George Orwells Animal Farm Essay -- George Orwell Animal Farm Essays

George Orwell's Animal Farm George Orwell wrote ‘Animal Farm’ as an allegory, which is a simple story, with a more complicated idea running alongside it. In this case, it is a story about a group of pigs taking over a farm, and the story of the Russian Revolution is told underneath it. The main characters of the revolution are portrayed in the book as follows: Mr Jones is Czar Nicholas II, the last Russian leader before the revolution; Old Major is Karl Marx, the person who influenced the people into revolting and the idea of communism; Snowball is Trotsky, one of the early leaders of the revolution; Napoleon is Stalin, a cruel, selfish, and corrupt leader; and Boxer and Clover represent the proletariat, or the ‘common’ working class people. At the beginning of the book, Boxer is introduced as ‘an enormous beast’, who is ‘not of first rate intelligence’, and we are also told that he is universally respected. He has a kind, gentle, caring character that others feel safe around ‘Last of all came the cat, who looked around, as usual, for the warmest place, and finally squeezed herself in between Boxer and Clover.’ Boxer and Clover are used by Orwell to represent the proletariat, or the working class, in Russian society. This lower class is naturally drawn to Stalin (represented by Napoleon) because it seems as though they will benefit most from his new system. Since Boxer and the other low animals are not accustomed to the "good life," they can't really compare Napoleon's government to the life they had before under Jones. The proletariat are also quite good at convincing each other that communism is a good idea, ‘they absorbed everything that they were told, and passed it on to the others’. Boxer... ...nd of the book shows how the leaders of the Russian Revolution turned out to be just as bad, if not worse than the czars, ‘The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to say which was which.’ George Orwell put Boxer in the story and killed him to show that all his hard work, like the proletariats in the Russian Revolution, was for nothing and that, in the end, it would always go back to the way it was at the beginning. This is something that Benjamin knew all the way through, and after the animals have forgotten Jones and their past lives, ‘Only old Benjamin professed to remember every detail of his long life and to know that things never had been, nor ever could be much better or much worse; hunger, hardship, and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law of life.’