The Past

Abstract

Winston Smith is deeply concerned, some might almost say obsessed, by the past. To begin with, his job at the Ministry of Truth is to alter news reports and records of the past so as to make them agree with the current party line. In our own brand of Newspeak he is providing an update. Of course he has no reason to suppose, nor does he, that the account he is changing bears any more relation to the truth than the version he produces, and he knows that his version will be altered when political circumstances change. Winston knows that the Party is engaged in the destruction of the past and he devotes much conscious and rational effort, at considerable risk to himself, in an attempt to discover something about the genuine historical past. He fails. The only piece of real evidence Winston ever finds comes to him by accident (unless it has been deliberately put in his way in order to trap him), and it is the old photograph of the three ‘traitors’ in New York at the time when they had confessed to being on Eurasian soil. It is not that he believes what the party says; how could he, since his own job is to alter the accounts of the past?