1984: Similes 11 key examples

In this chapter, the narrator writes that Winston feels "as shameless as an animal, writhing his body this way and that in an endless, hopeless effort to dodge the kicks." In another simile, Winston is "flung like a sack of potatoes onto the stone floor of a cell." He feels like his nerves are "in rags" and also feels reduced to his singular body parts: "He became simply a mouth that uttered, a hand that signed whatever was demanded of him." This last example is not only an example of metaphor, but also of metonymy, as Winston is figuratively reduced to his constituent parts. Such metonymy works well with the dehumanization and suffering that Winston goes through, as it captures the way he feels himself broken down into fragments. Unable to do more than confess whatever they want him to confess, he feels a connection only to the parts of himself that play a part in his surrender. Over the course of this chapter, Winston gradually loses possession of himself as a human being—and even as a consistent whole.

Animal analogies are not only a motif in this specific novel, but in Orwell's work overall. For example, in his allegorical novella Animal Farm, he uses anthropomorphized animal characters to criticize human society and political systems. In 1984, Orwell uses animal analogies to shed light on the inhumane nature of totalitarian governance, suggesting that the ability to feel compassion for others and think for oneself distinguishes people from animals. The comparisons also feel appropriate in the novel's propagandistic atmosphere, as propaganda cartoons often depict animals to criticize leaders, armies, and people. 

The first book includes many instances in which the narrator compares characters to animals. For example, when Goldstein appears on the telescreen during the Two Minutes Hate, the narrator compares his face to that of a sheep, specifying that "the voice, too, has a sheeplike quality." At first, the similarity seems to be limited to simile and metaphor. Eventually, however, it becomes evident that the sheep resemblance is intended by the Party members who have created the footage of Goldstein, as his bleating voice turns into "an actual sheep's bleat, and for an instant the face changed into that of a sheep." The sheep comparison is, in some ways, rather ironic. While similes and metaphors revolving around sheep tend to connote the inability to think for oneself, the Party's issue with Goldstein is precisely that he thinks and acts independently of their will.

When Winston reflects back on people's responses to the telescreens during the Two Minutes Hate, the passage includes other animal analogies. There was, for example, a "little sandy-haired woman" whose mouth opened and shut "like that of a landed fish." In addition, the dark-haired girl cries "Swine! Swine! Swine!" at the screen. 

At lunch in the canteen later that day, Winston seems to be surrounded by animals. To begin with, he is struck by how a man at a nearby table sounds like a duck: "The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck." In the same chapter, the narrator calls Winston's neighbor Parsons "froglike" and a man sitting on the other side of the room "beetlelike." Winston finds it curious how the Ministries is full of the latter: "little dumpy men, growing stout very early in life, with short legs, swift scuttling movements, and fat inscrutable faces with very small eyes." None of these animal comparisons give a positive impression of the characters surrounding Winston: the man who sounds like a duck is characterized as a propaganda machine, unable to think for himself; Parsons is characterized as clueless and slimy; the Ministry men are characterized as dirty and fickle.

Later in the novel, the specific metaphors and similes give way to more general animal analogies. Especially during Winston's torture in the third part, the narrator compares characters to animals in general. When the Skull-Faced Man is sent to Room 101, he begins howling "like an animal." Winston himself becomes "as shameless as an animal." The specific animal analogies in the beginning of the novel indicate that, under the totalitarian system, people are robbed of their humanity. The more general animal analogies at the end show that once they become prisoners and victims, people also lose their individuality. 

Asking the reader to imagine the sound made by a large machine that runs without oil, this simile contributes to the grueling sensory experience that is otherwise evoked by the auditory imagery. Through it, Orwell alludes to a common idiom in the English language that compares things to a "well-oiled machine," but he turns it on its head.

Another mechanical simile appears later in the scene:

A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.

Cite this Quote

Comparing the people's overpowering negative emotions and violent urges to an electric current, Orwell underlines the dangerous consequences of a society in which people have been robbed of the ability to think for themselves. The Party controls the emotional states of its members as though they were machines, or parts of an electric circuit. Even Winston, who is secretly critical of the Party and the events unfolding around him, finds it "impossible to avoid joining in."

At the end of a passage in which Winston reflects on the destruction of the past, he uses a metaphor to compare history to mist. While one can see and sometimes lightly feel mist, it cannot be captured. Mainly, it limits normal visibility. The past in Winston's world is not only nebulous, but adds to the obscurity of other aspects of life. Without a clear, verifiable knowledge of where one comes from, it is difficult to know where one is headed.

