The exhausted animals view the finished structure with justifiable pride. Shortly after, Napoleon makes a surprising announcement: He has sold the lumber not, as expected, to Pilkington but to Frederick.
He had cunningly appeared to favor Pilkington in order to drive up the price to Frederick. Furthermore, when Frederick promised to pay by check, Napoleon insisted on cash. Napoleon proudly displays the cash for all the animals to see; the money, he says, will be used to buy machinery for the windmill.
Furthermore, it is highly likely that Frederick will soon launch an attack on the farm. The next day, the attack begins. The destruction of their pride and joy infuriates the animals, and they launch a fierce counterattack. Despite the heavy casualties, they charge the enemy, overwhelming them and forcing them into a desperate retreat.
Although the animals now find themselves back at square one, they celebrate what comes to be called the Battle of the Windmill as a great day. A few days later, the pigs come upon a case of whiskey that had been hidden in the cellar of the farmhouse. Shortly after, Muriel discovers another commandment slightly different from the one she remembered.
Although Boxer is still in pain from the wounds he received in the Battle of the Windmill, he continues to work as hard as ever in the construction of the new windmill. Once winter sets in, rations are reduced, but somehow the pigs seem to be getting fatter. A new rule called spontaneous demonstration is propaganda. Suddenly, Moses the raven reappears, after an absence of many years. He continues to talk of Sugarcandy Mountain, an idea that reassures many of the animals.
Meanwhile, Boxer is approaching his 12th birthday, with its promise of retirement on a decent pension. A month short of retirement, he overdoes his efforts and collapses. Squealer announces that Napoleon has arranged to have him transferred to a hospital in town, where he will be treated by a veterinarian. When a van arrives to take Boxer away, the animals gather around to wish him good-bye. The others desperately try to urge Boxer to escape.
He tries kicking down the doors of the van, an easy task for a young Boxer, but he is too feeble to succeed. A few days later, Squealer announces the death of Boxer in the hospital. Napoleon is always right. That night the animals hear loud singing and noisy shouting from the house. Apparently, the pigs had acquired enough money to buy a case of whiskey. Time slips by; the original rebellion fades into the dim past, recalled by the few remaining old animals, Clover, Benjamin, and Moses.
Many others, including Muriel, Bluebell, and Jessie have died, as has Mr. The farm has become a thriving, expanding enterprise. For the animals, life is pretty much unchanged. But they still take pride in their unique status, the only farm in all of England owned and operated by animals. Nor do they ever abandon their belief in the basic principle of the farm that all animals are equal.
Squealer, who has grown very fat over the years but is still an important presence on the farm, separates the sheep in order to teach them a new song. A few days later, the animals hear Clover neighing loudly in the yard. Rushing over to find out why, they see Squealer, followed by a line of pigs, and finally Napoleon himself, all walking on their hind legs.
Benjamin reads what is now the one and only commandment on the wall:. A week later, a group of farmers in the neighborhood pay a visit to the farm. They tour the grounds, full of praise for what they see, particularly the windmill. That evening the animals hear the noises of laughter and singing from the farmhouse. Creeping quietly to the window, they peek in at the visitors and the pigs, playing cards and raising toasts.
Then the pigs and men pick up their cards and carry on with the game, as the animals creep away from the windows. They go a short distance, and then they hear angry cries and threats. Pilkington had each played an ace of spades simultaneously. For Orwell, the most important of the levels of meaning on which Animal Farm might be read was as a satiric allegory on the origins and aftermath of the Russian Revolution and on the history of the Soviet Union from to As the collapse of the Soviet system in recedes into history, this allegorical dimension of the story may appear to be less compelling, offering merely historical interest.
People born after, say, , might well be expected to view the Soviet Union with the same lack of interest that their parents view the decline of the Hapsburg Empire. But it is important, and for these readers especially, to be aware that Animal Farm not only satirically documented the development of the Soviet system under Joseph Stalin but played a role in its subsequent dissolution. See section on political influence, below.
