Farmer Jones tried to keep the animals under control. Old Major teaches the animals a song called Beasts of England in response to Mr Jones treating them badly. The song is about animals overthrowing man and being free. Bit and spur shall rust forever, Cruel whips no more shall crack. The animals sing about the devices Mr Jones uses to keep his power. The 'bit and spur' and 'whips' are used to cruelly keep the animals under control. The animals fight back against the men and take control of the farm.
The earth is ploughed, ships sail, miners sweat in dripping tunnels underground, clerks hurry for the eight-fifteen with the fear of the boss eating at their vitals.
And even in bed with their wives they tremble and obey. Obey whom? The money-priesthood, the pink-faced masters of the world. Gordon sees desolation and prophecies of doom behind the seemingly optimistic manifestations of life on the advertising posters:. Behind that slick self-satisfaction, that tittering fat-bellied triviality, there is nothing but a frightful emptiness, a secret despair.
The great death-wish of the modern world. Suicide pacts. Heads stuck in gas-ovens in lonely maisonettes. Yes, war is coming soon. The electric drills in our streets presage the rattle of the machine guns. Therefore the hatred of modern life, the desire to see our money-civilization blown to hell by bombs, was a thing he genuinely felt.
The fact that Gordon revolts with hysterical, self-pitying bitterness against a situation which he has deliberately chosen deprives it of the moral significance inherent in the acceptance of pain and suffering. But his final surrender to middle-class respectability is hardly less baffling. Modern society, Orwell concludes, is so organized that by ignoring money one is simply rejected from the stream of life. One of the secondary themes of the novel is that the god of money even prevents life from going on.
And lays the sleek, estranging shield Between the lover and his bride. To recapture a sense of traditional decency in English life is the main preoccupation of George Bowling, the hero of Coming Up for Air He is a fat, jovial insurance salesman, who leads a life of petty middle-class conformity in a London suburb and feels the tyranny of his nagging wife, his children and his job closing in upon him.
At the beginning of the novel he describes his environment and the people of his class with ironical perspicacity:. You know how these streets fester all over the inner-outer suburbs? Always the same. Long, long rows of little semi-detached houses — the numbers in Ellesmere Road run to and ours is — as much alike as council houses and generally uglier. The stucco front, the creosoted gate, the privet hedge, the green front door. Just a prison with the cells all in a row.
A line of semi-detached torture chambers where the poor little five-to-ten-pound-a-weekers quake and shiver, every one of them with the boss twisting his tail and the wife riding him like the nightmare and the kids sucking his blood like leeches. Fear is the main reason for their docility. Well, the chief one is an everlasting, frantic struggle to sell things. But it was the spirit of the time. Get on! Make good! If you see a man down, jump on his guts before he gets up again.
Listening to a lecture on fascism at the Left Book Club, Bowling is struck by the fact that the lecturer is inspired by hatred only:. It was a voice that sounded as if it could go on for a fortnight without stopping. The same thing over and over again.
Hate, hate. Gang up, choose your Leader. Both mean spanners and smashed faces. He is not pleading for peace but attacking the inhuman attitude of men who have lost all notion of traditional decency and are insane with hatred. Such men, Orwell contends, are to be found on the Left as well as on the Right: their fanatical attitude dehumanizes human relations. In an essay entitled Raffles and Miss Blandish Orwell shows that violence in modern life is a token of moral degradation.
Orwell attacks the indifference to morals which makes people accept violence, cruelty and perversion as normal and will eventually lead to the acceptance of an existence controlled by power and hatred.
As George Bowling remarks, it is the after-war that matters because the brutal fanaticism responsible for the War will have transformed the world into a hate-world, a slogan world:. The coloured shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber truncheons. The secret cells where the electric light burns night and day, and the detectives watching you while you sleep. And the processions and the posters with enormous faces, and the crowds of a million people all cheering for the Leader till they deafen themselves into thinking that they really worship him, and all the time, underneath, they hate him so that they want to puke.
