An outer-Party member aged 39, with a varicose ulcer above his right ankle and eyes that retain enough intelligence to see clearly. Winston is not heroic in any traditional sense — he is fearful, physically weak, and ultimately breakable. His tragedy is that he sees the truth clearly enough to rebel and not clearly enough to survive. He represents what Orwell thought of as the ordinary decent man: not a revolutionary, not a saint, just someone who cannot quite stop himself from preferring truth to lies, even when truth will kill him.

Dark-haired, twenty-six years old, works in the Fiction Department producing Newspeak novels by machine. Julia is Orwell's most contested character — feminists have noted she functions partly as a male fantasy of the politically uncomplicated sensuous woman. But she is also more pragmatically intelligent than Winston, a more experienced rebel, and perhaps more honest about the limits of what individual resistance can achieve. Her final destroyed state is as complete as Winston's — and she had further to fall, having trusted her body as a fortress.

A large, dark, burly man with thick spectacles and a manner of subtle gravity. Inner Party member who has spent years constructing the Brotherhood trap. O'Brien is genuinely the most intelligent character in the novel — he understands the system he serves with complete clarity and believes in it without contradiction. He is not cruel from personal sadism but from genuine conviction that power for its own sake is the only honest political program. His relationship with Winston contains something close to affection, which makes him more disturbing, not less.

Never appears in person — only on posters, telescreens, and in the Party's mythology. He may not exist as an individual. He is the necessary face of the Party's power — warm, patriarchal, infallible. The telescreen's mustachioed gaze covers every wall. Big Brother is the brand identity of totalitarianism: the abstraction of power given a human face so that love can be directed at it. 'He loved Big Brother' is the novel's last sentence because Big Brother is the last thing standing.

Winston's neighbour in Victory Mansions — sweaty, good-natured, unthinkingly loyal, devoted to the Party's athletic and social organisations. Parsons is the prole-adjacent outer-Party member the system was designed to produce: hardworking, enthusiastic, incapable of doubt. When he is arrested for thoughtcrime — his own daughter reported him for muttering 'Down with Big Brother' in his sleep — he accepts the arrest with genuine pride. He hopes they'll shoot him before the trial. Parsons is not a victim of the system; he IS the system, its most successful product.

A philologist working on the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak dictionary. Syme loves the project of Newspeak with the enthusiasm of a craftsman — he finds genuine beauty in the destruction of vocabulary. Winston knows early that Syme will be vaporized: he is too intelligent, too articulate about what the Party is doing. One day Syme stops appearing in the canteen. His name disappears from the chess club roster. He has become an unperson. Winston never mentions it.

The Party's designated arch-enemy — a former Inner Party member whose face provides the target for the Two Minutes Hate. Whether Goldstein exists, whether the Brotherhood exists, whether the book attributed to him ('The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism') was written by him or by the Party — all of this is uncertain. O'Brien implies the Brotherhood is a fiction. Even Goldstein may be a fiction. The Party needs an enemy more than it needs a real one.

Apparently an elderly widower who runs an antique shop in the prole quarter. Charming, nostalgic, fond of old nursery rhymes, willing to rent Winston the room above his shop. His apparent harmlessness is the trap. When the Thought Police burst in, Charrington enters behind them — forty years younger, black-haired, alert. He was never the old man. The performance was perfect. Orwell uses Charrington to argue that the most dangerous surveillance is the kind that presents as friendship.