Pigs standing above \\ the good, worse than the better, \\ a greater idea.
#HAIKUPRAJNA - Animal Farm [Book Review Analysis and Summary]
https://haikuprajna.blogspot.com/2022/12/20221211-animal-farm-book-review.html
Hello readers,
Was procrastinating on writing this review of George Orwell’s Animal Farm; the last time I read this story was back in May.
Nonetheless I have always thought it was a fun-to-read political allegory. The book follows a colourful cast of characters and is about the rise and fall of the world’s only Animal Farm. The narrative exposition and dialogue put the reader in the middle of the action, but does often gloss over things like confessions before deaths.
Other reviewers have touched on all the parallels and metaphors, so I am going to approach the philosophical aspects portrayed by the animals’ manipulation of ideas.
However, as others have said, it is impossible to separate the story from the history. Due to its satirical nature, every action is steeped in Orwell's political philosophy.
“He would say that God had given him a tail to keep the flies off, but that he would sooner have had no tail and no flies.”
While reading, I was focused on how Napoleon and Snowball interpreted different belief systems from Old Major's radical philosophy--having upon death become a kind of godlike guiding principle--between relieving and exploiting the inherent suffering of others.
Napoleon employed fear tactics as a means of transcending his own hindrances and hurdles to meet his ill intended ends.
His group of pigs hindered the rest of the animals to keep himself above the Farm by withholding knowledge and resources, from writing to food; he met rebellion with lethal force.
The pigs renounce a multitude of human vices before then being consumed by their attempt to pursue them, fixing their laws to be beneficial to the leaders.
Napoleon used stories about Snowball to twist real and fake events, which kept him in control of the narrative and thus the actors within it, and met with the humans they were warring with to revert the Animal Farm to its past, except for the pig's new power and control.
"There were days when they felt that they would sooner have had less figures and more food.”
Beyond the Stalinism criticism, Animal Farm demonstrated what happened when the systems one had faith in changed the beliefs of the system; some animals continued to dream of a Sugar Candy Mountain and all the promises of prosperity, at least until the very end.
Their hardest worker was sent to death while believing in the Farm's original cause, despite Napoleon's manipulation.
The Farm operated with clear social class divisions and managed to generate an income, but the dreams of improved living conditions are lost over the generations.
The pig’s adopting of human vices made them indistinguishable from humans, a reversion to the previous oppressive lifestyle they had broken free from, which is a dire warning about the nature of philosophical ideas in applications like politics and history.
Animal Farm is an informational story about the effects of philosophical and political ideologies on not only the leaders, but also the common population.
Despite restricting information, hiding general poverty and faking otherwise from the world outside, the Farm was yet still suffering, implying that it is what is happening in the outline that defines the idea.
“They were glad to believe so.”
Orwell had a grasp on metaphysics and its sociopolitical applications; the pigs burning the human’s things and becoming obsessed with and absorbed in using them seems, to me, to imply knowledge of how viral ideas root themselves in our society, such as seen in the current manifestation of information warfare with manipulation and disinfo campaigns; the pigs filling papers to burn the info was reminiscent of Orwell's 1984 and Bradbury's 451.
For both the upper class pigs and the common animal, their own songs and myths were the greater symbol than that of Napoleon's ideal, sustaining them through the years until everyone was old or dead.
The new farm's generation of animals were doing fine, but without the same level of insight, and had to rely on their dream's better ideas instead of reality's worse experiences.
Thank you for reading, please share your thoughts.
Allen W. McLean
1984 [ https://haikuprajna.blogspot.com/2021/08/20210804-doublethink-review-1984-annual.html ]
Fahrenheit 451 [ https://haikuprajna.blogspot.com/2021/09/20210922-review-fahrenheit-451.html ]
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