Animal Farm Tone

Objective, Withdrawn, False Neutrality

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 precisely, with seeming objectivity. What’s our point?

Our point is that Animal Farm is an allegory. In other words, the vast majority of details in the novel have as much to do with the Russian Revolution as they do with animals taking over a farm. In a voice showing little to no emotion, the narrator tells us that after the four pigs confess, the dogs "tore their throats out" (7.25). It seems to be objective reporting, as if the narrator is just doing his best to tell us what happened.

Except that the dogs tearing out the throats of other animals alludes to the Stalinist regime. It’s a metaphorical way of describing how people were robbed of their voices by being forced to make false confessions. It’s also a simple allusion to the literal violence that was so prevalent in Russia in the 1930s. The narrator isn’t just telling us what happened. He has a point to make, a score to settle, and yet he does it all behind the veil of neutrality.

This false neutrality is part of the power of an allegory or a fable. Orwell was one of the greatest essayists of his time. He could just as easily have written a tract denouncing the West's involvement with Stalin and the communist Russian state. Instead, he decided to write a "Fairy Tale." Why?

Because the form of the novel, the tone that the narrator can adopt within it, allows Orwell to essentially make his point without making it. His argument becomes all the more powerful because the reader doesn’t hear the narrator saying, "I am making an argument." Instead, the narrator gets to adopt this false position of objectivity so common in fiction. He gets to teach us a lesson without us realizing that we are being taught. At the very least, we don’t feel that someone is wagging a finger in our face.

Of course, the fable form also allows Animal Farm to be a much more universal book than it would have been if it were an essay about the dark downturn of the Russian Revolution. Though it’s more enriching to know the historical context of the novel, you can still read Orwell’s book without knowing that it alludes to Russia and pull a moral from within it. Very roughly: power corrupts.

Few lines in history have knocked as harsh a blow to simplistic utopian thinking as "All Animals Are Equal But Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others" (10.17). And yet the line just wouldn’t be the same if Orwell had written in an essay, saying something like: "Although Karl Marx and other utopians sometimes think that they can create social systems in which all men are treated as completely equal, they must learn that such social systems will be distorted by human greed and lust for power, and will inevitably lead to some men seeming more equal than others."

Now, which of the two packs more of a punch?