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
Nineteen Eighty-Four before publication, Orwell wrote about hesitating between that title and "Nineteen Eighty-Four". Warburg suggested choosing the main title to be the latter, a more commercial one. In his 1978 novel "1985", English author Anthony Burgess suggests that Orwell, disillusioned by the onset of the Cold War (1945–91), intended to call the book "1948". The introduction to the Penguin Books Modern Classics edition of "Nineteen Eighty-Four" reports that Orwell originally set the novel in 1980 but that he later shifted the date to 1982 and then to 1984. The introduction to the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt edition of "Animal Farm and 1984"