George Orwell

Essay by duku2004College, UndergraduateA, May 2004

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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 entertaining, 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. Old...