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.