Part 3: Chapter III - Nineteen Eighty-Four

"2 + 2 = 5. "They can't get inside you," she had said. But they could get inside you. "What happens to you here is forever," O'Brien had said. That was a true word. There were things, your own acts, from which you could not recover. Something was killed in your breast; burnt out, cauterized out."   The final chapter of George Orwell's dystopian nightmare masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Listen to episodes ad-free and get other benefits on my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/BayleysBookshelfPodcast   You can also support this podcast with a one-off donation at Buy Me A Coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/rjbayley If you’d like to send correspondence for me to read and discuss during an episode, or you would like to talk about me narrating your own audiobook or other voiceover services, you can contact via: Bluesky: @RJBayley https://bsky.app/profile/rjbayley.bsky.social Email: robertjbayley[AT]gmail.com Website contact form at RJBayley.com: https://rjbayley.com/contact/ Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/RJBayleyVoiceArtist/ This book is in the public domain and this production is entirely created and distributed in accordance with local laws. This audio production, however, is copyright to RJ Bayley 2025.

"You asked me once," said O'Brien, "what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world." The penultimate chapter of the increasingly non-fiction 1984. Listen to episodes ad-free and get other benefits on my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/BayleysBookshelfPodcast   You can also support this podcast with a one-off donation at Buy Me A Coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/rjbayley If you’d like to send correspondence for me to read and discuss during an episode, or you would like to talk about me narrating your own audiobook or other voiceover services, you can contact via: Bluesky: @RJBayley https://bsky.app/profile/rjbayley.bsky.social Email: robertjbayley[AT]gmail.com Website contact form at RJBayley.com: https://rjbayley.com/contact/ Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/RJBayleyVoiceArtist/ This book is in the public domain and this production is entirely created and distributed in accordance with local laws. This audio production, however, is copyright to RJ Bayley 2025.

"For the first time he perceived that if you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that could be given a name. From now onwards he must not only think right; he must feel right, dream right. And all the while he must keep his hatred locked up inside him like a ball of matter which was part of himself and yet unconnected with the rest of him, a kind of cyst."   Listen to episodes ad-free and get other benefits on my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/BayleysBookshelfPodcast   You can also support this podcast with a one-off donation at Buy Me A Coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/rjbayley If you’d like to send correspondence for me to read and discuss during an episode, or you would like to talk about me narrating your own audiobook or other voiceover services, you can contact via: Bluesky: @RJBayley https://bsky.app/profile/rjbayley.bsky.social Email: robertjbayley[AT]gmail.com Website contact form at RJBayley.com: https://rjbayley.com/contact/ Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/RJBayleyVoiceArtist/ This book is in the public domain and this production is entirely created and distributed in accordance with local laws. This audio production, however, is copyright to RJ Bayley 2025.

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever." Listen to episodes ad-free and get other benefits on my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/BayleysBookshelfPodcast You can also support this podcast with a one-off donation at Buy Me A Coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/rjbayley If you’d like to send correspondence for me to read and discuss during an episode, or you would like to talk about me narrating your own audiobook or other voiceover services, you can contact via: Bluesky: @RJBayley https://bsky.app/profile/rjbayley.bsky.social Email: robertjbayley[AT]gmail.com Website contact form at RJBayley.com: https://rjbayley.com/contact/ Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/RJBayleyVoiceArtist/ This book is in the public domain and this production is entirely created and distributed in accordance with local laws. This audio production, however, is copyright to RJ Bayley 2025.

"We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill him. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be. Even in the instant of death we cannot permit any deviation. In the old days the heretic walked to the stake still a heretic, proclaiming his heresy, exulting in it. Even the victim of the Russian purges could carry rebellion locked up in his skull as he walked down the passage waiting for the bullet. But we make the brain perfect before we blow it out. The command of the old despotisms was 'Thou shalt not.' The command of the totalitarians was 'Thou shalt.' Our command is 'Thou art.'" Listen to episodes ad-free and get other benefits on my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/BayleysBookshelfPodcast You can also support this podcast with a one-off donation at Buy Me A Coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/rjbayley If you’d like to send correspondence for me to read and discuss during an episode, or you would like to talk about me narrating your own audiobook or other voiceover services, you can contact via: Bluesky: @RJBayley https://bsky.app/profile/rjbayley.bsky.social Email: robertjbayley[AT]gmail.com Website contact form at RJBayley.com: https://rjbayley.com/contact/ Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/RJBayleyVoiceArtist/ This book is in the public domain and this production is entirely created and distributed in accordance with local laws. This audio production, however, is copyright to RJ Bayley 2025.

