George Orwell – 1984, Animal Farm

Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), better known by his pen name George
Orwell, was an English novelist and essayist, journalist and critic. His work is characterised
by lucid prose, biting social criticism, opposition to totalitarianism, and outspoken support of
democratic socialism.

As a writer, Orwell produced literary criticism and poetry, fiction and polemical journalism;
and is best known for the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier
(1937), documenting his experience of working-class life in the north of England, and
Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences soldiering for the Republican
faction of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), are as critically respected as his essays on
politics and literature, language and culture.

Animal Farm is an allegorical novella by George Orwell, first published in England on 17

August 1945. The book tells the story of a group of farm animals who rebel against their
human farmer, hoping to create a society where the animals can be equal, free, and happy.
Ultimately, however, the rebellion is betrayed and the farm ends up in a state as bad as it
was before, under the dictatorship of a pig named Napoleon.

According to Orwell, the fable reflects events leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917
and then on into the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union. Orwell, a democratic socialist, was a
critic of Joseph Stalin and hostile to Moscow-directed Stalinism.
Main characters and their peculiarities:

Pigs

- Old Major – An aged prize Middle White boar provides the inspiration that fuels the
rebellion. He is an allegorical combination of Karl Marx, one of the creators of
communism, and Vladimir Lenin, the communist leader of the Russian Revolution and
the early Soviet nation, in that he draws up the principles of the revolution. His skull being
put on revered public display recalls Lenin, whose embalmed body was put on display.By
the end of the book, the skull is reburied;
- Napoleon – An allegory of Joseph Stalin,Napoleon is the main villain of Animal
Farm;
- Snowball – Napoleon's rival and original head of the farm after Jones'
overthrow. His life parallels that of Leon Trotsky;
- Squealer – A small, white, fat porker who serves as Napoleon's second-in-
command and minister of propaganda, holding a position similar to that of Vyacheslav
Molotov;
- Minimus – A poetic pig who writes the second and third national anthems of
Animal Farm after the singing of “Beasts of England” is banned. Rodden compares
him to the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky.

Equines

- Boxer – A loyal, kind, dedicated, extremely strong, hard-working, and

respectable cart-horse, although quite naive and gullible. Boxer does a large share
of the physical labour on the farm. He is shown to hold the belief that "Napoleon is
always right." At one point, he had challenged Squealer's statement that Snowball
was always against the welfare of the farm, earning him an attack from Napoleon's
dogs. But Boxer's immense strength repels the attack, worrying the pigs that their
authority can be challenged. Boxer has been compared to Alexey Stakhanov, a
diligent and enthusiastic role model of the Stakhanovite movement. He has been
described as "faithful and strong"; he believes any problem can be solved if he works
harder. When Boxer is injured, Napoleon sells him to a local knacker to buy himself
whisky, and Squealer gives a moving account, falsifying Boxer's death;
- Mollie – A self-centred, self-indulgent and vain young white mare who quickly
leaves for another farm after the revolution, in a manner similar to those who left
Russia after the fall of the Tsar. She is only once mentioned again;
- Clover – A gentle, caring mare, who shows concern especially for Boxer, who
often pushes himself too hard. Clover can read all the letters of the alphabet, but
cannot "put words together". She seems to catch on to the sly tricks and schemes
set up by Napoleon and Squealer;
- Benjamin – A donkey, one of the oldest, wisest animals on the farm, and one
of the few who can read properly. He is sceptical, temperamental and cynical.
1984

In 1984 the Earth is divided into three great totalitarian powers: Oceania, Eurasia and
Estasia, engaged in a perennial war between them, whose main purpose is to maintain total
control over society.

Society is administered according to the principles of Socing , the British Socialist Party, and
is governed by an all-powerful single party headed by Big Brother, a character that no one
has ever seen in person (but that appears in posters everywhere) and that constantly
controls the lives of all citizens (his physical description recalls Josif Stalin, Adolf Hitler and
Lord Kitchener). The totalitarianism of Big Brother develops characteristics of the Soviet
Union of Stalin and Germany advocated by the Nazis.

Power is in the hands of a single party, simply called the Party, itself divided into Internal
Party (which includes leaders and administrators) and External Party (made up of
bureaucrats, employees and subordinate officials). His eyes are the televisions, televisions
equipped with cameras, installed by law in every home of the members of the Socing, which
the members of the External Party cannot turn off, but of which at most they can attenuate
the volume of audio. These television cameras, present everywhere, in addition to spreading
propaganda 24 hours a day, spy the life of any member of Socing, effectively canceling any
form of privacy: in this way, the government can easily observe any form of behavior, even
unconscious, which reveals that an individual has thoughts contrary to the Party’s orthodoxy.
This mechanism of observation is carried out continuously, and on every single member of
the Party.

