O'Brien (Nineteen Eighty-Four) O'Brien (Nineteen Eighty-Four) O'Brien (known as O'Connor in the 1956 film adaptation of the novel) is a fictional character and the main antagonist in George Orwell's novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four". The protagonist Winston Smith, living in a dystopian society governed by the Party, feels strangely drawn to Inner Party member O'Brien. Orwell never reveals O'Brien's first name. O'Brien is a member of the Inner Party and, like Winston Smith, works in the Ministry of Truth. There, he holds an administrative position that is so distant that Winston has only a vague idea of its nature. Winston suspects that O'Brien secretly opposes
George Orwell bibliography as a left-wing anti-totalitarian. As he explained in the essay "Why I Write" (1946), "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it." To that end Orwell used his fiction as well as his journalism to defend his political convictions. He first achieved widespread acclaim with his fictional novella "Animal Farm" and cemented his place in history with the publication of "Nineteen Eighty-Four" shortly before his death. While fiction accounts for a small fraction of his total output, these two novels are