Animal Farm Analysis

Animal Farm is an allegory for what happened in Russia between the years of about 1917 and 1943. Some of the latest editions of the book leave this fact out, likely hoping to make it a more "univer...

Orwell came up with the setting for his novel after seeing a young boy whipping a carthorse. As he writes in his Preface, "It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we s...

The narrator is an uninvolved third person (or possibly third creature) whom we know nothing about, never see, and who isn’t a character. The narrator is just a disembodied voice telling us w...

Orwell famously gave his novel Animal Farm the sub-title Fairy Tale. The subtitle seems ironic. Elsewhere we’ve noted that if Animal Farm is a fairy tale, it’s like one by the Brothers...

There’s something a bit strange about the way Animal Farm is told. First, the narrator is unidentified. Second, he has no role in the story he is telling. Third, he relates everything precise...

The style of Animal Farm is wedded to Orwell’s overall purpose in the novel. As you might have gathered from Orwell’s depiction of the intelligent pigs Napoleon and Snowball, he was ske...

You’ve got a farm. You’ve got some animals on it. Sounds reasonable to us. But wait, you say, surely that’s not all. Correct. If you’ve read the book, then you may have noti...

Animal Farm may deceptively be titled a "Fairy Tale," but if so it’s a fairy tale of the Brothers Grimm variety; the end is absolutely chilling. As we have seen, the dream of the Rebellion ha...

Submission under tyrannical human owner Jones. This is the first situation we come across, so we’re thinking it’s the initial one. It’s also fairly static, and we get the sense th...

Old Major identifies the animals’ general dissatisfaction with their world and roles; he declares that a rebellion is needed.This is about as clear-cut as anticipation gets. Even the reader i...

The characters are introduced. They want independence and self-sufficiency. Once they rebel, they have no choice but to be independent.Disaster befalls the animals as the leadership begins to take...

Orwell is so NOT his real name. It’s Eric Arthur Blair. (Source) Orwell came up for the idea of Animal Farm when he saw a boy whipping a horse. If only the horse were aware of its own streng...

There’s no sex in Animal Farm, though there is some implied promiscuity on the part of Napoleon – he seems to be responsible for all of the new generation of pigs.

None