Animal Farm, George Orwell | Bernard Grofman (essay date spring 1990)
Bernard Grofman (essay date spring 1990)
SOURCE: Grofman, Bernard. “Pig and Proletariat: Animal Farm as History.” San Jose Studies 16, no. 2 (spring 1990): 5-39.
[In the following essay, Grofman examines aspects of Animal Farm, including its literary roots, its place in didactic literature, and its critical reception.]
This essay has a very simple aim: to rescue Animal Farm from the often repeated claim that it is merely a children's story and to demonstrate how closely its events are tied to the events of Soviet political history.1 In the process I hope to demonstrate that Animal Farm works at several levels, as a charming story about “humanized” animals, as an allegory about the human condition, and, most importantly, as a thinly disguised and biting political satire about Soviet totalitarianism. No reader can fully enjoy the book without knowing, for example, that the pig Snowball...
[The entire page is 9112 words long]
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