The Party is governed by the Minamor ("Miniluv"), the Ministry of Love, whose function is to
control party members and convert dissidents to its ideology, and has a political police, the
Psicopolizia (in English, "thought Police")which intervenes in any situation suspected of
heterodoxy and deviation. Below the one party are the prolets, who have no power or
privilege, carrying out heavy work in exchange for the minimum subsistence, but have the
advantage of not being controlled except indirectly.

The thirty-nine-year-old Winston Smith is an employee of the External Party working at the
offices of the Ministry of Truth, charged with "correcting" the books and newspaper articles
already published, modifying them in order to make the forecasts made by the Party
verifiable and truthful. He also deals with modifying written history, thus contributing to fuel
the reputation of infallibility of the Party itself, applying damnatio memoriae to dissidents
"never existed" and so on.

Apparently Winston is a malleable type, in reality he does not tolerate the conditioning of the
regime and he does not manage to adapt his mind to the bispensiero, so much so that he
begins to write in a diary his own feelings of discontent towards the regime. His life changes
radically when one day, during a two-minute hate rally directed against Emmanuel
Goldstein, an opponent of Big Brother, meets Julia, a 26-year-old who adapts to the Outer
Party only for convenience. After some difficulty, Winston falls in love with Julia even though
the regime does not want sexual relations that have no other purpose than procreation. To
avoid being discovered during their amorous encounters, the two lovers, with the help of Mr
Charrington, find refuge in a room located in the neighborhoods reserved for the prolet, that
is the area of the city less guarded because inhabited by the semi-illiterate working class.

Winston and Julia thus decide to collaborate with a clandestine organization of rebels, called
the Brotherhood, to which O'Brien, important official of the Internal Party in which the
protagonist sees a father figure, says to belong. Thus they receive from him a book, the
theory and practice of oligarchic collectivism, the manifesto of the organization, which
exposes its anti-governmental ideologies against the regime.

Captured by a squadron of Psycho-Police and delivered separately to a prison of the Ministry

of Love, Winston and Julia are subjected to a program of physical and psychological torture
conducted by O'Brien, who is actually an officer of the same Psycho-Police. During his
imprisonment, Winston, evidently refractory to Socing’s sociopolitical conditioning, was
tortured and led to align himself with the Bispensiero, divided into three phases: learning,
understanding, acceptance. In the first phase, the pain is intense but Winston resists and
does not betray Julia. In the second phase the pain is unbearable and the physical
appearance of Winston changes, but he still manages to resist even if conscious of risking
a death sentence by shooting. In the third phase Winston is led to Room 101, where the
most absolute phobia of every condemned person materializes: in this case in a cage, fixed
on his face, two mice are placed, only animals that anguish him even in his nightmares.
Faced with the threat that his face will be devoured by mice, Winston, in total terror, betrays
Julia and denies her anti-government sentiments.

After a proper brainwashing, the attempt will succeed perfectly and Winston will end up
siding with Big Brother. In March 1985, Winston, now released and rehabilitated, met Julia
in a park, and both admit to betraying each other. Some time later, the protagonist sits alone
in the Bar del Castagno café where he learns the news of Oceania’s military victory over
Eurasian armies in Africa. The novel closes with Winston looking with admiration at a
manifesto of Big Brother and thus making the reader understand his own ideological change
and the fact that he will probably be killed by a bullet and that he will die in this way loving
Big Brother.

Political geography

Three perpetually warring totalitarian super-states control the world:

- Oceania (ideology: Ingsoc, i.e. English Socialism), whose core territories are the
Western Hemisphere, the British Isles, Australasia, Polynesia and Southern Africa
- Eurasia (ideology: Neo-Bolshevism), whose core territories are Continental Europe
and Russia, including Siberia
- Eastasia (ideology: Obliteration of the Self or Death Worship), whose core territories
are China, Japan, Korea and Indochina

The perpetual war is fought for control of the "disputed area" lying "between the frontiers of
the super-states", which forms "a rough quadrilateral with its corners at Tangier, Brazzaville,
Darwin and Hong Kong", and Northern Africa, the Middle East, India and Indonesia are
where the superstates capture and use slave labour. Fighting also takes place between
Eurasia and Eastasia in Manchuria, Mongolia and Central Asia, and all three powers battle
one another over various Atlantic and Pacific islands.