Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [887]

The beatings grew less frequent, and became mainly a threat, a horror to which he could be sent back at any moment when his answers were unsatisfactory. His questioners now were not ruffians in black uniforms but Party intellectuals, little rotund men with quick movements and flashing spectacles, who worked on him in relays over periods which lasted – he thought, he could not be sure – ten or twelve hours at a stretch. These other questioners saw to it that he was in constant slight pain, but it was not chiefly pain that they relied on. They slapped his face, wrung his ears, pulled his hair, made him stand on one leg, refused him leave to urinate, shone glaring lights in his face until his eyes ran with water; but the aim of this was simply to humiliate him and destroy his power of arguing and reasoning. Their real weapon was the merciless questioning that went on and on, hour after hour, tripping him up, laying traps for him, twisting everything that he said, convicting him at every step of lies and self-contradiction, until he began weeping as much from shame as from nervous fatigue. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 887

Note

The passage names the true instrument of control as verbal disembowelment rather than physical abuse — ‘destroy his power of arguing and reasoning’ — and locates the breaking point in shame, not pain. The catalogue of petty humiliations (refused leave to urinate, glaring lights) shows how the state dismantles the rational self that the reader’s own purpose treats as the internalized-panopticon target.