Animal Farm

Essay by Brian HindsHigh School, 12th gradeB+, March 1996

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Animal Farm

Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his psuedonym George Orwell, is an English

author commonly known to write about political issues. Orwell has been highly acclaimed

and criticized for his novels, including one of his most famous, Animal Farm. In a satirical

form, George Orwell uses personified farm animals to express his views on stalinism in the

novel Animal Farm.

Throughout Orwell's early novels, democratic socialism kept the author from total

despair of all humans(Greenblatt 104). After his better experience in the Spanish Civil War

and the shock of the Nazi-Soviet pact, Orwell developed Animal Farm. The socialism

Orwell believed in was not a hardheaded 'realistic' approach to society and polotics but a

rather sentimental, utopian vision of the world as a 'raft sailing through space, with,

potentially, plenty of provisions for everybody'(Grennblatt 106).

Animal Farm is a satirical beast fable which has been heralded as Orwell's lightest,

gayest work(Brander 126).

It is a novel based on the first thirty years of the Soviet Union, a

real society pursuing the ideal of equality. His book argues that this kind of society has not

worked and could not (Meyers 102). Animal Farm has also been known as a an enter-

taining, witty tale of a farm whose oppressed animals, capable of speech and reason,

overcome a cruel master and set up a revolutionary government(Meyers 103). On another,

more serious level, it is a political allegory, a symbolic tale where all the events and

characters represent events and characters in Russian history since 1917(Meyers 103).

Orwell uses actual historical events to construct Animal Farm, but rearranges them

to fit his plot. Manor Farm is Russia, Mr. Jones the Tsar, the pigs the Bolsheviks who led the

revolution. The humans represent the ruling class, the animals the workers and the peasants.