Animal farm

« Georges Orwell : an excellent criticism of the society.

I’m going to speak about “Animal farm” by Georges Orwell and which is a fantastic political book. It was first published in August 1945. The story take s place in England in “The Manor Farm” after the Russian revolution and before the Second World War.

The main characters are the proprietor Mr Jones and his animals. One day , Old Major had a dream and described it to all the animals in the manor farm.

In his dream the animals weren't the slaves of the humans.

Three days later Old Major died.

The animals organised a revolution with two leaders: Napoleon and Snowball, which are respectively a boar and a pig.

They banished Mr Jones and his men.

Napoleon and Snowball wrote “the seven commandments” and decreed new rules and the song "Beast of England" as a new farm's anthem.

But the two leaders happened to stop managing together as Napoleon wanted to be the only leader.

He accused Snowball of being a traitor and then he banished his former co-leader.

Napoleon then used the sheeps as propaganda leverage: they claimed everywhere on his behalf "four legs good, two legs bad".

This motto soon became "four legs good, two legs better"! He also used four dogs as a terrible threat and repression for his “people”. The pigs had a lot of privilege and were considered as more intelligent than the other animals.

They eventually adapted the seven commandments every time it suited more their own interests.

At the very end, the laws were finally replaced by the single sentence “ All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others ” .

One step after the other Napoleon and the other pigs looked more and more like human beings and even happened to walk on two legs.

At the end of the book, we can even picture Napoleon playing poker with humans and cheat like them. The novel deals with the Russian revolution and Stalinism.

George Orwell laughs at communism regime.

He wants to point out that this kind of political approach which consists in claiming that “everybody is equal” just like in the animal farm, is not realistic as there is always a leader like Napoleon or Stalin.

Therefore, the motto “ All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” can be translated into “All humans are equal, but some humans are more equal than others.”… I liked this novel because I found it very interesting: I share this cynical perception of the social and political environment, and also this description of the human inability to lead the world on rules which are decided by a few people and diverted by unscrupulous leaders.

Furthermore, I very much appreciated the way Georges Orwell’s use of humour to describe us.

To conclude I can say that this is the best political book I’ve ever read due to an excellent writing skill by the author and a very amazing imagination of Georges Orwell.

It’s the first book of him I have read so far but now I want to read the others because he is a very good writer.

The current government should learn about this history to avoid the same mistakes because now they do a lot of mistakes. I had ch osen to read this book because many of my friends recommend to me, I had read the summary which gave me the desire to read the book and I had heard that Georges Orwell was one of the most famous history’s book writers.. »