"1984" post one

“In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.”
These few lines in the beginning chapter of “1984” by George Orwell, reveal many conflicts and foreshadows where the plot will venture. George Orwell displays how complex and foreign society has become and how the government has become completely demented and lost sight of its true purpose. The government has changed all of their original laws and become a dictatorship under “Big Brother.” The fact that the “police” come and kidnap “criminals” during the night illustrates the conflict of man vs. society. Because of this, the people are too scared disagree with the government so they conform and allow their government to destroy their rights and liberties.
This segment unearths the reader’s question if the main character, Winston Smith, will be faithful to the government. When Winston describes what happens when a person rebels, he is also weighing in his own mind if he would be willing to risk this. The threat of the history of your existence puts a heavy pressure on the people but also sets the plot in motion. The denotation of a diary is to preserve your current history and document events in a person’s life. The fact that his existence could be “vaporized” by writing in a diary is extremely ironic.
Therefore, George Orwell describes what happens to rebels to emphasize the corrupt ideas of the government and the people’s inability to do anything about it. He foreshadows what will happen to Winston now that he has begun writing a diary. The contradictory events of Winston writing in his diary to preserve his history and the government obliterating his history for writing in a diary are extremely ironic and hence display how the rest of the story will be ironic. Orwell begins explaining that any conflict between man and government will be ironic and contradictory because the government is corrupt and unjust.