Four Legs Good! Two Legs Bad!

Animal Farm
By George Orwell


This is one of the novels Jenn picked for me to read this summer, and I've been meaning to read it for about ten years, since my friend Jef gave me his copy and told me I had to read it.  I read it on my kindle app though.

I really liked this novel basically right from the start.  Major's speech inspiring the various animals to rebel against their human oppressors is a great scene, and it makes it all the more sad that Major dies in the first chapter before being able to see his dream fulfilled.  I quickly fell in love with several of the characters.  Particularly the hard-working horse, Boxer, but I was also very intrigued by the cat in the opening chapter, when the farm takes a vote about whether or not rats should be treated equally along with the other animals, and the cat votes both yes and no.  That struck me as very funny for some reason.  I wish there were more of the cat later in the book, but she just kinda fades away.

Now, Jenn informs me that every character in Animal Farm is meant to represent an actual person involved in the rise of communism.  She suggested that I read the novel along with the sparknotes to get these little insights, but I opted to just read it and enjoy this story being told without trying to understand all the parallels and allusions to historical figures who I probably know little about anyway.  Actually, while I read Animal Farm I was reminded of Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus, which chronicles his father's life in Germany during the holocaust.  In Maus, each race is represented by a different species of animals (Jews are mice, Germans are pigs, Americans are dogs, etc), and I couldn't get those correlations out of my head while reading Animal Farm.

For such a short novel, the story does get a little boring at parts, but I ultimately love where it ends up.  Napoleon's rise to power, and Boxer's death are deeply powerful.  I love how Napoleon changes the commandments of the farm without any shred of democracy, and ultimately cuts a deal with the humans so that most of the farm is hurled back to the slavery they began with.  It's a very sad and pessimistic ending, but I can't imagine how else it would have ended.  My one criticism of the story is the continual building and destroying of the windmill.  I think they ended up building it three times, and the first time it was destroyed in the night, it was genuinely heart breaking.  The second time, I was over it.