Animal Farm

1027 Words3 Pages

At the beginning of George Orwell’s novella, Animal Farm, Mr. Jones, the overall caretaker of the Manor Farm in England, had stumbled clumsily to bed after recently putting down a couple of beers. The insensible farmer had no idea that he had left the buildings unsecured. The alert farm animals are completely aware of his mistake and quickly start planning a way to run Mr. Jones away from the farm. The oldest pig, Major, knows he’s going to die soon so he takes command and gives the speech on how to revolt. After Old Major dies, the pigs take over and create a system called “Animalism” and the Seven Commandments, which are rules of which all of the farm animals should follow. The animals work together to form a union against humans. In the midst of Major’s speech, he says,"All men are enemies. All animals are comrades" (Orwell 31). The two main leader pigs, Napoleon and Snowball both honor Major’s beliefs but want to achieve the goals in different ways. Napoleon focuses on the advantages he can gain for himself; Snowball wants to help all the animals of the farm. These different paths of power start to cause division on the farm.

In Chapter 5, Snowball finally gives up and runs away from the farm, leaving Napoleon the leader and motivator of the newly named Animal Farm. He declares that only the pigs have the power to make decisions for the farm and that all the other animals will obey them. Napoleon’s pig-in-crime, Squealer, gives explanation for all of Napoleon's actions with skillful but deceitful revisions of Animalist principles. Napoleon keeps strengthening his power causing more animals to be scared of him, which in turn, gives him less enemies. The common animals continue to obey the pigs in hope for a better future. Napoleon begins to ally with neighboring farms so that there is no way out for the common animals and they are now unknowingly trapped. At the end of Animal Farm, Orwell describes the pigs many years later and tells us that they are becoming more like humans. "No question now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which." (Orwell 139).

The most discretely obvious universal idea in Animal Farm is to criticize the idea of communism Orwell saw sweeping through Russia.

Open Document