When the clocks strike thirteen: Why George Orwell's opening line sets alarm bells ringing

Indian Express

16-05-2025

'It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.'
— George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
A world where clocks strike 'thirteen', might as well be one where pigs fly. Such is the beauty of the opening line of George Orwell's dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, that one might be almost forgiven for missing the blatant contradictions laid out right under one's nose, cleverly wrapped in mundane scene-setting banality. In one fell swoop, Orwell tells us that this is a malfunctioning world where the normal rules do not apply – all clocks simultaneously strike an impossible chime and the day is bizarrely both bright and cold.
Decoding the impossible chime
Suspending disbelief, many readers might conclude the author meant, 1 pm or 1300 hours military time. However, they would be anachronistically mistaken. Back in 1949, when the novel was first published, the world still ran on analogue time. Striking clocks, those time-honoured mechanisms that chimed the hours, were designed only to count to 12. A thirteenth strike was impossible. Orwell knew this. And that impossibility is precisely the point. Clocks do not strike thirteen, and if one does, it is either broken, or lying, and if all clocks strike thirteen then it is clearly a world where lies are accepted and enforced.
Had Orwell meant to denote afternoon, he would have written '13:00' or 'one in the afternoon.' Instead, he chose a phrase loaded with acoustic dread: 'the clocks were striking thirteen.' In choosing the language of mechanical chimes, Orwell signals something off-key. The world of Nineteen Eighty-Four runs on a different schedule, ringing with a falseness that is heard loud and clear.
By declaring an impossibility as reality, Orwell introduces the reader to doublethink, his term for the mental discipline of holding two contradictory beliefs simultaneously and accepting both as true. To accept that a clock can strike thirteen—without protest, without questioning—is the novel's first test. Pass it, and you are already a citizen of Oceania.
Perhaps most chilling is Orwell's use of collective certainty. The clocks, plural, strike thirteen. Not a single broken mechanism, but an entire system conspiring to mislead. This is not a glitch in the matrix. This is the matrix. It is, as Orwell might say, not that the lie is believed, but that believing the lie is required.
Orwell did not coin the phrase. In fact, a century before Nineteen Eighty-Four was published, Thomas Hardy wrote in Far From the Madding Crowd: 'This supreme instance of Troy's goodness fell upon Gabriel's ears like the thirteenth stroke of a crazy clock. It was not only received with utter incredulity as regarded itself, but threw a doubt on all the assurances that had preceded it.'
Hardy's metaphor captured how a single falsehood can unravel an entire reality. Orwell takes this idea and weaponises it. In Oceania, the clocks don't just accidentally strike thirteen, they do so as a matter of policy.
Incidentally, British legal tradition includes the fictional case Rex v Haddock, in which a testimony is compared to the thirteenth stroke of the clock, which is not only false in itself, but casts doubt on all that came before it. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the clocks striking thirteen don't just suggest a malfunction they announce a regime where malfunction is mandated. Truth, like time, has been reengineered.
The image also appears in Philippa Pearce's beloved children's novel Tom's Midnight Garden, where the grandfather clock striking thirteen becomes a literal gateway to another time. 'Tom Long is sent to stay with his uncle and aunt in a flat without a garden. But at night he wakes to hear the grandfather clock striking 13 – and finds that the small yard behind the flat is a big sunlit garden.'
Here, the thirteenth strike is as unnatural as it is in Orwell's world. It becomes a fracture in time that allows Tom to step into the past. The imagery underscores the same fundamental truth: when the clock strikes thirteen, the ordinary rules no longer apply.
Still ticking
In the 75 years since 1984 was published, Orwell's opening line has lost none of its shock value. When we say 'Orwellian' today, we mean the normalisation of the absurd, which is essentially the opening line's essence. As modern societies grapple with disinformation, surveillance, and the bending of facts to fit ideology, the chime of the thirteenth hour ticks closer.
('Drawing a Line' is an eight-column weekly series exploring the stories behind literature's most iconic opening lines. Each column offers interpretation, not definitive analysis—because great lines, like great books, invite many readings.)
Aishwarya Khosla is a journalist currently serving as Deputy Copy Editor at The Indian Express. Her writings examine the interplay of culture, identity, and politics.
She began her career at the Hindustan Times, where she covered books, theatre, culture, and the Punjabi diaspora. Her editorial expertise spans the Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Chandigarh, Punjab and Online desks.
She was the recipient of the The Nehru Fellowship in Politics and Elections, where she studied political campaigns, policy research, political strategy and communications for a year.
She pens The Indian Express newsletter, Meanwhile, Back Home.
Write to her at [e-mail] or [e-mail]. You can follow her on Instagram: @ink_and_ideology, and X: @KhoslaAishwarya. ... Read More