The overall tone of 1984 is one of unrelieved darkness, unless one is a very careful reader. Then, one will realize that the Party's rule must have been destroyed soon after the death of Winston Smith.
Throughout, Orwell underlines the hopelessness of Winston's struggle against the Party. Time and time again -- in his keeping a diary, in his prowling, and most notably in his sex with Julia -- Winston takes risks that make no sense if his primary goal is to destroy the rule of Big Brother. In fact, he wilfully blinds himself to the traps he walks into. I suspect, for instance, that many readers realize very early that O'Brien is utterly true to the Party; Winston has trouble recognizing this even when O'Brien is torturing him.
The tone of the main narrative is thus very black. Winston is not a sympathetic protagonist -- he is himself part of the apparatus of oppression, and he promises to ignore moral standards in struggling with the Party -- and the novel ends depressingly with him crushed.
But that is not the end of the story. Orwell always insisted the appendix on Newspeak was critical. Why?
On examination, we discover that the appendix is written in the subjunctive and simple past -- the way we speak about things that did not happen, or that are no longer happening. Orwell's ironic touch of hope, and the book's cleverest feature, is that the Party that placed its faith in language is marked as doomed through the subtle use of language.
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