"Animal Farm" by George Orwell

Gliederung

• George Orwell: The author and his times
• The Russian Revolution
• The plot
• 1. Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy
• But some animals are more equal than others
• The pigs
• Old major
• Napoleon and snowball
• Squealer
• Boxer and clover
• Mollie
• The dogs
• The sheep
• Muriel
• Benjamin
• The Pigeons
• Moses
• Farmer Jones
• Pilkington
• Frederick
• Whymper
• Setting
• Theme
• Style
• Point of view
• Form and structure
• Chapter I
• Chapter II
• Chapter III
• Chapter IV
• Chapter V
• Chapter VI
• Chapter VII
• Chapter VIII
• Chapter IX
• Chapter X
• But some animals are more equal than others
• Use of fable and allegory
• A broader meaning?
• Orwell on Animal Farm

George Orwell: The author and his times

George Orwell was a quiet, decent Englishman who passionately hated two things: inequality and political lying. Out of his hatred of inequality came a desire for a society in which class privileges would not exist. This to him was "democratic socialism." His hatred of political lying and his support for socialism led him to denounce the political lie that what was going on in the Soviet Union had anything to do with socialism. As long as people equated the Soviet Union with socialism, he felt, no one could appreciate what democratic socialism might be like.

And so, he says, he "thought of exposing the Soviet myth in a story that could be easily understood by almost anyone and which could be easily translated into other languages." That story was Animal Farm, and it has been translated into many other languages. Understanding Orwell's political convictions - and how they developed - will greatly enrich your reading of Animal Farm.

He was born Eric Blair - he took the name George Orwell many years later - in 1903, in India. His father was an important British civil servant in that country, which was then part of the British Empire. He retired on a modest pension and moved back to England a few years after Eric was born. Thus the family was part of the "lower upper-middle-classes," as Orwell was to say: people in the English upper classes who weren't rich, but who felt they should live as the upper classes traditionally did. That's why, when Eric was eight, the Blairs sent him away to boarding school to prepare for Eton, an exclusive prep school. Eric had a scholarship, and yet his father still ended up spending almost a quarter of his pension to send his son to that boarding school! From his parents' point of view, the sacrifice paid off: Eric won a scholarship to Eton. From the boy's point of view, it meant that in a ferociously snobbish, class-conscious world, he twice had the humiliating experience of being the poorest boy in the school. "In a world where the prime necessities were money, titled relatives, athleticism, tailor-made clothes...

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