The references to historical events are not all set in stone. Thus, the connection of Moses the raven to the monk Rasputin is less literally accurate than it is designed to point to the close association of the Orthodox church and the old aristocracy. Similarly, the name Armand Hammer — is included as a specific example of a businessman who dealt with the Soviet Union throughout its long existence and his longer life.
Orwell may not have known of him, but Hammer provides a striking example of the gobetween type represented by Mr. In the following historical sketch, the corresponding event or figure in Animal Farm is given within brackets.
Communist ideology was developed in the late 19th century by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels — It foretold the future triumph of the industrial working class over bourgeois capitalism by means of revolution. In , as a result of popular discontent with the czarist government, a crowd of peaceful workers trying to deliver a petition to the czar was fired upon by government troops.
Twelve years later, as a result of heavy losses by Russian armies in World War I, and the mishandling of domestic affairs by the czarina and her tooclose advisor, Rasputin, workers in St. Petersburg staged a strike in which they were joined by members of the army and navy, forcing the abdication of the czar [ Flight of Jones, Mrs.
Jones and Moses ]. This movement is known as the February Revolution, but the provisional governments that followed it were unable to achieve stability. A second phase of the rebellion, the October Revolution, led by the ruthless and skillful Vladimir Lenin and his associate, Leon Trotsky, vaulted the Bolsheviks into power.
A year later, a counterrevolution was launched against the Bolsheviks on a variety of fronts. Included among the counterrevolutionary forces were elements from the lately victorious allied armies of World War I, the English, the French, and the Americans. Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks prevailed, thanks to widespread peasant support and the military leadership of Trotsky [ Battle of the Cowshed ].
Two years later, Lenin died and the leadership passed not to Trotsky, the heir apparent, but to Joseph Stalin, the general secretary of the Communist Party. Behind the scenes, Stalin maneuvered the expulsion of Trotsky from the communist party, forcing him into exile in [ Dogs force Snowball to run away ].
At the same time, he ruthlessly imposed the collectivization of privately held farms, triggering a nationwide famine and resulting in the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens [ Five-Year Plan ].
The terror soon spread, cancerlike, to include the general staff of the army, intellectuals, writers, and artists [ Pile of corpses before Napoleon ]. In , Stalin concluded a nonaggression pact with his most formidable enemy, Adolf Hitler [ Frederick ], thereby producing mass defections from communist parties in the West. Accompanying this pact was the Russian German Commercial Agreement, which provided for the shipment of raw material to Germany in exchange for industrial machinery [ sale of timber ].
Two years later, Hitler violated the pact by invading the Soviets, which proved to be a critical mistake on his part. After some initial success blowing up the windmill , the German forces were halted and finally defeated at the battle of Stalingrad, one of the turning points of World War II [ Battle of the Windmill ].
In November , the Big Three Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin met in Teheran, during which the surface camaraderie disguised a deep distrust and acts of mutual chicanery. Churchill stormed out of the room and returned only after Stalin pursued him and apologized Human visitors come to Animal Farm and quarrel over card game. Lenin believed that the proletariat must be led by an intellectually elite corps of party members who would direct and secure the revolution.
Thus, the assumption of power by the members of the party had to be specifically attributed to Lenin. Despite the intense specificity of references to the history of the Soviet Union, historical allegory is only one level of meaning that emerges in reading Animal Farm.
Like many, if not all, works of art, Animal Farm has taken on additional meanings as different readers living in different times react to it. For example, embedded in the specific historical allegory is the wider political theme, of which Orwell was acutely aware, of the nature of power, particularly dictatorial power, and the employment of terror and propaganda as tools in acquiring and supporting that power.
No longer are they alienated from their labor, because now, so they believe, the fruits of that labor belong to them rather than to Mr. Their entire approach to work has changed, as Old Major predicted. The farm, however, had to be managed. The subsequent battle to preserve the farm from Mr. Therein lie the seeds of corruption: A new superior class is born and one superior figure in that class assumes total control.
One question emerges and engages readers: Is Orwell depicting an inevitable process, one that is inherent in the nature of revolution, or is he warning that revolution can be and often has been betrayed? Still another level of meaning that has become more prominent as the years pass is the animalrights theme. Orwell himself suggested this possibility when, in the preface to the Ukranian edition, he declared that the inspiration for the book occurred when he saw a young farm lad whipping a horse:.
