Theme Of Power In Animal Farm

Power has always been difficult to equally share. Humans have struggled for centuries to balance authority evenly and have created complicated systems to try to overcome the problem. The Russian Revolution is amongst many to have tried and failed to raise a fair government. George Orwell’s classic novel Animal Farm portrays this event in history into a smaller scale, making it easier to understand. Having so much power is not always a good thing. Animal Farm proves this to an almost scary extent where the characters are mainly animals, not people. In this novel, power is achieved in many different ways; corruption, physical force and knowledge. In George Orwell’s Animal Farm, power and control of the farm shifts from Mr. Jones to Snowball and

A way power is achieved is the knowledge of language of the pigs. In Animal Farm, the pigs gradually twist and distort a rhetoric of socialist revolution to justify their behavior and to keep the other animals in the dark. The animals heartily embrace Major’s visionary ideal of socialism, but after Major dies, the pigs gradually twist the meaning of his words. "Four legs good, two legs bad" (chapter III) then evolves to "Four legs good, two legs better!" (chapter X). As a result, the other animals seem unable to oppose the pigs without also opposing the ideals of the Rebellion. By the end of the novella, after Squealer’s repeated reconfigurations of the Seven Commandments in order to decriminalize the pigs’ treacheries, the main principle of the farm can be openly stated as “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” (chapter X). This

Animal Farm is not told from the perspective of any particular character, though occasionally it does slip into Clover’s consciousness. Rather, the story is told from the perspective of the common animals as a whole. "All that year the animals worked like slaves. But they were happy in their work; they grudged no effort or sacrifice, well aware that everything they did was for the benefit of themselves and those of their kind who would come after them, and not for a pack of idle, thieving human beings" (chapter VI). The animals trust the pigs only on the solid fact that they are animals as well, letting all the abusing pass without much notice. Gullible, loyal, and hardworking, these animals give Orwell a chance to sketch how situations of oppression arise not only from the motives and tactics of the oppressors but also from the naïveté of the oppressed, who are not necessarily in a position to be better educated or informed. When presented with a dilemma, Boxer prefers not to puzzle out the implications of various possible actions but instead to repeat to himself, “Napoleon is always right” (chapter VI). Animal Farm demonstrates how the inability or unwillingness to question authority condemns the working class to suffer the full extent of the ruling class’s