Man animal man animal farm

In Animal Farm, in contrast, we meet a totally different experience. It is ‘A Fairy Story’, a world of
formal
allegory, with allegory's distancing and universalising effect. This is because Orwell wants to use
only one
element of Wells's complex story. Wells, somewhat confusingly, includes different responses to
his plot: both
an agonised image of human suffering under the tyranny of evolution, and a satiric exposure of
the animal
nature of man. The writing is sometimes indebted to Hardy5 and at others to Swift. He employs
Moreau as the
image of the sadistic tyrant and the animals as sufferers, and uses the figure of Prendick to
focus the distress
because he shares both roles.
Orwell, however, was writing not about the general nature of man but about the specific issue of
the
corrupting nature of absolute power. He needed both to keep separate the images of tyrant and
victim, and to
remove the confusing presence of an intermediary, participating, narrator.6 Instead, he adopted
the traditional
form of children's fable and gave us two carefully separated images: of animals as victim and of
man as
tyrant. The animals, of course, as William Golding indicates, convey human responses—
George Orwell's splendid fable, having to choose between falsifying the human situation and
falsifying the nature of animals, chooses to do the latter. Often we forget they are animals.
They are people, and Orwell's brilliant mechanics have placed them in a situation where he
can underline every moral point he cares to make.7
We recall not only Boxer's loyalty and Clover's grief at the loss of her pastoral, but also
Benjamin's alert
scepticism about politicians, Mollie's human vanity and the cat's shrewd opportunism. But they
do not adopt
the human image: they retain the image of animals. The increasing corruption of the pigs, in
contrast, can be
caught in their changing image as they become more and more like dictatorial man. The satire
of the
Communist dictatorship is imaged in the one group of animals which insists on its common
nature and destiny
with the others but increasingly departs from it.
It is in his brilliant analysis and presentation of the role of Man that Orwell achieves his most
penetrating
satire. ‘Only get rid of Man’, says the Major, ‘and the produce of our labour would be our own.
Almost
overnight we could become rich and free’. (AF. 13). Again, the relation to Wells works by
contrast not
Man animal man animal farm

similarity. In Wells's story, getting rid of Moreau freed the animals from his dictatorial power and
they
reverted to their earlier state. But this does not happen on Animal Farm. In Major's proposals
there is an
unperceived ambiguity. On the simple level of story, animals are animals and men are men. But
on the
allegorical level, some animals are simultaneously animals and men. Jones is simply Jones, but
Napoleon is
also Stalin. ‘Only get rid of Man’ works on the simple level of story; but if the pigs are
simultaneously images
of men, you do not get rid of Man simply by sacking Mr. Jones. The aspect of human nature that
the pigs
represent is a permanent part of the picture; and utopia that starts with the provision ‘Only get
rid of Man’ is
shown in its nature to be illusory. The historical allegory thus allows a separation between the
animals and the
pigs, and allows Orwell to extend his theme from that of a satire on a particular political
philosophy to a more
universal account of the age-old conflict between the governors and the governed