jaylar
Winston is being tortured. He his tied to a bed, lights in his face, O’Brien standing at one side, a man in a white coat, holding a hypodermic syringe on the other.
Winston is confused, uncertain of everything.
From that first blow on the elbow the nightmare had begun. Winston had been tortured. made to confess.
Always there were five or six men in black uniforms at him simultaneously. Sometimes it was fists, sometimes it was truncheons, sometimes it was steel rods, sometimes it was boots.
The torture is described in detail. Then the beatings grew less frequent and became more a threat. His questioners changed to Party intellectuals, who worked on him in relays over long periods.
Winston was kept in constant slight pain, but it was not chiefly pain his torturers relied on. They slapped his face, wrung his ears, pulled his hair, made him stand on one leg, refused him leave to urinate, shone glaring lights in his face until his eyes ran with water; but the aim of this was simply to humiliate him and destroy his power of arguing and reasoning.
Their real weapon was the merciless questioning that went on and on, hour after hour, twisting everything he said, convicting him at every step of lies and self-contradiction until he began weeping as much from shame as from nervous fatigue.
Sometimes they would suddenly call him comrade, appeal to him in the name of Ingsoc and Big Brother, and ask him sorrowfully whether even now he had not enough loyalty to the Party left to make him wish to undo the evil he had done.
Winston became a mouth that uttered, a hand that signed whatever was demanded of him. His sole concern was to find out what they wanted him to confess, and then confess it quickly, before the bullying started anew.
