Illuminator-Pt.2 Ch.7 - Important idea the book conveys

" If you mean confessing ", she said, " we shall do that, right enough. Everybody always confesses. You can't help it. They torture you. "

" I don't mean confessing. Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter: only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you - that would be the real betrayal. "

She thought it over. " They can't do that ", she said finally. " It's the one thing they can't do. They can make you say anything - anything - but they can't make you believe it. They can't get inside you. "

" No ", he said a little more hopefully, " no; that's quite true. They can't get inside you. If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them. "

...

Facts, at any rate, could not be kept hidden. They could be tracked down by enquiry, they could be squeezed out of you by torture. But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make ? They could not alter your feelings: for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.

This passage shows an important idea the book conveys, which is that nothing can change the way you feel. Julia and Winston talk about what they would do when they get caught, which is bound to happen sooner or later. They know that they can't help it if they confess everything, because the Party would have ways of obtaining that information through variations of torture. However, they agree to not truly betray one another, which means that they wouldn't stop loving one another. They weren't going to let the Party alter their feelings for one another, as Winston thought, "They could not alter your feelings: for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to." No matter what they did to them, they could never change their love for one another, and they knew that their love would be invincible any external damage.