Book Report on George Orwell's Animal Farm

Title
Animal Farm

Author
'Animal Farm' is written by George Orwell. Orwell was born in Motihari, India, in 1903 and died in 1950. His real name is Eric Blair. He was educated at Eton. From 1922 to 1928 he served in the 'Indian Imperial Police' in Burma, an experience that later found expression in the novel 'Burmese Days'. For the next two years he lived in Paris, and then came to England as school teacher. Later Orwell worked in a book shop. In 1937 he went to Spain to fight for the Republicans and was wounded. During World War II he was a member of the Home Guard and he worked for the BBC.
In 1943 he joined the staff of 'Tribune', contributing a regular page of political and literary commentary. Later Orwell became a regular contributor of 'The Observer', for which he worked as a special correspondent to France and Germany.
Orwell was a socialist but detested extreme political view-points. His most successful publications 'Animal Farm' and '1948' are meant to be warnings against totalitarian regimes and dictatorship. The pair of novels brought him his first fame and almost his only remuneration as a writer.
Orwell's reputation rests not only on his political shrewdness and his sharp satires but also on his marvellously clear style and on his superb essays, which rank with the best ever written: 'Politics And The English Language'.

Story
'Animal Farm' was first published in 1945 by Secker And Warburg. The copyright is by Eric Blair. It contains 120 pages. The story takes place on Manor Farm in Southern England in the forties. The story is told chronologically.
The book is a parable of the utopian roots of the Russian Revolution and the totalitarian state that followed.

Characters
There are 4 main characters in 'Animal Farm'. #Napoleon: He is a 'smart' pig. He takes the leadership amongst with the other pigs. He is very mean. He only does things when he gets better by it.

#Boxer: He is a 'hard-working' horse. When things are going bad on Animal Farm, Boxer only works harder. He doesn't see that Napoleon is terrorising the whole farm.

#Squealer: He is a 'fat' pig and helper of Napoleon. He does everything that Napoleon tells him to do. Squealer is also very mean toward the other animals.

#Snowball: He is a 'cleaver' pig. There is always a difference of opinion between Napoleon and him about their projects.

Summary
Mr. Jones, the owner of Manor Farm, is always drunk and treats his animals badly. Major, an 'old' pig, tells the other animals to start a rebellion. It is the only way to change their miserable life. He teaches them the words of the song 'Beasts Of England', a song about the time when England will belong to the animals.
One evening all the animals come together to discuss how they could overtake the farm. Together they make a plan, that was implemented in due time. Then they take over Manor Farm and rename it in Animal Farm. The animals try to learn reading but only the smartest animals actually learn it. The pigs, who could read and write the best, propose seven rules which all animals should obey to:

* whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy * whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend * no animal shall wear clothes * no animal shall sleep in a bed * no animal shall drink alcohol * no animal shall kill any other animal * all animals are equal
These rules are summarised by the statement 'Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad'. However , gradually things change. The pigs and dogs create a new rank. They make themselves the leaders of animal farm. Sometimes their behaviour must defended by adapting several rules of the above seven commandments. Their criticism is consequently respond by the remark: 'but it was always so, don't you remember?'
There is also a struggle for leadership between the two pigs Napoleon and Snowball. Snowball can make brilliant speeches and has good ideas. But Napoleon has most support from the sheep. When Snowball presents a plan for the building of a windmill, he is chased away by a group of dogs.
Now Napoleon is the ultimate leader. Every idea Snowball had is proposed again by Napoleon. When things go wrong, Snowball gets the blame. Napoleon behaves more and more like a human-being (sleeping in bed, wearing clothes and walking on two legs).
The horse Boxer is the best worker of all. He works harder and harder each time things go bad. Then he falls ill.
In the end the pigs invite their human neighbours to a feast of reconciliation, leading the other animals to realise that they have merely exchanged one tyranny for another.

