Nineteen Eighty-Four the novel, Winston Smith, is a rank-and-file Party member. Smith is an outwardly diligent and skillful worker, but he secretly hates the Party and dreams of rebellion against Big Brother. Smith rebels by entering a forbidden relationship with fellow employee Julia. As literary political fiction and dystopian science-fiction, "Nineteen Eighty-Four" is a classic novel in content, plot, and style. Many of its terms and concepts, such as "Big Brother", "doublethink", "thoughtcrime", "Newspeak", "Room 101", "telescreen", "2 + 2 = 5", and "memory hole", have entered into common usage since its publication in 1949. "Nineteen Eighty-Four" popularised the adjective "Orwellian", which
Nations of Nineteen Eighty-Four better rendered as 'Obliteration of the Self'". Although Ego death is a common Jungian trope in mythology and is associated with Zen Buddhism, Orwell does not appear to have based this on any existing Chinese word or phrase. Regardless, like "Neo-Bolshevism" in Eurasia, "Obliteration of the Self" in Eastasia is a skewed, totalising ideology which parallels Ingsoc. "Obliteration of the self" is a major theme of "Nineteen Eighty-Four", and the phrase roughly sums up Ingsoc's goals. In Oceania, Ingsoc holds any sense of selfhood or individuality to be thoughtcrime, and every arm of the government works to promote the citizens'