(contains some spoilers)
George Orwell is illustrating Winston Smith, the main character of 1984 as the last seed of hope. According to Wikipedia, George Orwell originally planned to name the book The Last Man in Europe but later changed the title.
Winston just might have been the'last man' in Europe. in this book, 'man' means
a person who hasn't yet lost their true conscience, their true-to-human human mind, and someone who overlooks the setups, evil doings, lies and brainwashing that the Party create and overtake. Throughout the plot, the reader can have a thorough lookout on how Winston starts off hating the Party but in the process of finding someone with similar thoughts to him, getting betrayed by the people he trusted and getting his cover blown, you can see how the Party eliminates mindsets like his. You can see how minutely they plot his capture and watch his every move, facial expression and thought, and in the end captures him and puts him in the ministry of love. In the ministry of Love, he is tortured and brainwashed. Through beating, starving and putting him through drastic pain, he confesses to crimes he did not commit, admits that 2+2=5, and is slowly brainwashed to the point that he is convinced that the Party will not stop for power. He is convinced that every document that he falsely corrected had never existed, he is convinced that the past belongs to whoever writes it, whoever has a hold of power.
The saddest thing in my personal opinion, is that he starts to think(as a result of the brainwashing) that the flashes of memories that he used to have, the ones he had about his mother and his little sister, where he took chocolate from his starving baby sister's hands, where he saw the last happy memory of the three of them, sitting in their small living room with a dusty board game in front of them, laughing as they slid down two squares and sometimes went up a square. When Winston convinced himself that these memories were nothing but hallucinations, it was like the last bit of hope , the last bits of the true past were gone. Those memories were swimming in the surface of his conscious mind, waiting to be pulled out and put into the light so they could help recover the world from lies and nothingness. When he was forced to pushed those memories down, it was like the last shred of hope had vanished and the world in the reign of Big Brother would last for ever.
At the end, Winston appears sitting in a cafe, as an alcoholic. It makes the reader wonder if there will ever be, and how there might ever be hope for the fictional world of Oceania.
In the end his joy for his own spontaneous love of big brother represents Winston's final destruction, his final breakdown that the ministry of love intended to accomplish. It is old Winston's last defeat and the new Winston's, and the Party's final victory.