In the fourth chapter of the first book, this conception of the past is consolidated by a new metaphor. As Winston sits at his work desk making corrections to past records so that they correspond with the present, it occurs to him that history is like a palimpsest:

All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.

Cite this Quote

A palimpsest is a manuscript page that has been scraped or wiped clean for the purpose of reuse. "Palimpsest" derives from an Ancient Greek word that means "scrape again," and it points to the ancient practice of reusing wax-coated tablets by smoothing them off after writing on them with a stylus. By comparing history to a palimpsest, Winston expresses that the Party uses the past at their whim: they tell a certain version of history while it works with their goals, until they wipe this version away in favor of a new, preferable version.

In the seventh chapter of the first book, another comparison occurs to Winston. With a simile, he compares the past to an unsolvable equation.

It was like a single equation with two unknowns. It might very well be that literally every word in the history books, even the things that one accepted without question, was pure fantasy.

Cite this Quote

Typically, a mathematical equation requires you to solve for one unknown variable. A single equation with two unknowns does not have a single solution. Through this simile, Winston captures the meaninglessness of the reality enforced by the Party. When the past is an unknown and the present is an unknown, it seems impossible to reach any stable, objective conclusions about the world. He then reinvokes the mist metaphor from the third chapter: "Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth." Not only is Winston exasperated at having to witness this cycle, he is forced to play a part in it every day at work.

At the end of a passage in which Winston reflects on the destruction of the past, he uses a metaphor to compare history to mist. While one can see and sometimes lightly feel mist, it cannot be captured. Mainly, it limits normal visibility. The past in Winston's world is not only nebulous, but adds to the obscurity of other aspects of life. Without a clear, verifiable knowledge of where one comes from, it is difficult to know where one is headed.

In the fourth chapter of the first book, this conception of the past is consolidated by a new metaphor. As Winston sits at his work desk making corrections to past records so that they correspond with the present, it occurs to him that history is like a palimpsest:

All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.

Cite this Quote

A palimpsest is a manuscript page that has been scraped or wiped clean for the purpose of reuse. "Palimpsest" derives from an Ancient Greek word that means "scrape again," and it points to the ancient practice of reusing wax-coated tablets by smoothing them off after writing on them with a stylus. By comparing history to a palimpsest, Winston expresses that the Party uses the past at their whim: they tell a certain version of history while it works with their goals, until they wipe this version away in favor of a new, preferable version.

In the seventh chapter of the first book, another comparison occurs to Winston. With a simile, he compares the past to an unsolvable equation.

It was like a single equation with two unknowns. It might very well be that literally every word in the history books, even the things that one accepted without question, was pure fantasy.

Cite this Quote

Typically, a mathematical equation requires you to solve for one unknown variable. A single equation with two unknowns does not have a single solution. Through this simile, Winston captures the meaninglessness of the reality enforced by the Party. When the past is an unknown and the present is an unknown, it seems impossible to reach any stable, objective conclusions about the world. He then reinvokes the mist metaphor from the third chapter: "Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth." Not only is Winston exasperated at having to witness this cycle, he is forced to play a part in it every day at work.

At the end of a passage in which Winston reflects on the destruction of the past, he uses a metaphor to compare history to mist. While one can see and sometimes lightly feel mist, it cannot be captured. Mainly, it limits normal visibility. The past in Winston's world is not only nebulous, but adds to the obscurity of other aspects of life. Without a clear, verifiable knowledge of where one comes from, it is difficult to know where one is headed.

In the fourth chapter of the first book, this conception of the past is consolidated by a new metaphor. As Winston sits at his work desk making corrections to past records so that they correspond with the present, it occurs to him that history is like a palimpsest:

All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.

Cite this Quote

A palimpsest is a manuscript page that has been scraped or wiped clean for the purpose of reuse. "Palimpsest" derives from an Ancient Greek word that means "scrape again," and it points to the ancient practice of reusing wax-coated tablets by smoothing them off after writing on them with a stylus. By comparing history to a palimpsest, Winston expresses that the Party uses the past at their whim: they tell a certain version of history while it works with their goals, until they wipe this version away in favor of a new, preferable version.

In the seventh chapter of the first book, another comparison occurs to Winston. With a simile, he compares the past to an unsolvable equation.

It was like a single equation with two unknowns. It might very well be that literally every word in the history books, even the things that one accepted without question, was pure fantasy.

