Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [1076]

It might be ten minutes hence, or ten years. They might keep him for years in solitary confinement, they might send him to a labour-camp, they might release him for a while, as they sometimes did. It was perfectly possible that before he was shot the whole drama of his arrest and interrogation would be enacted all over again. The one certain thing was that death never came at an expected moment. The tradition – the unspoken tradition: somehow you knew it, though you never heard it said – was that they shot you from behind: always in the back of the head, without warning, as you walked down a corridor from cell to cell. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 1076

Note

The ‘unspoken tradition’ — knowledge transmitted without ever being said — is a chilling note on how terror propagates through the Ministry. Death from behind, walking a corridor, frames the body as permanently vulnerable in transit, a detail that prefigures the novel’s end.