It was a stable life, in which people felt secure, never realizing that the old world was coming to an end or could ever change. On the way he has the impression that he is pursued by all the people who deprive the common man of his freedom and bully him into a soulless and joyless existence made of unnecessary and valueless loyalties:.
After him! Stop him! When he comes to Lower Binfield, he finds that his village is transformed beyond recognition; it is now a fair-sized town surrounded with industrial concerns. There is even a bomb factory nearby and a big military aerodrome. No one recognizes him or even seems to recall his name. A house is destroyed and several people are killed or wounded. This makes him realize for good how chimerical his desire to rediscover the old way of life was.
His excursion has taught him with certainty that. The bombs, the foodqueues…. Fight against it if you like, or look the other way and pretend not to notice, or grab your spanner and rush out to do a bit of face-smashing along with the others. In Keep the Aspidistra Flying Gordon Comstock settled down to middle-class respectability with a newly acquired conviction that this was the only way if he wanted to live decently in modern society.
This is precisely the kind of life from which George Bowling feels the need to escape after fifteen years of marriage.
Their way of life is the only possible one in an industrial and capitalistic society. Happiness may depend on successful personal relationships, but even Gordon and Rosemary would have found that their every-day life could not remain untinged with fear. Indeed, in all his novels Orwell shows that genuine personal relations cannot flourish in the oppressing atmosphere of modern life. Man has come to a deadlock, and retreat is impossible.
By revisiting Lower Binfield, George Bowling commits the same mistake as his friend Porteous, but he understands that those who cling to the stable civilization which made life secure and peaceful, cling to something that is dead and are therefore dead themselves.
This German person? My dear fellow! Dead men and live gorillas. Some critics stress the fact that he glorifies a way of life which is essentially conservative and whose preservation would have meant the continuation of hard working conditions, little or no education for the poor and more generally a very unsatisfactory existence for the unprivileged.
But this is rather beside the point because Orwell does not glorify or sentimentalize the hardships of the poor. Neither materialism nor the hysterical fear which turn men into brutes will save them from the horrors of totalitarianism.
Orwell wants decency to prevail as the best guarantee against the temptation to yield to fear and hate. With the majority of people decency is smothered by the petty cares of a harassed existence. In Coming up for Air Orwell succeeds better than in his previous novels in blending the experience of his main character with the development of his theme. He renders the atmosphere of fear and hatred which developed in pre-war days and coexisted with incredulity and indifference.
At the same time, he shows how unreal and irrelevant these feelings and attitudes could become for the ordinary man facing the dismal realities of his everyday life. He saw mankind as hopelessly divided into categories which imprisoned people into fixed rules and attitudes and made real communication impossible.
The gap between the ruler and the ruled cannot be bridged more easily in Burmese Days than in In English society the passage from one class to another puts such a strain on the individual that it often entails a psychological breakdown. On the contrary, they are made keenly aware of their limitations as human beings. It is their problems and preoccupations that he dramatizes, and he obviously thought that, more than any social group, they were the victims of industrialism and progress.
They were either unable to adapt themselves to new conditions or forced by financial and industrial tyrants into a life-time of depressing suburban conformity. The middle-class people with military and professional traditions have always considered themselves superior to the commercial class.
In his pre-war novels he emphasizes the strain put on the young who are raised in the belief that they must keep up their standards but are too poor to live on equal terms with the people of the class to which they cling.
It takes Gordon Comstock thirty years to become reconciled with life and clear up the confusion aroused by his education. The essential fact about them is that all their vitality has been drained away by lack of money. Of course, in that kind of family, the lack of money is always at its worst when the kids are at the school-age. He satirizes them for their outdated outlook on life, but it is obvious from the works he wrote about that he was still influenced by their complex attitude towards money and class and that he was struggling to free himself from it.