It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat CW, 19, Although he had no compunctions about hunting them, Orwell loved animals, with the exception of pigs and rats, two species that play prominent roles in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is unlikely that he would have become an animal rights activist, but he clearly is capable of imagining a powerful case against cruelty to animals.
This mutileveled character of Animal Farm is reflected in the variety of terms used to categorize it. It has been variously described by four literary terms: fairy story, beast fable, satire, and allegory. Frequently, all four of them have been employed in a manner suggesting that the four terms are interchangeable, but the fact is that the terms indicate fairly clear and distinct categories.
Fairy story is the first to consider, as it is the term Orwell himself used as the subtitle of the book. Similarly, the beast fable, the story in which the behavior of animal characters conveys a moral lesson, comes close to describing Animal Farm except that the moral lesson is muted in favor of the element of satire, which aims to ridicule its subject, exposing the vice or folly it exhibits, but not delivering an explicit moral.
The emphasis on vice or folly determines the type of satire, dark or light, deadly serious or relatively tolerant.
The other element is allegory, one form of which features a surface story to allude to a historical event or to persons. As we have seen, Animal Farm most famously allegorizes the history of the Soviet Union, from the revolution of to the Teheran Conference of Clearly, the story integrates and occasionally overlaps these forms in forging its distinctive character.
If a modern-day Polonius were available, he might describe it a satirical-allegorical-fairy story, cast in the form of a beast fable. As for the efficacy of this form, the critic Matthew Hodgart has described it well:. He chose a very ancient genre, based on the animal story found in the folk-tales of all primitive and peasant cultures, and reflecting a familiarity and sympathy with animals which Orwell seems to have shared.
The central figure is often the trickster, spider in Africa, fox in Europe and pig in Orwell. However, Orwell himself described the main focus of the book in a letter to his agent Leonard Moore in If they question you again, please say that Animal Farm is intended as a satire on dictatorship in general but of course the Russian Revolution is the chief target. It is humbug to pretend anything else.
Like these, it recounts a temporarily successful but ultimately failed attempt to achieve a goal that seems to offer release from a society whose restrictions and limitations poison the possibility of freedom.
In Burmese Days , the protagonist looks to marriage as the way of ending his loneliness and his resultant dependence on the deadening society of the local European club.
Keep the Aspidistra Flying recounts the jejune crusade of a young poet determined to defy the money god, who rules over modern civilization. George Bowling, the antihero of Coming Up for Air, tries to go home again to his Edwardian childhood, only to discover that the past is another country, and one for which he has no passport. Animal Farm departs from this scheme slightly in creating, not an individual, but a collective protagonist: the animals at Manor Farm.
The action also differs in that the animals seem to secure their goal early on. By the end of the second chapter, their revolt has succeeded, leaving them in the first flush of enthusiasm:. The animals were happy as they had never conceived it possible to be.
Every mouthful of food was an acute positive pleasure, now that it was truly their own food, produced by themselves and for themselves, not doled out to them by a grudging master. In chapter 7, after witnessing the wholesale slaughter of dissident pigs and hens, Clover, the maternal carthorse, looks down from the knoll at the farm spread out before her, realizing something has gone wrong:. These scenes of terror and slaughter were not what they had looked forward to that night when Old Major had first stirred them to rebellion.
Others suggest that his so-called pessimism is really a corrective to a danger to which socialists are particularly susceptible: utopianism, the illusion of an earthly paradise. He believed that is what happened historically in the religious sphere. It constituted the pattern by which the church had won and maintained power for centuries: the prospect of eternal happiness in heaven.
Later, into the vacuum created by growing disbelief in an afterlife, new creeds such as Marxism had moved, with the promise of retributive justice and equality in a golden future on earth. For Orwell, in this lies the crucial distinction between socialism and communism. For a democratic socialist as Orwell conceived it, socialism should have no utopian goals, simply a form of government struggling to implement more justice and equality than existed under capitalism. Although he felt both Christianity and communism make a similar rhetorical appeal to people, Orwell recognized a significant difference.
