George Orwell's Animal Farm

A fable is „a brief tale in verse or prose that conveys a moral lesson, usually by giving human speech and manners to animals and inanimate things“8, which usually concludes with a moral in form of an epigram.9 Fables are usually writen as so-called beast fables, in which animals show human behavior and skills and characteristics. 10

Animal Farm is one of George Orwell’s most successful books. Even though Orwell chose a difficult topic to deal with, its message is quite easy to understand even for younger readers who do not know or understand much about Stalin, the Russian Revolution and its consequences for the population.

On the first view, Animal Farm is just a story about a farm on which the animals, after hearing of an old boar’s dream about a world in which all animals live free without being oppressed by humans, start a rebellion and chase all humans off the farm. The animals then start to run the farm by themselves, with all animals being equal and and each animal working according to its own capacities. In their seven commandments, which are agreed by all animals, they arrange the rules which they need on the farm to make sure every human behavior, such as walking, drinking alcohol, wearing clothes or sleeping in beds, is illegal. The seventh and last commandment says that „All animals are equal“11. But this idealized equality does not last very long. Not long after the humans are chased from the farm and the animals start to work on their own, the pigs, being the most intelligent among the farm animals, explain the other animals that it has to be the pigs who take over some of the farm’s management because none of the other animals would be capable of all that brainwork. Within the pigs the two boars Napoleon and Snowball turn out to be the most powerful ones and use a third pig, Squealer, to anounce their decisions. During the harvest the pigs are not seen working on the fields as every other animal. When the other animals wonder about that, it is Squealer who explains to them that the brainwork of the pigs is much harder than the work the other animals have to do on the fields. It is also the pigs who are leading the weekly meetings which take place every sunday instead of work. The pigs are the only animals who are capable of learning the whole alphabet and teach themselves reading. Quite soon they take a room as a headquarter for themselves where they study books from the farmhouse and increase their knowledge which the other animals do not possess. Instead of sharing the cow’s milk and the apples from the fields with the others the pigs start using those luxury goods for their own mash.