Essay on Animal Farm

Submitted By lehcar78
Words: 722
Pages: 3

Animal Farm By Rachel Sanders
“Everyone is equal, but some are more equal.” This statement is very well demonstrated through the book Animal Farm by George Orwell. We will see the great lesson Orwell was trying to convey to us through three main points. First, what makes a fairytale and how Animal Farm is considered one of them, second we will see the strand of communism and totalitarianism that arise, and last who and what the characters are represented and their respected themes they play in this time period.
According to Google’s dictionary a fairytale is: a children's story about magical and imaginary beings and lands. The main answer to why Animal Farm is considered a fairytale is that animals in it talk and can walk upright, read, write, and do things that normal animals can't do. Plus they overthrow the original owners of the farm. But to go farther, Animal Farm is a depiction of Stalinism in the Soviet Union. It uses animals to portray the characters in it, such as horses, pigs, and others. So I assume that having the animals talk and interact as people make Animal Farm a fairly tale, although the message is deadly serious. What is this message you might ask?
The underlying themes in Animal Farm are quite clear as they come off the pages to the reader. Communism is a way of living where everything is owned by everyone and there's no government because none is needed. Totalitarianism is when a government fiddles with everything, even the most personal things (it has total control over its people) As in the opening quote “everyone is supposedly equal”… but some are more equal than others. In Animal Farm the reader is drawn by emotions to the difficult state of the animals. Being abused and hurt, the attitude is set against the farmer. But as the story progress’ the reader finds that the pigs who run the farm are just as power hungry and self serving as any of the humans. Communism and Totalitarianism is reflected in this mindset on how unfair the animals were treated but then flipped on how unfair the humans were treated in the end. “In Animal Farm, Orwell, who was a socialist himself, shows the degeneration of a regime originally based on socialism towards a totalitarian and unequal one, in which a minority uses ideology to control the rest- so that, in the name of absolute equality, a minority controls all the rest and behaves no better than the previous rulers it sought to replace.”
Along with this idea of Communism and Totalitarianism, Orwell hints at who the characters in the book represent. First off the Old Pig-- Old Major represent the beginning of communism or Karl Marx—in the beginning the old pig dies and is