Censorship and Tyranny

The titular Memory Police function as the primary antagonist of the story, as they are a wholly destructive organization interested only in further solidifying their own power and control. Moreover, the MP’s specific tactics are directly symbolic of real-world dynamics of tyranny and censorship, thereby framing the MP themselves as a representation of the destructiveness of such actions. For example, of the Memory Police’s most prominent actions is the practice of making things ‘disappear,’ meaning outlawing certain types of objects and erasing the townspeople’s memories of those objects. The novel’s very first line reads, “I sometimes wonder what was disappeared first—among all the things that have vanished from the island” (3). This one element of unrealism in the narrative symbolizes the real-world practice of censorship, in which tyrannical entities solidify their own power by censoring cultural elements that might encourage...