit but rejects it to avoid further cross‑referencing. He glances repeatedly at Tilotson, convinced they are working on the same assignment, and feels a deep certainty that his version will be the one ultimately selected by the unseen Party “master brain.” He ends the scene contemplating the paradox that the Party can create dead men but not living ones, and that Ogilvy, though never existing, will now live in the recorded past as solidly as any historical figure.