Is Animal Farm by George Orwell merely a political argument or does it manage to entertain the reader as a story in itself

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ANDREW ROBINSON

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PERSONAL STUDY

Is Animal Farm by George Orwell merely a political argument or does it manage to entertain the reader as a story in itself

In this Personal Study I shall be writing about how Animal Farm by George Orwell entertained me as a novel while putting over a political argument in the process.

The opening chapter introduces the theme of revolution that dominates the whole novel, and aswell as doing that it also introduces the farm animals. In Chapter 1 Old Major is the central figure, he gets all the other animals into the barn one night and talks about a revolution, which gets the smartest animals – the pigs, thinking about what could happen.

One way in which Orwell makes this story enjoyable in its own right is how he when describing the farm animals, actually describes them in the way of humans, by juxtaposition the “animalness” of the farm animals with traditionally human characteristics. The example of this is then Orwell describes Clover, the mare “who never got her figure back after her fourth foal”. This makes the novel more of a story as well as just a political argument.

In chapter 2 Old Major, who symbolizes the idealistic, intellectual or abstract vision of a future “Animal Farm”, dies. His death brings to the fore the main characters in the novel, who use the fever of revolution in animal farm to propel themselves to power. These characters are Napoleon who is an aggressive and shrewd pig, Snowball who is the brilliant and idealistic pig and Squealer who is the persuasive speaker and therefore he is the liaison between the leader and the common animal. These three animals make the story more entertaining as because each one of them represents someone or something in the history of the Russian Revolution you can even without knowing much about the Russian Revolution, get an idea of certain things that happened. Napoleon represents Stalin, Snowball represents Lenin and Squealer represents the Russian propaganda machine, due to his persuasive speaking.

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One thing that is extremely entertaining about the novel is the extreme naivety of the other animals; they talk about how “Mr Jones feeds us. If he were gone, we would starve to death” , the other animals – which in general represent the people – don’t really understand the concept of a revolution and what is entertaining about the whole story is how they will listen to the future leaders and just take what they say as to be right, like drones.

In chapter 3 all the animals start to work, and this is ...

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