Question

Write a summary for the article “The Censors”

Answer 1

Answer:

'The Censors' is the story of a young man named Juan who gets a job censoring letters for an authoritarian government. He's great at it - so great that he censors his own letter and gets himself executed.

Explanation:

All letters written and mailed in this society go through the Censor's Secret Command, a bureaucratic agency that inspects everything for bombs, poisonous powders, secret messages, and more. Anything and everything could be a potential signal to the Censors that the letter's sender or receiver is plotting against the government, and Juan is worried that something in his letter will implicate Mariana.

He comes up with a genius plan: he'll get a job with the Censors, work his way up the ladder, and intercept his own letter to send it through safely. He's hired easily, as there's a continuous need for new censors for reasons that we learn later in the story.

Juan quickly and easily works his way up the ranks at the Censor's Command. By the end of the first week, he's in the department that actually censors letters and is fully devoted to his work. Juan censors letter after letter, throwing away most of them that come across his desk.

One day, Juan's own letter lands on his desk. He's so focused on being the best censor possible that he mercilessly censors it and tosses it in the reject pile, which is a red flag to his superiors. Juan is executed the next day, 'another victim of his devotion to his work.'