It's a terrible novel. It's iconic, I'll give you that, but there are lots of badly-written, yet iconic books. (Looking at you Bukowski) The main character isn't complex at all. There's no depth at all to Winston. He's not a revolutionary in any fashion whatsoever. I didn't realize the extent to which he was a complete author-insert until I read Johnston's essay though. I wasn't expecting a political treatise, but I would have liked a better thought out world with characters that have actual motivations. The only character with any kind of motivation at all in the whole book is O'Brian.
>The main character isn't complex at all. There's no depth at all to Winston.
Of course everyone has their own response to any piece of art but I find this criticism very surprising. Even the "takedown" article you posted pretty clearly shows Winston to be a complex character (especially in relation to the role he is cast in):
"From the very beginning of his supposed revolt against the Party, Winston simply assumes that he will not be victorious"
"Winston’s revolt against the situation is based in large part on his sense of physical disgust with icky surroundings, far more (I would argue) than it’s based on any coherent ideological or humanitarian critique... Winston is repelled more by the crappy cigarettes, and the fact that people use ugly English, and the malodorous sweatiness of Parsons, and the nastiness of the food, and the forgetting of nursery rhymes, than he is by the way the system he lives in is forcing people to live as slaves in terror of death and torture."
"Winston’s sexuality is really weird, mixed up as it is with his general uninterest in other people, his contempt for the Party and a general dislike of women"
"The closest Winston comes to thinking that there is any hope of positive social change is when he thinks about the proles; but he doesn’t know any proles, he doesn’t like being around them, he thinks they smell (of course), he doesn’t believe that they are capable of independent thought or action, and what ‘faith’ he has in them is shown to be completely groundless and abstract"
"As would-be rebels go, Winston is strikingly inactive and incurious. When Winston and Julia form their little two-person cell, do they talk to each other about the world they live in, and try to figure out its true nature, and what, if anything, they can do to shake the system? No. They have sex and drink black market coffee."
Seems like a pretty complex guy to me, and much more interesting as a character than the ideologically motivated revolutionary that Johnston seems to want him to be.
