PLZ - help! Animal Farm

hej.. skal aflevere denne stil imorgen. Nogen der gider tjekke den for de fejl som jeg ikke har opdaget? PLZ.. kan ikke rigtig få hjælp andre steder end her.. På forhånd tak.. Ps. skal afleveres imorgen


Animal farm is a well-known novel written by George Orwell. It is a political satire based on events during and after the Russian Revolution (1917). In this novel Orwell uses a farm and animals to symbolise the communist system.


The character I feel most sympathy towards in this novel is the horse Boxer. He is also the character that, in my opinion, resembles Orwell’s point of view the most ( -If the animals (= population) is not well enough educated to think for them selves, they can easily be fooled by the bad leader, Napoleon (symbolises Stalin) and the good speaker, Squeler (symbolises the Russian propaganda-newspaper of the 1930’s, - ‘Propaganda’). In this novel Orwell uses Boxer to represent this unskilled labour class in Russian society. This lower class is (because of their low intelligence) naturally drawn to Napoleon because it is not difficult to persuade them into thinking they are getting a good deal. This unskilled labour class is also good at convincing each other that communism is a good idea:
Their most faithful disciples were the two cart-horses, Boxer and Clover. These two had a great difficulty in thinking anything out for themselves, but having once accepted the pigs as their teachers they absorbed everything that they were told, and passed it on to the other animals by simple arguments. (p. 11) This really shows how unintelligent Boxer is. And the fact that he in the end is send away in a glue truck really makes me feel sympathy towards him.
The central character in his novel is the pig Napoleon, who is a metaphor for Stalin. His development throughout the novel is very clear. Napoleon seems at first to bee a good leader. His intention was also good in the beginning: He really wanted to continue Old Major’s wish and make the animals be independent and not controlled by humans. But Napoleon is eventually overcome by greed and soon becomes power-hungry: (...) Napoleon announced that there would be work on Sunday afternoons as well. This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half. (p.40) The true side of Napoleon becomes clear after he slaughtered so many animals for putting against him. He even hired a pig to taste his food to make sure that no one would poison him. By the end of the book, Napoleon does not even pretend to lead a socialist state. He instead becomes more or less a dictator: The animals reassured him on this point immediately, and no more was said about the pigs sleeping in the farmhouse beds. And when, some days afterwards, it was announced that from now on the pigs would get up an hour later (...) no complaint was made about that either. (p. 46) Orwell also makes the parallel between Jones and Napoleon much more clear: It did not seem strange when Napoleon was seen strolling in the farmhouse garden with a pipe in his mouth – no, not even when the pigs took Mr. Jones’s clothes out of the wardrobes and put them on. I truly do not think that the animals wanted to stop Napoleon. They were too unintelligent to realise that he actually suppressed them. In their mind Napoleon was the ‘safer’ who freed them from Mr. Jones. It is first in the end that the animals realise that Napoleon actually stands for the same thing that Mr. Jones stood for...
The animal that leads a happier life is, in my opinion, actually the animal that suffers the most, - Boxer. The reason why I think he leads a happier life, is the fact that he is not aware of his suffering (like Mollie is). He truly believes that life is better now where Napoleon is the leader, and he enjoys working for Napoleon: His two slogans, ‘I will work harder’ and ‘Napoleon is always right’, seemed to him a sufficient answer to all problems. He had made arrangements with the cockerel to call him three-quarters of an hour earlier in the morning instead of half an hour. And in his spare moments, of which there were not many nowadays, he would go alone to the quarry, collect a load of broken stone and drag it down to the site of the windmill unassisted. (p. 41-42)
The fact that Orwell uses animals as main characters makes the story more interesting to read. Moreover it makes the story easy to understand because the contrast between animals is bigger then between humans: By writing about animals rather then human beings, Orwell was also able to sharpen the contrast between his characters. (Background text p. 4). Another important thing is that Fables have no longer descriptions that might distract us from the main plot. The characters are less complicated than those in a novel or play. They are ‘types’, rather than real individuals. They live in a world, but is full of down-to-earth, everyday details. The characters are divided into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in a way that is not true in real life. (Background text p.4)

In this “fairy-story” Orwell intended to criticise the communist regime he saw sweeping through Russia and spreading to Europe. The fact that he used animals to symbolise the Russian society made it much more easier to understand what the communist interpretation of socialism resulted.