George Orwell » Animal Farm

George Orwell » Animal Farm

Character Summary

Mr Jones
The cruel farmer who holds the animals of the farm in slavery.

Old Major
An old and venerable pig on the farm. He is the animal who inspires everyone else to dream of being freed from slavery under the humans.

Snowball
A pig, he is one of the leaders of the rebellion. Snowball is highly intelligent and persuasive, a brilliant orator, and is always dreaming ways and means of improving life on the farm.

Napoleon
A pig, along with Snowball the other main leader of the rebellion. He is more adept than Snowball at building alliances among the other animals. He is also more politically asture than his rival.

Squealer
A pig. Like Snowball, a brilliant and persuasive orator, but unlike Snowball, much less inclined to take the lead with his own ideas.

Boxer
A carthorse. Enormously strong, most of the ambitious building projects undertaken on Animal Farm depend on his physical strength and his unquestioning dedication to the rebellion. Dull-witted, he is easily manipulated by the more intelligent animals.

Clover
Another carthorse. Unquestioningly loyal to the rebellion, though even she has doubts at times.

Muriel
A goat, one of the more intelligent animals on the farm outside of the pigs. She is a great friend of Clover.

Benjamin
A donkey. Stubborn and reserved, he is one of the very few animals on the farm who does not actively support the rebellion, though he does not condemn it either. A cynic. He is devoted to Boxer.

Moses
A raven. He seduces many of the animals on the farm with tales of SugarCandy mountain, a mythical place in the clouds where animals go after they die.

ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL, BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS.

When the animals take over the farm, they think it is the start of a better life. Their dreams is of a world where all animals are equal and all property is shared. But soon the pigs take control and one of them, Napoleon, becomes the leader of all the animals. One by one the principles of the revolution are abandoned, until the animals have even less freedom than before.

Submitted by Anonymous.

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Animal Farm is a classic work by George Orwell and a noted piece of literature, which, of course, may help the reader to catapult the imagination beyond the horizons of dogmatic adherence to idealistic or Utopian thoughts. It however, represents human characteristics in an analogy of animal instincts, but it really gives insight into the Russian Revolution of 1917. It also mimics the doomsday of a precipitated change, brought by a modicum of bureaucratic class called as Bolsheviks.

Submitted by Rahimullah Baig Hunzai.

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In this book, written in 1943 and 1944 while Orwell was working as a journalist and commentator for (among others) the BBC Orwell vents his profound disdain for Stalinism and his dissapointment with Marxism as political praxis. A particularly English brand of Socialist with a towering social concience Orwell himself not only campaigned on behalf of teh ILP but had the courage of his convictions to join the Poum in the fight against fascism in Spain in 1937. However, dissapointed and endangered by the political machinations of Stalins Russia in Spain and disgusted by the Molotov Ribbentrop non aggresion pact of 1939 and early communist rhetoric against involvement in World War 2 as a capitalist war, Orwell turns his not inconsiderable facility for satire against totalitarian socialism. Not so much against the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 but against the hypocracy, the repressiveness that that revolution descended into from the dreath of Lenin. This is one of teh best books in the English Language written by one of the most viscerally intelligent, humain, geniuses of the pen to have lived. It comes highly recommended.