At Ease, Comrade!

Animal Farm is an interesting story by George Orwell. At a first glance, the novel seems to be a cute story about farm animals that take over a human farm and farm the land for themselves. To any fourteen year old, that is what Animal Farm is. However, to an eighteen year advanced placement literature student, Animal Farm is so much more; it is a work of satire.

A satire is a work in which the author uses humor, irony and/or exaggeration to expose and criticize a human vice and create a social commentary.  Some famous examples are Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”. This writing basically got Swift kicked out of Ireland because Ireland was going through a famine and as a response to the excess amount of complaining, Swift wrote a paper about how a solution to the famine and poverty was eating and selling babies.  Obviously, he was not seriously suggesting the people of Ireland eat their babies but it this kind of exaggeration that makes a satire a satire.

Orwell used irony throughout Animal Farm and this irony used was in order to ridicule how the Russian people traded tyrants after the revolution yet nothing changed. For example, the prized boar, Old Major, talked about how he had a dream where all animals were united and how they provided for themselves. After Old Major had died, the two pigs, Snowball and Napoleon, arranged the revolution and drove Farmer Jones and his men off the farm. This symbolizes the Russian Revolution and how the Russian people overthrew the Romanov. Afterwards, Snowball and Napoleon led the people and Snowball really tried to help the animals be productive and be united. however, Napoleon saw Snowball as competition and he tried to kill Snowball with the nine puppies he trained.  Once Napoleon took power, he stopped all committees and all the voting. It was his way or death. The ironic element is that the pigs were supposed to be for the animals and one of them. One of the animal commandments were All animals were equal yet the “milk and the windfall apples (and also the main crop of apples when they ripened) should be reserved for the pigs alone,” (Orwell, 1955, p. 33). The pigs ate like kings while the rest of the farm got slop (or what I think animals would consider slop). This is a direct parallelism to the people of the Soviet Union. Stalin and his men ate all the good food while the people got scraps. The ironic element is that the animals expected the goods to be shared equally because in the rules all animals are “equal” yet the pigs do not share because they are “special”. It is opposite of what all the animals expected and the Russian people went through the same with Stalin. He and his men ended up taking all that was good and valuable and leaving the people with dirt.