1984 11

"Winston shrank back upon the bed. Whatever he said, the swift answer crushed him like a bludgeon. And ye he knew, he knew, that he was in the right. The belief that nothing exists outside your own mind - surely there must be some way of demonstrating that it was false. Had it not been exposed long ago as a fallacy?" (266)

This is the first sign that what O'Brien is dictating to Winston is actually making an impression on him. The idea that nothing exists in memory and that history isn't real is a hard idea for Winston to grasp, and he even tries to remember the word for such actions, but he can't. It's a sign that his memories are slipping, and that he doesn't believe in what he originally believed in anymore. Orwell cleverly writes Winston's gradual slip into submission. From here on in the rest of the book, things just get worse and less believable for Winston, and in the end, he believes everything O'Brien has told him.