Witness his deathbed instructions that he be buried according to the rites of the Church of England. On the other hand, this newer religion, Soviet Communism, had betrayed its principles by using the end to justify the means virtually from day one of its initial appearance in Nor was Orwell deluded into assuming that it was due exclusively to the figure of Joseph Stalin.
On the allegorical level, its simplicity strengthens the veracity of the narration, reinforcing the idea that the impersonal, objective narrator is simply recounting what happened, not making judgments. The reader is given the task that the narrator has carefully chosen to avoid. One of the singular features of the book, in keeping with its fable format, is that the action is presented from the point of view of the animals, not of the narrator.
There are occasional minor departures from this focus, but by and large there is no authorial intrusion into the presentation. Thus, as events unfold, we see their impact on the animals, recognizing the growing distinction between the animals and the pigs Fowler, The novel continually uses the term animals to refer to the rank and file, while the pigs constitute an elite class. One outgrowth of this is that it is only the animals whose feelings and reactions are recorded.
The feelings of the pigs—and particularly Napoleon—are never shown. Orwell does not bother with motivation: He makes his Napoleon inscrutably ambitious and lets it go at that. In his review, Frye introduced another critical point. He suggested that Animal Farm was designed to illustrate the theme of the corruption of principle by contingency. But Frye argued that the history of communism demonstrates the opposite development, the corruption of the contingent by principle.
In this all-encompassing explanation of life lay the corrupting seeds of communist doctrine. But the October Revolution, which brought the Bolsheviks to power, was a carefully planned coup by the party elite. Thus the revolution was corrupted by the principle of Marxism that contended that the end justified the means. This point would not have been alien to Orwell, who saw Marxist theory as a very useful tool in uncovering the flaws and defects in the existing bourgeois culture and the general consciousness it engendered.
However, the contradictions in the overall Marxist scheme were all too apparent. On a philosophical level, it displayed an inherent contradiction between its fundamentally materialist position and its underlying idealist strain, which professed faith in the triumph of the human spirit. This is the element of utopianism that Orwell dismissed as wishful thinking. The utopian dream seems to be taking on a moment of reality in chapter 2, in the immediate aftermath of the routing of Farmer Jones.
Thus, literacy appears as the initial step in the acquisition of power and in the transition from animal to human. With their superior knowledge it was natural that they should assume the leadership. Privilege, in turn, gradually transforms itself into power. A perfect example of the process appears at the end of chapter 3, when the animals learn that fresh milk and ripe apples are to be reserved exclusively for the pigs.
This arrangement, so they are told by Squealer, is not a privilege but a necessity. The milk and apples are vital to the production of brain power. But in the world of revolutionary politics, brain power is no match for brute force. It might be said that on Animal Farm emerge three classes of creatures: pigs, animals, and brutes, the last being the dogs, taken from their mothers shortly after birth and bred by Napoleon to attack on command.
Along with terror is the invention of a significant scapegoat. The banished Snowball assumes mythic status as a pervasive evil presence, the root source of anything that goes wrong in the state. The scapegoat is not, however, depicted as a lone figure. Other traitors include any potential rivals of the dictator. Critical throughout to the process of the totalitarian state is propaganda. In the political-allegory dimension of Animal Farm , the character of Squealer represents Pravda, the official news organ of the Soviet regime.
The idea of propaganda engages the problem of the relation of language to truth. In the years immediately preceding the writing of Animal Farm, Orwell was intimately involved with propaganda. The use of language to convey untruths in the service of the state forms a prominent role in Nineteen Eighty-Four, but it also occupies a central place in Animal Farm. They represent the rewriting of history that makes a mockery of the past.
The final stage of the totalitarian state is the emergence of a vast bureaucracy controlled by apparatchiks, functionaries of the state, the Soviet version of the managerial class envisioned by James Burnham. In the future, the farm will become a collective oligarchy. In the ideological struggle that was one facet of the cold war, Animal Farm, together with its successor Nineteen Eighty-Four, played an important role.
