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Sorry, I wasn’t very clear.

I’m not talking about literal man vs nature in the sense of being stuck on a mountain with a bear trying to eat you. I was trying to suggest you look at the structure and thematic implications of man vs nature and man vs God.

Man vs nature tends to involve a human trying to prove he’s worthy to exist in a brutal, uncaring system far more powerful than himself. It’s pretty straightforward to see how that basic concept could apply to a dystopian story.

And I’d argue that 1984 embodies something very similar to the “man vs God” structure. The Party serves the role of God, creating a standard of right and wrong and making moral demands of humanity. Winston spends the whole book struggling with and trying to escape the omniscient, omnipotent eye of the Party.

This is a thematic structure which allows your characters to have a more personal relationship with the driving force of the dystopia, while if you used the “man vs nature” thematic structure, your oppressive force would be so much grander in scale and so forceful that they couldn’t care less about the efforts of the insignificant specks who are your characters.