Although he hated their way of life and their submissiveness, he understood their predicament and the kind of morbid state of mind it could breed. Their confusion and their bitterness were due to the obsoleteness of a social structure which left them uncertain about their own position. He praises the traditions of the workers, the fact, for instance, that in a working-class home the father is always the master and not the woman or the baby as in a middle-class home.
Orwell found that atmosphere more congenial than that of a middle-class family. His approach to his subject is, as usual, quite unorthodox. Orwell approves of the working-class attitude towards education because, as he says, they see through it and reject it.
This may be surprising considering that education normally contributes to awareness, to a better under-standing of life and ultimately to better living conditions. Like Wyndham Lewis, Orwell questions the sincerity of middle-class people who say they want equality but do not seriously intend to abolish class-distinctions and are not prepared to change their own habits.
Why should a man who thinks all virtue resides in the proletariat still take such pains to drink his soup silently? It can only be because in his heart he feels that proletarian manners are disgusting. So you see he is still responding to the training of his childhood, when he was taught to hate, fear and despise the working class. Indeed, why should a middle-class man pick up bad manners because he wants to abolish class distinctions?
Yet it is on the ground of such arguments that Orwell concludes that class prejudice can hardly be abolished. The lower classes smell is the inherent disease which makes prejudice against them ineradicable. His arguments imply that so long as people of different classes have such prejudices about each other, they had better remain separate. Orwell himself lived among workers who were extremely kind to him but always treated him as an outsider.
In Spain he lived for a while in a classless society and wrote enthusiastically about it and became convinced that it is possible for human beings of different classes to associate without prejudice. But this was only possible in exceptional circumstances, for Orwell was a bourgeois and declared that he would always remain one; you can sympathize with the oppressed, live among them but not be of them.
He drew attention to the problem aroused by the English class-system and called for a more realistic attitude towards it: economic status should be the main criterion, and the poorer middle class should get rid of their bias against the working class and be made to see that their real interest lies with them.
As he showed in his pre-war novels, modern man was caught between inescapable evils. Something had to be done to prevent his being crushed by his way of life and to save England from fascism and destruction. He thought England could only be saved by the common man; nothing could be hoped from the upper classes, who had lost their former ability but refused to admit it and took refuge in stupidity.
He ceased to bother about subtle class distinctions, referring only to the rich and the poor and noting that the working-class way of life was becoming increasingly similar to that of the middle class.
Ordinary men, he said, tend to unite when they face the same dangers: enslavement in a heartless society, destruction by war, totalitarianism. He wrote later that ordinary people had saved the British morale at the beginning of the War, because they had retained their integrity; they felt that they were fighting for democracy and knew that the War had to be won by their own efforts.
Orwell describes the nature of work in the mine and explains how the miners live on their small wages. He deals with the housing problem and conveys, perhaps unintentionally but with extraordinary vividness, the sense that escape from these rows of similar small comfortless black houses must be next to impossible. He discusses the budget of the unemployed and draws attention to the injustices of the Means Test. He stresses the deadening and debilitating effect of unemployment on everyone concerned, the human degradation it entails among the more miserable of the unemployed, and the devastating effects of unemployment on the morale of the workers.
Contrary to what many people think, they do resent not being able to work, and are humiliated by it. One of the visible results of unemployment is physical degeneracy, which is increasingly widespread in England. This, Orwell argues, is not due to unemployment alone, which makes underfed, harassed, miserable people long for cheap luxuries, which somehow palliate their misery, rather than spend what they have on wholesome food.
The degeneracy was already a noticeable feature before the First World War and is due ultimately to unhealthy ways of living generated by industrialism. Even in matters of food mechanization provides substitutes for the genuine products; they tempt people because of their shiny, standardized look but they corrupt taste.
