Learning Outside Classroom
Suummarize
Animal Farm
Animal Farm begins
with a very drunk Mr. Jones (owner of Manor Farm) doing a really crummy job of,
you know, his job. Luckily, there's a wise pig on the farm: Old Major. Old
Major encourages the neglected animals to rebel and run the farm themselves
with one important qualification: everyone should be equal. Then he dies. This
seems like a grand idea to everyone except Benjamin, a cynical donkey whose
main job in life is to be, well, cynical. So, they rebel. The pigs, being the
smartest animals, naturally take the leadership role. So much for that equality
business. So much for Old Major's vision of a peaceful coup, too, because
there's immediate conflict between two pigs, Napoleon and Snowball. Napoleon
wants to sit around and be in charge of everything, while Snowball wants to
teach the other animals and build a windmill. Obviously, Snowball's plan is way
better, so he wins.
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Not. Instead, Napoleon uses his private army
of nine ferocious and enormous dogs to become the All Powerful Dominant Boss
Leader Chief Pig. Okay, he doesn't call it that, but you know it's in the
back of his mind somewhere. With Snowball is out of the picture, the other
pigs blame everything on him. They exploit the other animals shamelessly,
breaking all the rules about equality that they had established after the
Rebellion. Life on the farm gets worse and worse, the animals forget old
Major's original dream, and the pigs make some poor management decisions when
dealing with the neighboring farms. The culminating miserable moment comes
when the pigs send Boxer, a hardworking and loyal horse who is ready for
retirement, to his death. Ouch.
In short, the pigs are starting to look a
lot like the horrible human owners that we started with at the beginning of
this whole mess, walking on two legs and everything. In fact, they may even
be worse.
Critical
Contemporary reviews of the work were
not universally positive. Writing in the American New Republic magazine,
George Soule expressed his disappointment in the book, writing that it
"puzzled and saddened me. It seemed on the whole dull. The allegory
turned out to be a creaking machine for saying in a clumsy way things that
have been said better directly." Soule believed that the animals were
not consistent enough with their real world inspirations, and said, "It
seems to me that the failure of this book (commercially it is already assured
of tremendous success) arises from the fact that the satire deals not with
something the author has experienced, but rather with stereotyped ideas about
a country which he probably does not know very well".
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