Animal Farm, George Orwell | Samir Elbarbary (essay date 1992)
Samir Elbarbary (essay date 1992)
SOURCE: Elbarbary, Samir. “Language as Theme in Animal Farm.” International Fiction Review 19, no. 1 (1992): 31-8.
[In the following essay, Elbarbary explores Orwell's use of language in Animal Farm.]
George Orwell's repeated insistence on plain, firm language reflects his confidence in ordinary truth. This is visible in the language of the narrator in Animal Farm, which is characterized by syntactic tidiness and verbal pithiness. “Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the pop-holes”; this is how the narrator begins the fable. Set in ironic juxtaposition to this terse phrasing is another distinct language: the crassly elitist, manipulative, unintelligible, and circumlocutory discourse of the pigs, through which the fictitious passes off as factitious and the animals' world is created for them. The magical agency...
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