"Sometimes with a fading hope he thought of O'Brien and the razor blade. It was thinkable that the razor blade might arrive concealed in his food, if he were ever fed. More dimly he thought of Julia. Somewhere or other she was suffering, perhaps far worse than he. She might be screaming with pain at this moment." You know it's grimdark when your clinging onto the hope of being snuck a razorblade. Listen to episodes ad-free and get other benefits on my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/BayleysBookshelfPodcast You can also support this podcast with a one-off donation at Buy Me A Coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/rjbayley If you’d like to send correspondence for me to read and discuss during an episode, or you would like to talk about me narrating your own audiobook or other voiceover services, you can contact via: Bluesky: @RJBayley https://bsky.app/profile/rjbayley.bsky.social Email: robertjbayley[AT]gmail.com Website contact form at RJBayley.com: https://rjbayley.com/contact/ Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/RJBayleyVoiceArtist/ This book is in the public domain and this production is entirely created and distributed in accordance with local laws. This audio production, however, is copyright to RJ Bayley 2025.

"It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same—everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same—people who had never learned to think but who were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world. If there was hope, it lay in the proles!" Listen to episodes ad-free and get other benefits on my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/BayleysBookshelfPodcast You can also support this podcast with a one-off donation at Buy Me A Coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/rjbayley If you’d like to send correspondence for me to read and discuss during an episode, or you would like to talk about me narrating your own audiobook or other voiceover services, you can contact via: Bluesky: @RJBayley https://bsky.app/profile/rjbayley.bsky.social Email: robertjbayley[AT]gmail.com Website contact form at RJBayley.com: https://rjbayley.com/contact/ Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/RJBayleyVoiceArtist/ This book is in the public domain and this production is entirely created and distributed in accordance with local laws. This audio production, however, is copyright to RJ Bayley 2025.

"And in the general hardening of outlook that set in round about 1930, practices which had been long abandoned, in some cases for hundreds of years—imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages and the deportation of whole populations—not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive." Sincere apologies for the lateness of this. This is a beast of a chapter (that I love to be fair) and I was really burned out from finished another audiobook for a publisher along with juggling an influx of writing work and trying to sell my house! Thank you for bearing with me, normal service shall now resume. Listen to episodes ad-free and get other benefits on my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/BayleysBookshelfPodcast You can also support this podcast with a one-off donation at Buy Me A Coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/rjbayley If you’d like to send correspondence for me to read and discuss during an episode, or you would like to talk about me narrating your own audiobook or other voiceover services, you can contact via: Bluesky: @RJBayley https://bsky.app/profile/rjbayley.bsky.social Email: robertjbayley[AT]gmail.com Website contact form at RJBayley.com: https://rjbayley.com/contact/ Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/RJBayleyVoiceArtist/ This book is in the public domain and this production is entirely created and distributed in accordance with local laws. This audio production, however, is copyright to RJ Bayley 2025.

"You are prepared to give your lives?" "Yes." "You are prepared to commit murder?" "Yes." "To commit acts of sabotage which may cause the death of hundreds of innocent people?" "Yes." "To betray your country to foreign powers?" "Yes." "You are prepared to cheat, to forge, to blackmail, to corrupt the minds of children, to distribute habit-forming drugs, to encourage prostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases—to do anything which is likely to cause demoralization and weaken the power of the Party?" "Yes." "If, for example, it would somehow serve our interests to throw sulphuric acid in a child's face—are you prepared to do that?" "Yes." "You are prepared to lose your identity and live out the rest of your life as a waiter or a dock worker?" "Yes." "You are prepared to commit suicide, if and when we order you to do so?" "Yes." "You are prepared, the two of you, to separate and never see one another again?" Listen to episodes ad-free and get other benefits on my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/BayleysBookshelfPodcast You can also support this podcast with a one-off donation at Buy Me A Coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/rjbayley If you’d like to send correspondence for me to read and discuss during an episode, or you would like to talk about me narrating your own audiobook or other voiceover services, you can contact via: Bluesky: @RJBayley https://bsky.app/profile/rjbayley.bsky.social Email: robertjbayley[AT]gmail.com Website contact form at RJBayley.com: https://rjbayley.com/contact/ Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/RJBayleyVoiceArtist/ This book is in the public domain and this production is entirely created and distributed in accordance with local laws. This audio production, however, is copyright to RJ Bayley 2025.

"When once they get hold of us there will be nothing, literally nothing, that either of us can do for the other. If I confess, they'll shoot you, and if I refuse to confess they'll shoot you just the same. Nothing that I can do or say, or stop myself from saying, will put off your death for as much as five minutes. Neither of us will even know whether the other is alive or dead." Thank you Learned Librarian Patreon: Jon Listen to episodes ad-free and get other benefits on my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/BayleysBookshelfPodcast You can also support this podcast with a one-off donation at Buy Me A Coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/rjbayley If you’d like to send correspondence for me to read and discuss during an episode, or you would like to talk about me narrating your own audiobook or other voiceover services, you can contact via: Bluesky: @RJBayley https://bsky.app/profile/rjbayley.bsky.social Email: robertjbayley[AT]gmail.com Website contact form at RJBayley.com: https://rjbayley.com/contact/ Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/RJBayleyVoiceArtist/ This book is in the public domain and this production is entirely created and distributed in accordance with local laws. This audio production, however, is copyright to RJ Bayley 2025.