Cite this Quote

Typically, a mathematical equation requires you to solve for one unknown variable. A single equation with two unknowns does not have a single solution. Through this simile, Winston captures the meaninglessness of the reality enforced by the Party. When the past is an unknown and the present is an unknown, it seems impossible to reach any stable, objective conclusions about the world. He then reinvokes the mist metaphor from the third chapter: "Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth." Not only is Winston exasperated at having to witness this cycle, he is forced to play a part in it every day at work.

The seventh chapter of the first book opens with a line Winston writes in his diary about his hope in the proles. It occurs to him that, to overthrow the Party, the proles would merely need to "rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies." In this simile, Winston juxtaposes the might of the proles with the might of the Party. He sees the proles as a powerful and majestic horse, and the Party as an irksome but insignificant insect. However, he recognizes that, for the time being, the proles lack consciousness of this power. The horse has yet to realize that it has the ability to dispose of the tiresome fly.

As Winston's reflections continue in the same chapter, the reader learns that the Party also views the proles through animal comparisons:

[...] the Party taught that the proles were natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals, by the application of a few simple rules.

Cite this Quote

There is something ironic to the Party seeing the proles as animals. While they make this comparison in order to emphasize the inferior status of the proles, the comparison simultaneously emphasizes the proles' power. If the proles both comprise the majority of the population of Oceania and are like animals, they surely have more than enough power to overthrow the current system. From Winston's perspective, the narrator elaborates on the Party's stance on the proles:

So long as they continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern. 

Cite this Quote

In the eyes of the Party, the proles are like farm animals, in that their only function is to work the land and produce offspring. To capture the proles' habituation, the narrator compares them to cattle that have been introduced to a foreign landscape. Although nothing in the post-revolutionary world is natural, the proles seem to live in the same way as they always have.

In the following chapter, Winston compares the proles to yet another animal that is associated with hard work:

They remembered a million useless things, a quarrel with a workmate, a hunt for a lost bicycle pump, the expression on a long-dead sister’s face, the swirls of dust on a windy morning seventy years ago; but all the relevant facts were outside the range of their vision. They were like the ant, which can see small objects but not large ones.

Cite this Quote

Although Winston invests his hope in the proles, all three of the animal comparisons are based in some degree of condescension. He sees them as a horse—but a horse that fails to realize how to get rid of flies that pester it. He also sees them as cattle—but cattle that has unknowingly been cut off from its natural environment and development. He sees them as an ant—but an ant that is blind to the bigger picture. Although these animals are more neutral bases of comparison than those often used to describe Party members, Winston has limited faith in the likelihood of their political awakening and mass uprising.

The seventh chapter of the first book opens with a line Winston writes in his diary about his hope in the proles. It occurs to him that, to overthrow the Party, the proles would merely need to "rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies." In this simile, Winston juxtaposes the might of the proles with the might of the Party. He sees the proles as a powerful and majestic horse, and the Party as an irksome but insignificant insect. However, he recognizes that, for the time being, the proles lack consciousness of this power. The horse has yet to realize that it has the ability to dispose of the tiresome fly.

As Winston's reflections continue in the same chapter, the reader learns that the Party also views the proles through animal comparisons:

[...] the Party taught that the proles were natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals, by the application of a few simple rules.

Cite this Quote

There is something ironic to the Party seeing the proles as animals. While they make this comparison in order to emphasize the inferior status of the proles, the comparison simultaneously emphasizes the proles' power. If the proles both comprise the majority of the population of Oceania and are like animals, they surely have more than enough power to overthrow the current system. From Winston's perspective, the narrator elaborates on the Party's stance on the proles:

So long as they continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern. 

Cite this Quote

In the eyes of the Party, the proles are like farm animals, in that their only function is to work the land and produce offspring. To capture the proles' habituation, the narrator compares them to cattle that have been introduced to a foreign landscape. Although nothing in the post-revolutionary world is natural, the proles seem to live in the same way as they always have.

In the following chapter, Winston compares the proles to yet another animal that is associated with hard work:

They remembered a million useless things, a quarrel with a workmate, a hunt for a lost bicycle pump, the expression on a long-dead sister’s face, the swirls of dust on a windy morning seventy years ago; but all the relevant facts were outside the range of their vision. They were like the ant, which can see small objects but not large ones.

Cite this Quote

Although Winston invests his hope in the proles, all three of the animal comparisons are based in some degree of condescension. He sees them as a horse—but a horse that fails to realize how to get rid of flies that pester it. He also sees them as cattle—but cattle that has unknowingly been cut off from its natural environment and development. He sees them as an ant—but an ant that is blind to the bigger picture. Although these animals are more neutral bases of comparison than those often used to describe Party members, Winston has limited faith in the likelihood of their political awakening and mass uprising.

