Animal Farm: Political Issues
...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. Old Major, the inspiration of
the rebellion, is a combination of Marx, the chief theorist and Lenin, the
actual...
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