Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [1005]

‘You are thinking,’ he said, ‘that my face is old and tired. You are thinking that I talk of power, and yet I am not even able to prevent the decay of my own body. Can you not understand, Winston, that the individual is only a cell? The weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism. Do you die when you cut your fingernails?’ — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 1005

Note

O’Brien pre-empts Winston’s thought and dissolves it with the cell/organism metaphor — a neat dramatization of the totalitarian move that reconceives the individual as disposable tissue in a larger body. The fingernail question makes the abstraction unnervingly concrete.