In this simile, Julia's bad language is the sneeze, and the Party is the bad hay. There is nothing performative in her expression of disgust against the government. Rather, her language feels natural, which makes Winston feel validated in his political unorthodoxy. 

As Winston and Julia keep meeting and getting to know each other, he becomes increasingly familiar with her views. In the third chapter of the second book, he recognizes that she has little political interest in the Party and its doctrine. Additionally, she finds any sort of organized revolt "stupid." This brings Winston to wonder how common these apolitical views are among younger Party members:

He wondered vaguely how many others like her there might be in the younger generation—people who had grown up in the world of the Revolution, knowing nothing else, accepting the Party as something unalterable, like the sky, not rebelling against its authority but simply evading it, as a rabbit dodges a dog.

Cite this Quote

Once again, Winston uses an animal simile to make sense of Julia's opposition to the government. Like a horse sneezing when it comes across bad hay, a rabbit dodging a dog represents an organic reaction in the animal world. On the one hand, Winston is pleased to witness the natural vehemence in Julia's resistance to the Party and its dogma. On the other hand, his own resistance is far from apolitical—his dislike for the party runs deeper than his dislike for the ways in which it negatively impacts his everyday life.

Nevertheless, Winston finds relief and inspiration in the opportunity to discuss his dissent with another person. In his dystopian world, difference of opinion is impossible. Between Winston and Julia, difference of opinion is engaging and valuable.

In this simile, Julia's bad language is the sneeze, and the Party is the bad hay. There is nothing performative in her expression of disgust against the government. Rather, her language feels natural, which makes Winston feel validated in his political unorthodoxy. 

As Winston and Julia keep meeting and getting to know each other, he becomes increasingly familiar with her views. In the third chapter of the second book, he recognizes that she has little political interest in the Party and its doctrine. Additionally, she finds any sort of organized revolt "stupid." This brings Winston to wonder how common these apolitical views are among younger Party members:

He wondered vaguely how many others like her there might be in the younger generation—people who had grown up in the world of the Revolution, knowing nothing else, accepting the Party as something unalterable, like the sky, not rebelling against its authority but simply evading it, as a rabbit dodges a dog.

Cite this Quote

Once again, Winston uses an animal simile to make sense of Julia's opposition to the government. Like a horse sneezing when it comes across bad hay, a rabbit dodging a dog represents an organic reaction in the animal world. On the one hand, Winston is pleased to witness the natural vehemence in Julia's resistance to the Party and its dogma. On the other hand, his own resistance is far from apolitical—his dislike for the party runs deeper than his dislike for the ways in which it negatively impacts his everyday life.

Nevertheless, Winston finds relief and inspiration in the opportunity to discuss his dissent with another person. In his dystopian world, difference of opinion is impossible. Between Winston and Julia, difference of opinion is engaging and valuable.

In this simile, the grain of corn is the Party's worldview, which it disseminates through propaganda on the telescreens. The body of the bird is the acquiescent masses. In Winston's view, the masses embrace the Party's propaganda as easily as a bird swallows a piece of corn. However, this figurative corn goes undigested because the masses do not bother putting in the effort to chew and break down the corn. The undigested nature of the corn points to the masses' inability to question ideas that are fed to them. For Winston, it is especially concerning that people possess the ability to question these ideas, but lack the interest to do so.

As the narrator points out in the passage, the lack of understanding—the non-digestion of the corn—is a way of staying sane. Although Winston loathes people's apathy, he recognizes that self-induced blindness can act as a form of protection in a totalitarian system. When freedom is not an option, closing one's eyes to their lack of freedom—and thereby neglecting to question it—becomes necessary for self-preservation.

The end of this chapter shows that, although they love each other and take comfort in their broadly similar stances, Winston and Julia have starkly different approaches to opposition. Whenever Winston wants to discuss the Party's doctrine, Julia falls asleep. She feels little interest in solidarity and mass resistance, showing much more concern for how she can sabotage the Party's control in her immediate, everyday life.

This simile, in which Julia is compared to a pocket ruler, contributes to the characters' dehumanization. Already, the narrator has encapsulated it from Winston's point of view: "The feeling of nakedness, with one's hands behind one's head and one's face and body all exposed, was almost unbearable." As the men beat Julia and Winston, they do not engage with them as humans, but as objects. The ruler comparison also offers the reader an image of Julia's body. Her position reminds Winston of the type of ruler that you can fold up to fit into your pocket. This indicates that her body is both stiff and contorted; she is being twisted up in ways a body isn't supposed to be, powerless over her movements and positions.

