Animal Farm

Around a week ago, I picked up a random book – Animal Farm – and speedran it in one evening because I thought I had to finish my blog the next day. But I didn’t, so now I’ve had more time to gather my thoughts about it.

Animal Farm tells the story of the Manor Farm, wherein a group of mistreated animals come together under the guidance of the pig Old Major and rebel against their human oppressors, kicking the abusive Mr. Jones out of his house and renaming the farm “Animal Farm”. The animals set guidelines for themselves, stating that all animals are equal – every animal must do the same amount of work, and every animal is equally rewarded. But when the pig Napoleon seizes control, the Animal Farm quickly crumbles to dust, leaving no trace of the paradise that was meant to be.

Orwell, a socialist, wrote this book (as well as 1984, which I wrote a blog on last year!!) as a critique of how socialist ideals can be easily twisted by a corrupted leader – in other words, Stalin and the USSR. In fact, many of the characters in Animal Farm directly represent a person (or a group of people) during the Russian Revolution. Old Major – the original visionary – represents Karl Marx and Lenin, Napoleon is Stalin, and Snowball is Leon Trotsky.

Boxer, my favorite character, represents the common citizens, who work hard for no reward. For the entirety of the novel, he is the most naïve, yet most determined, hardworking animal on the farm. When Boxer protests that someone has replaced the 7 Commandments (including “ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL”) with “ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS”, the pig Squealer easily convinces him and the rest of the animals that their memories are faulty. This brainwashing continues on and on, and in hindsight, Boxer’s fate was completely foreseeable, yet it still hit like a truck when the inevitable happened.

Most of all, it was striking to witness the systematic, logical, and crushing collapse of what seemed to be a perfectly reasonable ideology. At the very beginning, I (along with all the animals) was blinded by the vision of a perfect society – one with too much food, 3 workdays per week, fair elections, and in the far future, maybe even electricity-powered machines. Yet as I progressed through the first half of the novel, that vision slowly started to falter. Some things seemed somewhat unsettling – why did the pigs steal the milk? Why did Napoleon steal those harmless puppies from their mother? Why are all the animals, except the pigs, incapable of forming a coherent thought? – but I just let it slide. Maybe, I thought, it was for the greater good!

It was not for the greater good. As the farm was flipped upside-down on its head, I realized that Benjamin, the wise old donkey, was right all along:

“Things never had been, nor ever could be, much better or much worse – hunger, hardship and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law of life.”

- Anthony