Tommaso Losito 5Am

1)What are the main characteristics of Dickens' characters .You can refer to the
novel Oliver twist.
2) What are the recurrent themes and linguistic strategies in the collection Dubliners
by J.Joyce?
3)Why is Animal Farm by G.Orwell defined an allegorical fable?

1)

Dickens enjoyed great popularity throughout his life compared to any other previous
author, his works in fact attracted a very large audience, from the poor to the
aristocrats, and the technological developments of the time, as well as the quality of
his writings, allowed his fame to spread around the world very quickly.
Furthermore, we can say that the author is much more than a great entertainer, in
fact he analyzed the society of the time and, through his novels, represented the
English society of the nineteenth century.

In particular, it was his characters who described the reality of his time,through a
great imagination, they managed very well to convey the idea of ​what life was lived
during the first and the second half of the nineteenth century.

The characters within the stories become real people and through satire and the
description of the environments and the characters themselves, the narration
transforms an individual emotion into a feeling that concerns all human beings,
immersing the reader in some way, completely within the story, making him observe
the most bizarre, paradoxical and amusing aspects of English social life.

In the case of Oliver Twist, there is the representation of a terribly polluted London in
the first half of the nineteenth century in which, through the main antagonists, is
underlined the exploitation of child labor and in general violence, cruelty towards
children and social injustice.
The main character, Oliver Twist for example, is used by Dickens to criticize the
public policy towards the poor in England in the first half of the 19th century.

Charles Dickens, through his novels and tales of him, was a key spokesperson for
the conscience of his period.
2)

Dubliners is a collection of 15 stories unified by the subject and its compositional

structure, a very particular structure that follows the stages of human existence, from
infancy to death.
In Dubliners, Joyce shows the fall of moral values, linked to Dublin's politics, religion
and culture; all the inhabitants of Dublin in fact are considered as weak, they are
afraid of the other inhabitants and are the slaves of their culture.
The main theme of the stories, therefore, is the achievement of self-awareness; for
the author, knowing oneself is the basic of morality and therefore the protagonists
have the task of knowing themselves in order to get out of the so-called moral
"paralysis".
Joyce in this case, would seem to give a moral of life but, the writer's goal is anything
moral, Joyce does not intend to give instructions on how to overcome this situation,
but to underline the impossibility of getting out of this condition of " paralysis".
The impossibility of getting out of paralysis represents another fundamental theme in
Joyce's work, it is defined as "escape" and is described as a useless and desperate
attempt by the protagonists of the stories to escape and get out of paralysis in all
ways but which, however, are destined to fail and remain in it.

Furthermore, in these 15 stories that make up the work, Joyce realistically describes
minimal events that occur in the interior of the city.
Each detail represented has a strong symbolic value, because the author in the
novel uses the technique of epiphanies:
he shows us a particular situation that alludes to a broader meaning, a sudden
spiritual revelation determined by a gesture or a situation that would seem trivial but
is not, through which the entire existence of the character and the character himself
is illuminated, finally manages to understand the deeper meaning of existence and
the true meaning of life.

3)

Animal Farm is a satirical novel written by George Orwell that highlights the origins
and developments from the totalitarian regimes formed in the 1900s.

The novel is set on a farm where the animals rebel because they are tired of
exploitation by man, for this, they get rid of their master and begin to create a new
society, based on the democratic division of tasks by living in peace. without
exploitation; they collect the results of the hard work of the fields and create laws
based on the principle of equality.
However, a slow process of degeneration begins in which the pigs, more selfish and
cunning than other animals, create a revolution and seize power in a despotic way,
becoming real tyrants by taking control of the farm and taking on more and more
behaviors. similar to man, until their leader is actually almost human in appearance
as well.

Precisely because of the central themes dealt with within the novel, it can be defined
as a true allegory of the parable of communism in the former Soviet Union but in
general an allegory of all the revolutions which, transforming into regimes, fail basic
ideals that generated them.