Both Auden and Orwell use specific word choice to create the characterization of oppressed citizens to warn readers that too much totalitarian government control of its citizens can lead to a lack of individualism. In Auden’s “The Unknown Citizen”, the Unknown Citizen has no identity, his life is very conventional in that he does not distinguish himself from any of his fellow citizens. The Unknown Citizen was always a hard worker, “yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views” (Line 9). Auden deliberately uses the word “scab”, to describe the qualities that Unknown Man does not exhibit. A scab has the denotation of a worker who ruins a labor strike by returning to work before the strike has achieved its goals, but can also have the connotation