As a consequence, its author came to achieve an eminence that approached a kind of mythic status. Part of the status derived from his authorship of two books that had a powerful emotional appeal in calling attention to the evils of the Stalinist regime.
Of these, it is clear that Animal Farm locates that regime as its primary target. Nineteen Eighty-Four, on the other hand, while certainly including the Soviet Union as the most obvious example, targets the general threat of the totalitarian state and its looming presence.
The American Book of the Month Club offered it as a selection in September , and it proved to be a phenomenal success. As for its impact beyond the Iron Curtain, its power was made evident after the collapse of the Soviet empire in the testimony of those who had read the book in translations smuggled into Eastern Europe. The U. Beginning with the Korean edition of Animal Farm in , the U.
In the case of one early translation, the Ukrainian, for which Orwell wrote an explanatory preface see Prefaces , the American authorities intercepted an attempt to smuggle copies to the East.
Observing diplomatic protocol, they turned them over to the Russians. Related questions. Why did snowball give sound for retreat in Animal Farm? Why did Snowball give the sound for retreat? What type of animal is snowball in Animal Farm? What animal is called snowball from Animal Farm? What kind of animal was snowball in Animal Farm? What is Snowball from Animal Farm?
In Animal Farm who is snowball? Describe snowball in Animal Farm? Who in Animal Farm was snowball in real life? What animal is Snowball in Animal Farm? A pig. How did snowball die in Animal Farm? What animal represented Trotsky in Animal Farm? Which animal is leon trotsky in Animal Farm?
What type of person is snowball in Animal Farm? Who is the scapegoat in Animal Farm? What archetype does snowball fit in Animal Farm? Why did snowball leave in Animal Farm? What was snowball accused of in Animal Farm? What animal is snowball in George Orwells Animal Farm? What color is snowball from Animal Farm? Who represented trosky in Animal Farm? Who is leon trosky in Animal Farm? What animal is snowball inanimal farm? Jones was hurled into a pile of dung and his gun flew out of his hands.
But the most terrifying spectacle of all was Boxer, rearing up on his hind legs and striking out with his great iron-shod hoofs like a stallion.
His very first blow took a stable-lad from Foxwood on the skull and stretched him lifeless in the mud. At the sight, several men dropped their sticks and tried to run.
Panic overtook them, and the next moment all the animals together were chasing them round and round the yard. They were gored, kicked, bitten, trampled on. There was not an animal on the farm that did not take vengeance on them after his own fashion. Even the cat suddenly leapt off a roof onto a cowman's shoulders and sank her claws in his neck, at which he yelled horribly. At a moment when the opening was clear, the men were glad enough to rush out of the yard and make a bolt for the main road.
And so within five minutes of their invasion they were in ignominious retreat by the same way as they had come, with a flock of geese hissing after them and pecking at their calves all the way.
All the men were gone except one. Back in the yard Boxer was pawing with his hoof at the stable-lad who lay face down in the mud, trying to turn him over. The boy did not stir. I forgot that I was wearing iron shoes. Who will believe that I did not do this on purpose? The only good human being is a dead one. Mollie in fact was missing. For a moment there was great alarm; it was feared that the men might have harmed her in some way, or even carried her off with them.
In the end, however, she was found hiding in her stall with her head buried among the hay in the manger. She had taken to flight as soon as the gun went off. And when the others came back from looking for her, it was to find that the stable-lad, who in fact was only stunned, had already recovered and made off. The animals had now reassembled in the wildest excitement, each recounting his own exploits in the battle at the top of his voice.
An impromptu celebration of the victory was held immediately. The flag was run up and Beasts of England was sung a number of times, then the sheep who had been killed was given a solemn funeral, a hawthorn bush being planted on her grave. At the graveside Snowball made a little speech, emphasising the need for all animals to be ready to die for Animal Farm if need be. The animals decided unanimously to create a military decoration, "Animal Hero, First Class," which was conferred there and then on Snowball and Boxer.
It consisted of a brass medal they were really some old horse-brasses which had been found in the harness-room , to be worn on Sundays and holidays.
There was also "Animal Hero, Second Class," which was conferred posthumously on the dead sheep.
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