The Life and Works of George Orwell: A Journey Through History and Allegory

Return Home and Career

The following year he returned home and began a teaching job which he soon had to abandon for health reasons and take a part-time job first in a bookshop and then a novel reviewer for New English Weekly. In late 1936 he went to Spain to fight in the Republican ranks but was injured. He was also a war correspondent for the Observer. He suffered from tuberculosis and in the last years of his life was often hospitalized. He died in 1950 at the age of forty-six.

Main Works of Orwell

His name is mainly linked to the publication Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984).
"Animal Farm" was written between November 1943 and February 1944. It's a novel of a political fantasy genre because it's based on the story of a politically influenced fantasy story but, as Orwell himself states, it can also be considered a novel because it tells real events, even if in the form of a metaphor, the Russian Revolution of 1917.

The book is set in the first half of the twentieth century in Willingdon, a small town in England, and talks about the animals of an English farm that, tired of being subjected to the orders of human beings, decide to rebel. Having driven out their master, they set up a new farm based on laws of equality between animals and aversion to humans. Among them, however, emerge the pigs who, with cunning, greed and selfishness, impose themselves on the other more docile animals by dictating laws in their favour to the point of reducing them to hunger and fatigue. Too late they will realize that they are more exploited than before and will end up no longer distinguishing pigs from humans.

The text, 142 pages long, consists of ten short chapters and can be divided into five macrosequences. In the first, the animals of the Master's Farm are tired of being reduced to misery and slavery by man and so, spurred on by the Old Major, they begin to mature an idea of rebellion; in the second, following serious food shortages and increasingly frequent beatings, they carry out a revolution led by the two most intelligent pigs, Snowball and Napoleon, thanks to which they manage to drive out the master and his men; in the third they establish that their government must guarantee equality between all animals that will never again have to deal with the world of men; they continue to work but each according to his own abilities and happy to finally produce something for themselves; in the fourth sequence, however, emerge the pigs who, being the most intelligent, take over the situation by managing power to their own advantage, thus violating the principles of equality enshrined in the seven commandments; in the fifth sequence, the struggle for dominance between Napoleon and Snowball ends with the victory of the former, who, thanks to the dogs he trained, centralizes all the power and manages to modify the laws previously established without the others noticing it; in the last sequence the pigs end up taking on the same human characters and the animals to know the same mistreatment and the same privations as before.

Political Metaphor and Characters

The writer uses a metaphor to denigrate the Soviet totalitarian regime in the years of the 1917 revolution. Many of the characters in history represent, in fact, the historical characters of communism. The Old Major, a wise twelve-year-old boar, depicts Karl Marx, both of whom died before the revolution they devised was applied, and the song he teaches other animals praises the First English International in 1864, in which Marx's ideas triumphed, marking the starting point for the spread of communist doctrine in Europe. Lenin is not personified by anyone, however his successors, Stalin (the pig Napoleon) and Trozkij (the pig Snowball), are present. The first, a big pig with a fierce appearance, with his cruelty, ambition, cunning and arrogance, manages to subdue everyone in order to have the power and the honours that come from them. The other is, he is lively, witty, intelligent and very inventive, but less authoritarian than his antagonist, in fact he is soon expelled from the farm by Napoleon's ferocious dogs on the charge of treason because he also thought a little bit about the interests of other animals. Left alone, the pig centralizes all the powers and takes possession of the profits of the farm, contradicting and manipulating those commandments, that declaration of equality that had been the input of the revolt.