1984 by George Orwell, Passage 3 (page 96-97)

     "A long line of trucks, with wooden-faced guards armed with sub-machine guns standing upright in each corner, was passing slowly down the street. In the trucks little yellow men in shabby greenish uniforms were squatting, jammed close together. Their sad, Mongolian faces gazed out over the sides of the trucks utterly incurious. Occasionally when a truck jolted there was a clank-clank of metal: all the prisoners were wearing leg-irons. Truck-load after truck-load of the sad faces passed. Winston knew they were there but he saw them only intermittently...
The trucks were still filing past, the people still insatiably gaping. At the start there had been a few boos and hisses, but it came only from the Party members among the crowd, and had soon stopped. The prevailing emotion was simply curiosity. Foreigners, whether from Eurasia or from Eastasia, were a kind of strange animal. One literally never saw them except in the guise of prisoners, and even as prisoners one never got more than a momentary glimpse of them. Nor did one know what became of them, apart from the few who were hanged as war-criminals: the others simply vanished, presumably into forced-labour camps. The round Mongol faces had given way to faces of a more European type, dirty, bearded and exhausted. From over scrubby cheekbones eyes looked into Winston’s, sometimes with strange intensity, and flashed away again. The convoy was drawing to an end. In the last truck he could see an aged man, his face a mass of grizzled hair, standing upright with wrists crossed in front of him, as though he were used to having them bound together. It was almost time for Winston and the girl to part. But at the last moment, while the crowd still hemmed them in, her hand felt for his and gave it a fleeting squeeze."

     This passage talks about war prisoners coming through London, where Winston lives. At first, when I was reading this, I wondered why Orwell would spend so much time explaining the prisoners in such detail. Then I realized that the prisoners could be symbols of Winston, and all the residents of Oceania, for that matter. First, Orwell mentions the wooden-faced guards. This is much like the Thought Police, who are constantly watching Oceanians. Orwell also mentions the fact that they are close together, and that they are utterly incurious. A parallel can be drawn there, too, because most of the citizens live in small apartments, and don't have an inquisitive nature: they usually just accept everything about life. Also, the leg-irons may represent the strict rules of the government. Later, Orwell states that the prisoners' faces are dirty and exhausted, which is a pretty good description of Winston. Orwell then tells that some prisoners looked into Winston's eyes "with strange intensity," (as if to say "we aren't as different as you think we are"). The last description of a prisoner is of one who was "used to having [his hands] bound together." This sort of sums up the state of society in 1984, because people have gotten so used to the opressive government that they don't even seem to care any more. I may be looking way into this, but I think that Orwell was saying that Winston was just as much a prisoner as the men in the trucks.