Everything slick and streamlined, everything made out of something else. Orwell states facts and alludes to the causes which are responsible for them, but he does not really explore the process by which mechanization destroys man, and he does not show its effects on his characters. We are reminded that his commitment to socialism was both intensely personal and representative of the dominant mood of the Thirties. And all the while everyone who uses his brains knows that socialism, as a world system and wholeheartedly applied, is a way out….
Indeed, socialism is such elementary common sense that I am sometimes amazed that it has not established itself already. The responsibility, says Orwell, lies mainly with the socialists themselves. One of his grievances is that many socialists are insincere. Another source of complaint is that so many people in the socialist party are cranks and keep off from the party more serious-minded people, who hesitate to associate with them.
Another type of socialist whom Orwell abhors is the social reformer like Shaw or Mrs. Socialism, Orwell writes, is essentially an urban creed which grew up more or less concurrently with industrialism. Most socialists accept industrialism too readily; they want to develop it further, and present its achievements as their primary aim.
But mechanical efficiency entails softness and degeneracy and frustrates the human need for effort and creation. Huxley had seen the danger before him, but Huxley was not a socialist. Orwell saw that the mechanization advocated by the socialists required collectivism and centralized control and that man could be made to live under a form of socialism in which he would be well fed but a slave.
He does not yet emphasize the corrupting nature of centralized power but he does foresee the perils of excessive mechanization. Socialism should be humanized and the people of the Left should momentarily drop their differences and concentrate on one essential purpose: the overthrow of tyranny. And it is these people who have contributed to the success of fascism in Germany. Orwell insists, somewhat naively, that if the real aim of socialism is made clear, every decent person will want to work for its establishment.
Orwell had gone to Spain as a reporter, but once there, he found that he could not be a mere spectator. Since he had letters of introduction from the Independent Labour Party, he joined the P. The P. This became a much controverted opinion particularly after the defeat of the Republicans. It is perhaps idle to reflect that if the Revolution had not been crushed out by the government under the influence of the communists, the Republicans might have won the war.
It is well known, that Franco won because he was backed by Germans and by Italian troups, whereas the Republicans were abandoned even by the Russians.
But, as Hugh Thomas remarks in his history of the Spanish Civil War, 32 the Spanish workers had lost their chief reason for fighting once the Revolution was abolished and they lost the privileges they had acquired.
The communist position was that they must do away with revolutionary chaos for the sake of efficiency. It was better to win the war first and make the Revolution afterwards.
At first, Orwell, though fighting with the P. After the liquidation of the P. And, after all, instead of disillusioning me it deeply attracted me. The effect was to make my desire to see socialism established much more actual than it had been before. Class-distinctions were reasserting themselves, and the civilian population was losing interest in the war. This did not shake his enthusiasm for the socialist ideal; the workers had been frustrated of their Revolution, but its aims seemed the more desirable.
When you have had a glimpse of such a disaster as this — and however it ends the Spanish war will turn out to have been an appalling disaster, quite apart from the slaughter and physical suffering — the result is not necessarily disillusionment and cynicism. Curiously enough the whole experience has left me with not less but more belief in the decency of human beings. It is also at that time that Orwell acquired political views which he defended energetically until his death.
One of them is that whoever associates with people whose fundamental interest it is that a socialist society should not be established, actually contributes to the success of fascism. This is what communists did in Spain by allying with the liberals, who were opposed to any change in the structure of society. As time wore on, Orwell was increasingly convinced that communists and fascists were playing the same political game.
He never changed his mind about Russian communism, and he considered the subsequent alliance of England with Russia as an alliance between enemies. The similarity between fascism and communism was another discovery he made in Spain; it sprang from a conviction that power necessarily corrupts, particularly when it is concentrated in a few hands.
Of the corrupting effect of power, Orwell only had a glimpse in Spain, where the Russian purges of had some repercussions, but it made him aware of some of its possible consequences. One of them was that even a socialist revolution might subject the ordinary man to a form of slavery which could be worse than that of a liberal state.