Soon after, a second simile replaces the image of her stiffness, describing her as limp:

Then two of the men hoisted her up by knees and shoulders, and carried her out of the room like a sack. Winston had a glimpse of her face, upside down, yellow and contorted, with the eyes shut, and still with a smear of rouge on either cheek; and that was the last he saw of her.

Cite this Quote

No longer a pocket ruler, Julia has become a sack. She is lifeless and colorless as the men carry her out of the room. Even her face—yellow and contorted—has been removed of its usual vivacity and color. It is symbolic that the last time Winston lays eyes on Julia, she has no energy or agency—she is even upside down. Their relationship, and life as they know it, is literally turned on its head.

This simile, which compares O'Brien's fingers to pillars, emphasizes his power over Winston. Whereas Winston is reduced to an immobile body fastened to a bed and subjected to intense pain, O'Brien towers over him like a large building. Pillars are symbols of power. Moreover, they are known to stand the test of time, as pillars are often what remain of temples and architecture from Ancient Greece and other ancient civilizations. By comparing O'Brien's fingers to pillars, Orwell is juxtaposing his immense, timeless power with Winston's fragility. 

Only after posing the question nine times is O'Brien content with the answer he receives from Winston: "Four, five, six—in all honesty I don't know." Two and two making five becomes a symbol of the Party's power over reality. In the eyes of the Party, Winston's insistence on his own conception of reality makes him dangerous. His conviction in his private ideas is what O'Brien seeks to root out over the course of the third book.

In this part, Winston balances the knowledge that he is gazing at himself with an absolute sense of alienation. The narrator captures this through the impersonal diction of "a thing," "a creature," and "a face." The indefinite articles convey that he is not yet ready to claim what he sees as himself. Over the course of the passage, the narrator seems to be describing an animal skeleton or a ragged doll.

As the passage continues, the narrator narrows in on Winston's filthiness:

Except for his hands and a circle of his face, his body was gray all over with ancient, ingrained dirt. Here and there under the dirt there were the red scars of wounds, and near the ankle the varicose ulcer was an inflamed mass with flakes of skin peeling off it. But the truly frightening thing was the emaciation of his body. The barrel of the ribs was as narrow as that of a skeleton; the legs had shrunk so that the knees were thicker than the thighs.

Cite this Quote

For the reader, the grayness and grittiness of Winston's skin give it a tactile quality, which combines with the visual imagery of his splotchy scars. The disconcerting tactile and visual imagery is combined with similes to give the reader a fully fledged picture of what Winston looks like. His ribs are like that of a skeleton.

This passage marks a turning point for Winston, especially in his mental state. Although the long-term torture has been breaking him down, he has managed to retain a sense of himself. Once he sees what he looks like, he begins to fully comprehend what he has gone through—and will continue to go through—at the hands of the Party. O'Brien uses this tactic to show how degraded Winston is, after he claims that he is superior to the Party. He shows Winston what he sees when he looks at him, pointing out his grime, dirt, stink, emaciation, baldness, and tooth loss. He tells Winston that he is nothing but a bag of filth, at which point Winston collapses and begins to weep. 

In this simile, Winston is the swimmer and the current is the Party. The novel's first two books tell the story of Winston swimming against the current; the third book shows his gradual relinquishment. By the very end of the novel, he swims with the current in unquestioning bliss. 

The richness of this simile comes from its corporeality: any reader who knows how to swim can feel, with their own body, how Winston feels. Swimming against a current requires a large amount of energy, so it feels soothing when you finally give in and let the current carry you. Perhaps this shift in force makes you wonder why you didn't relinquish sooner, or why you ever tried at all.

However, alongside this soothing quality, the simile also holds an implicit connotation of danger. Usually, people have an explicit reason for swimming against a current. Perhaps there is a waterfall down the river that one must avoid, perhaps one is being pulled out to sea, perhaps one is being dragged in the direction of a whirlpool. Giving in to the current often means giving in to danger, because one has lost the energy to fight. This appears to be the case for Winston: absolutely broken down, he lacks any will to resist the Party's wishes.

Another element to note is that the comparison between the Party and the current suggests, rather ironically, that the Party and Ingsoc are forces of nature. Reminiscent of propaganda, this reveals just how brainwashed Winston has become. Whereas the simile casts his former resistance as unnatural, the totalitarian state becomes part of the natural flow.