Now, when he dreams, even a daydream, it is about the state, and how he’d die for the state, but not for his love.

My problem was reading it casually and intermittently, as well as experiencing a plethora interruptions.

I had forgotten that O’brien snapped the rat’s cage shut, not open. Makes a big difference.

Still glad we got a chance to chat about it.

It is open to speculation but this makes more sense to me than his release being a dream or being sent back to the MOL for execution.

…the shouting outside had died down a little. The waiters were turning back to their work. One of them approached with the gin bottle.
Winston, sitting in a blissful dream, paid no attention as his glass was filled up. He was not running or cheering any longer. He was back in the Ministry of Love, with everything forgiven, his soul white as snow. He was in the public dock, confessing everything, implicating everybody. He was walking down the white-tiled corridor, with the feeling of walking in sunlight , and an armed guard at his back. The long-hoped-for bullet was entering his brain.

Orwell, George (1983-10-17). 1984 (pp. 637-638). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.

How did he instantly get from drinking a glass of gin in the cafe, to the MoL?

And, it was at the same instant he found himself cheering Oceania’s victory that he was shot. The instant he accepted Big Brother.

Winston is sitting in a bar, drinking gin, and remembering Julia and other things. His job at the Ministry is meaningless. His soul and values have been destroyed, which is how the real experts create totalitarianism. The narrative is very straightforward, actually.

I’m not quite sure what happened there, unless Orwell was trying to communicate the response of the now totally broken Smith to the Party’s brainwashing. Is he drugged, hallucinating, is it a dream? What of the meeting with Julia, his rosy (relatively speaking) post-release life?

I don’t really now what to make of it all, except that the Party has won. It has controlled his reality, created it for him. He has come to embrace that which he has fought all his life, that which has persecuted and victimized him. He is, to use the modern phrase, collaborating in his own enslavement, voting against his own self-interest, because to do otherwise would first require his recognizing his own self-betrayal–and Julia’s.

Its all allegorical, of course, a metaphor for his own enslavement, now embraced because submission is easier than any further resistance.

Perhaps the clue is the wartime bulletins he watches on the telescreen. It’s the same propaganda he’s always watched, and used to dismiss outright. But now it has become his Mainstream Media, his Fox News, his Current Events. He actually believes it now, is involved in the outcomes, roots for his side. After the brutal, unflinching realism of the rest of the novel, this last dreamlike episode must signify something, must serve some purpose. It is Smith’s epiphany.

I’ll be honest, I don’t really know what Orwell was trying to do in that last chapter. But I suspect he was successful.

Now that you mention it, the ending does seem sort of dreamlike, surreal; although at the time I read it it didn’t really feel that way, or at least, I didn’t think of it that way.

The book is online, maybe I’ll read that last chapter again and refresh my memory..

They broke him completely, then they made his life better to show that punishment is not important. It is the ability to break you that matters.

They killed him to show that while killing him was of no real importance, their power over life and death is omnipotent.