Book Portfolio

The book I read was Animal Farm by George Orwell. This book was about how the animals on Mr. Jones farm don’t like the way he has been treating them. So the leader, Major, gets them all together to help him to overthrow their owner. He tells them this based on a dream he has where there are no humans. All the animals end up loving the idea, but he ends up dying, so the three younger pigs; Napoleon, Snowball and Squealer take over for him. When the animals defeat Mr. Jones they name the farm Animal Farm. The farm is running well until Napoleon wants to build and windmill, but Snowball doesn’t want to, so they call a meeting, where Napoleon sets his dogs that he’d been training on him and runs him out, giving him all power. Now he says the farm has to be run by the pigs, because it would be good for the entire farm. But then he decides to build the windmill, but soon finds it knocked over. He automatically thinks it was Snowball that came back, but the animals who were against him who were suspected, were attacked by the dogs. He has shown the rest of the animals how much power he evidently has and starts to make snowball to be a villain. He slowly starts to act like a human and sleep in beds and trade with the other farmers. He tries to tell the common animals that he is a good leader when they are cold and hungry. But when a farmer, Mr. Frederick, doesn’t give him enough timber, a war breaks out when the farmer comes and tries to destroy the farm. Later, the pigs start to be more and more like humans, and start to align themselves with them. Soon the common animals can’t distinguish them between the humans and pigs. The remaining commandment on the barn says this, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” The theme of this book was that if you are not careful, power can corrupt you.
George Orwell wrote this book with the intent to show how bad communism really was back then. He uses Napoleon overthrowing Snowball to symbolize what Stalin did. Orwell also shows how bad Stalin treated his fellow people, killing to further himself and to get what he wanted. Napoleon did those very same things to the common animals, which he used to work together with. He also kills Boxer just to get some money for whiskey. He also uses animalism to easily show another example of socialism. He uses the concept of the windmill to show the struggles the Soviet Union went through before it was finished. In Animal Farm, it took the animals a long time to finally build the windmill successfully because of everyone trying to destroy it. This is just like all the trouble Russia had to go through to finally get the Soviet Union to work.
In using the symbol of the animals overthrowing their evil leader Mr. Jones, he was trying to show how the Russians overthrew the Czars. He then shows how when Napoleon just takes up Mr. Jones old habits and starts to mistreat his fellow animals and make them unequal that the communist system is not so equal after all. When the dogs and pigs take over the government, saying that they know what to do and will make Animal Farm better, they are being just like Stalin, the Russian dictator. Especially when they start to murder enemies and even they’re own animals.
When in chapter 10 Mr. Pilkington says to Napoleon and his fellow leaders “ If you have lower animals to contend with,” he said, “We have our lower classes!” he shows the corruption that has been happening throughout the story. Even going back to what Major said about dividing the humans and animals, he’s doing the same with splitting the animals in themselves. He’s telling the truth about how the animals were in the upper class, or non working, and the laborers. This quote also ties together these animals and the working people of the world today. The way the reader can see that this is real to them also, makes it all the more important.
Overall, Animal Farm was George Orwell’s way to help the people of his time realize how awful and unequal socialism really was. He knew that if he just wrote about what was going on his readers wouldn’t really care. So he set it in the Animal Farm because by using these fictional characters and problems it would be easier to understand. Here is a quote from Old Major warning the animals of the farm; "Your resolution must never falter. No argument must lead you astray. Never listen when they tell you that Man and the animals have a common interest....we must not come to resemble him...No animal must ever live in a house or sleep in a bed, or wear clothes, or drink alcohol, or smoke tobacco, or touch money, or engage in trade."