Reading experience
I found the book on my bookshelf and it was recommended to me by my mother. I decided to read it because I also saw the movie and that was a cool film. I expected a good book, because the movie was great. My expectation came true, 'Animal Farm' has some very humoristic parts. The book is realistic, because the situation has happened before in the Soviet Union. It describes the history that starts good with genuine purposes. But in the end nothing has actually been changed. All the parts in the book impressed me, because I was very excited about them. All the aspects of the book are successful.
I would advise others to read the book, because it is easy and funny.
Chapter 1
Shawn Dripchak
Mr. Pollock
English I – IV
7 November 2011
Orwell, George. Animal Farm. New York: Harcourt Inc., 1956.
One of the best qualities I want when I’m working in a group is leadership. Leadership can sometimes be good and sometimes be bad. In George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm, leadership had a tendency to have a negative effect on all the animals, except of course the ruler and his species: the pigs. After the farm animals chased Mr. Jones and his workers out, the pigs took leadership. Over the years, the pigs progressively made the farm from a democracy to a type of tyranny.
This is my favorite sentence describing the Battle of the Cowshed: “The men gave a shout of triumph” (Orwell 57). Reading this sentence made me feel like I was actually one of the farm animals watching these two-legged things scream and charge right at my location. Hence, it made me feel frightened. It also reminded me of the “Rebel Yell” from the Confederate Army in the Civil War, in which they would scream and charge at their opponent to try to scare and intimidate them.
When I read this book, I could tell that the theme was power, but it took me some time to figure it out. By saying power is the theme, I mean in the way of leadership, corruption, and control over the intellectually inferior. In the way of leadership and corruption, the pigs say they will preside over a farm of equal animals. But, the pigs take advantage over that power and begin to more and more resemble those whom they claim to replace. In the way of the theory “control over the intellectually inferior” the pigs become the leaders because they say they’re the most intelligent. It soon becomes very clear that their intelligence and good intentions don’t connect, and so the pigs become dependent on the obliviousness of the other animals and their ability to understand that the Seven Commandments are gradually being corrupted.
The following sentence was the greatest surprise to me in the whole book: “They (the dogs) dashed straight for Snowball, who only sprang from his place just in time to escape their snapping jaws. In a moment he was out the door and they (the dogs) were out chasing him” (Orwell 67). What surprised me the most was that Napoleon sent dogs to attack Snowball and that all that time he was “teaching” the dogs, he was actually teaching them to obey him and attack Snowball at sight. When the dogs were first born, Napoleon saw them as a good way to take leadership of Animal Farm by teaching them to attack Snowball and drive him out of the farm and to use them as his personal bodyguards. I didn’t see that coming.
George Orwell said a lot through his book Animal Farm. Firstly, he plainly states “with great power, comes great responsibility,” (Uncle Ben, Spiderman) and if we don’t take care of things then we might get in a worst state or right back to same problem we were previously in. I think Orwell’s message to society takes more of a communist approach to things in Animal Farm. He could be seen as communist because in the beginning of the book he shows a “perfect” state where all the animals are equal and they all live together in sync. And in that scene, they all have equal food, all have a say in what goes on at their farm and live happily together.
Although I can see why it would be disapproved for young readers, I would recommend Animal Farm to everyone 12 years and older. I had a hard time, and thought it was a little confusing, trying to figure out if Animal Farm was actually a metaphor to the Russian Revolt. Although I did finally conclude that it was a metaphor, I also found out that Animal Farm is very unique because it expresses a sociopolitical structure with animals, not humans. Animal Farm made me realize that animals are used a lot in books to show or make a point without being so straightforward. Animal Farm, to me, was a very easy book to read because it always kept you on your toes, and there was always something happening; like when Mollie leaves The Animal Farm or when Boxer is to be killed. Also, the ending caught me by surprise because it was both sad and bad. It ended with the pigs basically becoming humans and the name of the farm being changed back to Manor Farm. This part was sad to me because it shows you how ignorant and powerless the other animals were.
Description Animal Farm Book Review Genre Reference stats Published on 2011-11-11
I MADE THE INCREDIBLY RASH PROMISE to read half of the 1001 Books List before I turn 28. I must have been mad. Depending on which year’s list you look at, I am currently hovering around the 17% mark, which is worrying since this represents the achievement of my entire life so far. Clearly I need to make up some ground and fast.
To do this I am rushing through the list by reading the thinnest books I can find. These days I tend to look at a book and assess whether I want to read it or not purely by how slender it is. Hence both Disgrace and The Thirty-Nine Steps (I’ve already talked about them somewhat [on my blog], but for the record: 3 and 2.5 stars respectively), and hence, after having it on my shelf for about fifteen years,Animal Farm.
This is a book I really ought to have read years ago. All the way through my childhood, well-meaning relatives kept giving copies of it to me because they had heard I liked animals. Being a child who was a) very emotional and b) not stupid, I was suspicious enough to find out more before I began to read it, and my research led me to discover that a) Animal Farm is not really about animals at all, and b) the horse totally dies.
