The Ironies of 1984 The novel 1984, by George Orwell, has many examples of irony throughout it. The two major types of irony: verbal irony and situation irony, are demonstrated again and again in this novel. In the following essay I will discuss these types of ironies and give examples of each from the book. The first type of irony is verbal irony, in which a person says or does something one way, but the true meaning is the opposite. One of the first example of this irony is discovered when the main character, Winston Smith, uses the "Memory hole" to deposit things -- one would think that this would be where things are remembered ("Memory"), but it's actually an incinerator.