1984 Reading Journal Part III

Unfortunately, it does seem that Big Brother-whether he really exists or not-has won. When Winston tried to rebel (moving up from simply thoughtcrime to joining what he thought was the Brotherhood and being involved with Julia, who was not his wife), he was captured and tortured into insanity, believing the idiocy that the Party forced upon him. Big Brother seems to represent the (Inner) Party as a whole, with the thoughts that power is all that matters and that pain is necessary for power; unfortunately, they have almost completely succeeded in these endeavors. People have completely lost all freedoms except the freedom to live-they can't choose what they eat, where they work, who they marry, etc. The Party has manipulated the society so that if anyone rebels against this, they are vaporized; people are trained to accept everything and to block out any and all contradicting thoughts.
At the end of the novel, Winston is an alcoholic (or as close as one can be, considering that the only substance is victory gin)-"The [gin] grew not less but more horrible with every mouthful he drank. But it had become the element he swam in. It was his life, his death, and his resurrection. It was gin that sank him into stupor every night, and gin that revived him every morning. When he woke, seldom before eleven hundred, with gummed-up eyelids and a fiery mouth and a back that seemed to be broken, it would have been impossible even to rise from the horizontal if it had not been for the bottle and teacup placed beside the bed overnight. Through the mid-day hours he sat with a glazed face, the bottle handy, listening to the telescreen." The Party drove him not only to this insane dependency on gin through the torture they forced him to endure but also to the instinct, ironically, to love Big Brother. Somehow, through the Winston's screaming for the rats to go to Julia, he was changed to value the things that the Party values, and to think that he had been wrong in opposing the party at all. Unfortunately, it is assumed that Winston then deteriorates into nothing from this sad state until he dies. Despite all of his efforts, the Party has won.