On Animal Farm
Friday, January 1st, 2010I commemorated the New Year by reading George Orwell’s Animal Farm for the first time. I came away with mixed feelings. I’m not generally enthusiastic about allegories, mainly because they’re usually so focused on making observations about history that they fail to present these observations in a compelling way. By applying the narrative of the Russian Revolution, and particularly the rise of Stalinism, to a British farm, Orwell removes his readers from the realities of the Soviet Union and allows them to view the events in a dehumanized, almost more objective way. It’s an interesting idea that has been used successfully in other tales. But the novel ultimately left me disappointed, for two reasons. First, Orwell uses the farm to parallel the Stalinist regime, rather than symbolize it. Second, Animal Farm reads much more as a subjective history than as an individual’s story. As a result, readers are kept at arms distance throughout.
