George Orwell
Eric Blair was in India in 1903 as he was the son of a minor colonial official. Orwell was educated at
Eton, in England where he began to develop an independent-minded personality and indifference
to accepted values, and professed atheism and socialism. On leaving college he started to work for
the Indian Imperial Police in Burma (1922-1927). He hated working in Burma and returned to
England on sick leave. Once back in England he devoted himself to writing full time, publishing his
works with the pseudonym of George Orwell. His works are Down and Out in Paris and London
(1933) (a non-fiction narrative in which he described his experience among the poor), Burmese
Days (1934) (based on his experiences in the colonial service), The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) (a
report on the conditions of miners in the industrial North), Homage to Catalonia (1938) (based on
his experience during the Spanish Civil War), Animal Farm (1945) (made him internationally known
and financially secure) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) (his most original novel). There is the
rejection of his English background because he accepted new ideas and impressions and his life
and works were marked by a conflict between middle-class education and emotional identification
with the working class. The role of the artist is to inform, to reveal facts and draw conclusions from
them and he has a social function. His essays were Inside the Whale (1940) (the role of the writer),
Why I write (1946) (his aim was “to make political writing into an art”) and Politics and the English
Language (1946) (Rules for good writing: Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech
which you are used to seeing in print, Never use a long word where a short one will do, If it is
possible to cut a word out, always cut it out, Never use the passive where you can use the active,
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday
English equivalent and Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous).
Animal farm
Orwell chose as a subtitle “A fairy story” because this novel has some characteristics of fairy tales,
like speaking animals. But there’s a big difference between his novel and fairy tales: the absence of
a moral and the not clear distinction between good and evil. Orwell chose to structure it as a fairy
tale to avoid censures because his aim was to critique totalitarian regimes, especially the
soviet/communist one. It’s divided in 10 chapters and it tells the story of a group of farm animals
who rebel against their human farmer, hoping to create a society where the animals can be equal,
free, and happy. Ultimately, the rebellion is betrayed, and under the dictatorship of a pig named
Napoleon, the farm ends up in a state as bad as it was before. The characters are:
Old Major (Marx)
Napoleon (Stalin)
Snowball (Trotsky)
Squealer (the Pravda)
Clover (Proletariat)
Boxer (Proletariat)
Mollie (Middle-upper classes)
Benjamin (the aged population)
Mr Jones (the zar)
Moses (the Church)
The dogs (the police)
The sheep (the mass)
The hens (kulaks)
It’s an allegory of the Russian Revolution. It’s a third person narrator story. The themes are the
power (control of the past and the language and education, manipulation and the use of violence
and fear) and the economic profit above everything else (construction of the windmill).
