A Book Review of Animal Farm

Animal Farm
Written By George Orwell in 1946
Preface Written By Russell Baker
139 Pages
Fiction / “Fairy Story” (Fable)

Summary: The Moore Farm of 20th century England is an ordinary farm where life for everyone seems fairly normal. But, what the humans don’t realize is that the farm animals meet together in secret to conspire against them, because they believe they are being taken advantage of and treated like slaves. The animals eventually rally together and run all of the humans off the farm and begin to run it by themselves, renaming it “Animal Farm”. Life for them is great, even better than it was when the humans were in charge. Two pigs named Snowball and Napoleon establish themselves as leaders and help to assign the different animals jobs around the farm. As years pass however, the two pigs begin to disagree on how they should treat the animals and this leads to them turning against each other. Napoleon, the smarter of the two, gathers together a small army of dogs he brainwashed to only follow him and orders them to run Snowball off the farm, in addition to kill any of the animals who don’t agree to submit to him as their new dictator. Ironically, this story ends with life for the animals becoming worse than it was when humans were in charge and they wish for things to be back to the way they were years earlier.
Scenes: My favorite scene from this book can be found in Chapter 4 (54-60) which takes place a few years after the original animal rebellion. Mr. Jones, the former owner and head farmer of Moore Farm, learns of its new prosperity and how comfortable the animals have become. Thinking himself to be a fairly clever man, he decides this is the perfect time to take the farm back. At the same time the owners of the two adjacent farms to Animal Farm, Foxwood Farm and Pinchfield Farm, hear the same news and worry that a similar rebellion could happen on their farms. The three farmers gather together a mob, for lack of a better word, made up of some of their own farmhands and themselves and attempt to take back the farm. Their approach is announced ahead of time to Snowball and Napoleon by some messenger birds, who gather the animals to mount a counter-attack. The battle that ensues is later dubbed “The Battle of Cowshed” and results in the humans retreating after the death of a teenage stable-boy at the hands, or hoofs rather, of Boxer the horse. I like this part of the book because it is full of action and great descriptive passages such as “Jones saw him coming and raised his shotgun and fired. The pellets scored bloody streaks along Snowball’s back, and a sheep dropped dead.” (58). Also, it is important to the plot progression of the book in that it makes the animals takeover of Moore Farm basically permanent, since all the humans are now scared of the animals and how they brutally killed a teenage boy. They’re all so scared, in fact, that they don’t attempt to take back the farm again for the rest of the book.
Character: The character I’ve chosen to write about is Napoleon the pig. He is the eventual dictator of Animal Farm and is crafty, greedy, persuasive, eloquent, a natural leader, and kind of evil. He is able to completely hoax the animals into believing that Snowball was not as good as he and his intentions appeared to be. Napoleon was able to make them all believe that Snowball was a spy for Mr. Jones and was never for the rebellion, but that in reality he was really against it the whole time. None of this true of course, but since Napoleon saw Snowball as a threat in his rise to dictatorial power he had to get rid of him and completely slander any positive memory the animals had of him. This, along with Napoleon’s tweaking of the Seven Commandments of Animalism to fit his goals, guaranteed the animal’s blind allegiance to him, even to their eventual starvation and demise.
George Orwell develops Napoleon very well, even to the point that I believed he had good intentions until he ordered his army of guard dogs to chase Snowball of the farm. After that it was pretty obvious he was up to no good. Napoleon changes in many ways towards the end of the book. The primary being him eventually realizing that the only way he could have the amount of control he wanted (which was basically ultimate control) over the rest of Animal Farm, in his small, pig-headed mind (pardon the pun) was for him to slowly adopt habits of humans and Mr. Jones specifically. Napoleon at the end of the book is a raging alcoholic, trades and plays poker with other farmers, walks on two legs, wears articles of Mr. Jones’s clothing, and even sleeps in the Jones’s house along with the rest of the pigs from the farm since they’re all “more equal” than the other animals. It is even said at the very end of the book that “The creatures outside the house looked from pig to man, and man to pig, and pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which” (139). I don’t really like Napoleon, but I thought I did at the beginning of the book. The main reason I chose to write about him is because he’s very important to the plot of Animal Farm, maybe even the most important character next to Old Major and Snowball.
Purpose: I think George Orwell’s purpose in writing Animal Farm was to warn the public in a very subtle way of the dangers and evils of Communism, specifically in the Soviet Union (since this book was written in 1946). It is even pointed out in the preface of Animal Farm (V-XII) that Snowball and Napoleon were supposed to be alluding to Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin, two prominent political figures in the Russian Revolution of the early 1900’s. Stalin, like Napoleon with Snowball, gets Trotsky deported from the Soviet Union and all positive memory of him removed from the public’s minds through propaganda. This now left Stalin with no prominent political figure to oppose his and therefore no major obstacles in his rise to dictatorial power.
Connections: The most obvious connection that can be made with Animal Farm is the rise of Communism in Russia during the 1930’s and 1940’s and the eventual establishment of the Soviet Union. Specifically, Wikipedia.org pointed out that the revolt of the animals against Mr. Jones is most likely George Orwell 's analogy with the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, and Mr. Jones 's attempt to regain control, with the aid of neighboring farmers, is supposed to parallel the Western European powers ' efforts in 1918-21 to crush the Bolsheviks. In addition, Napoleon 's emergence as the farm 's only leader reflects Joseph Stalin 's arrival to sole power after having Leon Trotsky deported from the Soviet Union. Finally, the Horn and Hoof Flag described in Animal Farm is most likely based on the Hammer and Sickle Flag of the USSR.
Recommend: I really enjoyed this book. I thought it was very well written and even though it was a fable it had an interesting storyline that I wanted to read all of. I especially liked the amount that the characters were described and the relatability of them, even though they were animals. I also liked the writing style, specifically the frequent use of describing adjectives and details that helped me be able better picture the story panning out in my mind’s eye. The main thing that I didn’t like was the way that the book ended. It seemed to me that the story was cut off early and that so much more could have been added to give a sense of closure to the story. I think the kind of person that would like reading this book is someone who enjoys political fiction and/or fables that are reminiscent of Aesop’s own set of fables. I would, and already have, recommended this book to a friend.

Work Cited
"Animal Farm: Significance and Allegory." Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 2012. Web. 6 Jan. 2013. .

Cited: "Animal Farm: Significance and Allegory." Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 2012. Web. 6 Jan. 2013. .