Spoiler: the horse does die, and nastily. It’s probably a good thing I didn’t read this as a child because there is a heavy lot of animal-on-animal cruelty in this book. But, of course, Animal Farm isn’t really about the animals. It’s all a great big allegory and, as an easily understandable expression of what tends to happen when you put a high-minded ideology into practice, and especially why Communism is such a total non-starter, it’s brilliant. If, it argues, even cuddly little animals end up shooting each other in the face and turning into human beings out of sheer wickedness, then those of us who were human in the first place have no chance. As arguments go, it’s compelling.
I’m a big fan of George Orwell’s non-fiction writing because it manages to be simple, elegant and above all memorable, and this is no exception. Animal Farm is sound-bite heaven. It’s incredible how much a text that’s less than 100 pages long has become part of our culture and the way we understand politics. Phrases like ‘Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad’, ‘Napoleon is always right’, and ‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others’ get trotted out (hah) endlessly, even by people who haven’t read the book.
With that said though, Animal Farm is by no means perfect. Where it doesn’t really work is as an actual story. It’s so obviously intensely full of meaning that you can’t focus on what’s going on on the surface because you’re trying to work out which of the pigs is meant to be Stalin (and to remember exactly who Molotov was, because it turns out that you may not have been paying full attention during that History lesson).
That doesn’t affect its cleverness, but it did influence how I felt about its characters. Yes, Boxer dies, and that is sad but, because he’s just a horse-shaped allegorical symbol for the credulous Soviet worker, it’s hard to have a real depth of emotion for his fate. It turns out, contrary to what I was expecting, that you don’t feel particularly sad when metaphors kill other metaphors, even if the first metaphor does it by sending the other metaphor off to be turned into glue. Oh well. Sucks to be a metaphor, I guess.
Essentially, I appreciated the ideas behind Animal Farm a lot, but I’m not sure I actually enjoyed the process of reading it. Nor do I feel that, now that I have read it, I have any deeper understanding of its political message than I did before. It’s an immensely clever bit of writing, and what it has to say is (I think) immensely true, but that’s really all. I know this is one of George Orwell’s most famous and important works, and I’m probably ruffling a lot of feathers with this opinion, but I still think I prefer him when he’s in essay writing mode.
– Robin Stevens
Author: George Orwell
Main Characters: Napoleon, Snowball, Squealer, Boxer
Minor Characters: Jones, Benjamin, Muriel, Clover, Fredrick, Pilkington, Mr. Whymper, Moses
Point of View: ( ) First Person ( ) Camera-Eye (*) Oamniscient
Symbols: Green flag with hoof and horn - Green fields of England and future of the Animal republic. Moses (raven) - religion
PLOT LINE:
Introduction: Major tells animals his dream about the Rebellion and freedom for animals
Narrative Hook: Animals rebel against Jones, kick him off farm.
Rising Action: Struggle between Snowball and Napoleon for control of farm.
Climax: Animals at a debate between Snowball and Napoleon, Napoleon unleashes his dogs, they run Snowball off the farm.
Falling Action: Napoleon begins his "reign of terror," exploits other animals while telling them things are better off than when Jones was around.
Resolution: Humans praise pigs for successful exploitation of other animals, animals look into farmhouse and can't tell the difference between the pigs and the humans.
What incident begins this story? The story begins with Old Major, a large boar, telling the other animals of his dream when all animals whill be free and humans will be gone. He tells them of the Rebellion, but warns them if it happens, the animals must never accept human vices or tyrranize over the other animals. Jones neglects feeding the animals, and they rebel before realizing that was the rebellion.
What is the major conflict? The major conflic in this story is the struggle between Napoleon and Snowball for the control of the farm, in this case it would be pig versus pig.
What further events complicate this story? Further complicating the story was the threat of Jones trying to come back and retake the farm. Here all of the animals, including Snowball and Napoleon, would have to work together to keep the farm under their control.
How is the conflict resolved? The conflict is resolved when during a debate Napoleon calls the dogs he had trained and they run snowball of the farm. He then assumes leadership of the farm.
What is the setting of this story and how does it contribute to the novel as a whole? The setting of Animal Farm is on a farm somewhere in England. Had the story taken place anywhere else, it would be a little1 hard to believe (for example, animals walking and talking in New York City?).
A theme is a general statement that the author wishes to make about life. Write one sentence which states the theme of this book. The theme of Animal Farm can be explained in two words: Power corrupts.
List at least two quotes that you think are worth remembering.
"Windmill or no windmill, he [Benjamin] said, life would go on as it had always gone on -- that is, badly."
"Once again the animals were conscious of a vague uneasiness."
Comment on the author's style. George Orwell takes the concepts of Communism and capitalism and symbolizes them on a farm in England, Communism being the animal self-rule and capitalism being the human rule of the farm. He symbolizes the qualities and feelings of the people under communism in each of the farm animals, Boxer being the people who accept what they are told without a question, Mollie representing those who cannot give up their old way of life, etc. He (the author) makes it easier to understand the feelings of the people by giving just 1 or 2 qualities to each animal.
Why did you dis/like this author? Although I have not ready any other works of his, judging from this story, I like the author because he makes the story easy to understand and also fun to read (much more fun than reading a book containing the hard facts, I think).
Why did you dis/like this story? I liked this story because it was easy to follow, you couldn't get lost somewhere because there were no technical terms to have to look up and only then partially understand. This story was fun to read, and if you know your history, you can relate this story to actual events and feel how those who went through it felt.
Footnotes
1 little is used sarcastically here.