He also saw that truth was deliberately distorted for political purposes and for the first time alludes to the rewriting of history. But his belief that the spirit of man cannot be destroyed was not shaken until the Second World War.
But the thing I saw in your face No power can disinherit No bomb that ever burst Shatters the crystal spirit. It was urgent to save England from fascism as it had been urgent to save Spain a few years before; as in Spain, the only remedy was the Revolution. Its most marked characteristics are its gentleness, the privateness of English life and a belief in the liberty of the individual.
The English have a great respect for constitutionalism and legality, and their judges are incorruptible. True, they are hypocritical about their Empire, and England is the most class-ridden country under the sun, a land of snobbery and privilege, but the whole nation is united in moments of supreme crisis.
Orwell recognized later that he had been wrong since the War was won without making the Revolution. He thought that war is wrong but sometimes necessary and that it is nonsense to pretend that one side is as good as another because they both use violence; there is something like fighting for a good cause.
He had a strong dislike for pacifists and never missed an opportunity to criticize them. If you throw away your weapons, some less scrupulous person will pick them up. If you turn the other cheek, you will get a harder blow on it than you got on the first one.
This does not always happen, but it is to be expected and you ought not to complain if it does happen. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law.
He was convinced that by being a pacifist in time of war, one automatically helped the enemy and that it was easy to cry for peace when other people were defending your life.
In his essay on Gandhi Orwell writes that Western pacifists never answer awkward questions honestly. Are you prepared to see them exterminated? If not, how do you propose to save them without resorting to war? To the pacifists who quoted Gandhi as an example of successful non-violent resistance, Orwell answered that Gandhi dealt with a fairly liberal government who gave him a chance to get a hearing. If he had lived under a totalitarian regime, he would have disappeared in the middle of the night, and no one would have heard of him again.
Like Wyndham Lewis, he accused them of insincerity. He felt in a position to criticize other intellectuals because his own ideas were drawn from personal experience and not from a theoretical humanitarianism. He condemned their internationalism, their irresponsibility and the discrepancy between their ideas and their actions. For the last twenty years the main object of the English Left-wing intellectuals has been to break this feeling down and if they had succeeded, we might be watching the S.
Orwell even writes that power-worship and cruelty were among the motives which attracted the English intelligentsia to the U. This is a one-sided view which Orwell might have been at pains to substantiate. He says that they belong to the Left-wing middle class who are keen on ideology but remain attached to their bourgeois way of life:.
All Left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible.
Many of them were pacifists up to , then advocated war against Germany from to , and then promptly cooled off when the war actually started. But the Left-wing intellectuals are at their most irresponsible when it comes to political orthodoxy. So it is to any ordinary person. The pattern of their life is usually the same: public school, university, a few trips abroad, then London. He understood their urge to commit themselves and the fact that, when they did so, they had to conform to the party line; yet he thought that, as intellectuals, they ought to have fully weighed the implications of their commitment.
His own writing on political commitment shows how conscious he was that the intellectual was caught between irreconcilable claims on his conscience:. On the whole the literary history of the thirties seems to justify the opinion that a writer does well to keep out of politics. For any writer who accepts or partially accepts the discipline of a political party is sooner or later faced with the alternative: toe the line, or shut up.
They cannot prevent the invasion of literature by politics because to preserve a purely aesthetic attitude towards life is impossible in a world full of injustice and misery. Unfortunately, political responsibility usually forces the writer to yield to orthodoxy, which is not compatible with artistic integrity. When a writer engages in politics he should do so as a citizen, as a human being, but not as a writer.
Though he may have lacked discrimination in his attacks against intellectuals, he was probably right in his analysis of their political conversion. Disappointed young men found in communism a relief to their depressing purposelessness. Orwell writes that it is a mistake to believe that young people are attracted by laziness; on the contrary, they are usually prepared to sacrifice themselves for a cause and to commit themselves to the ideology that requires most of them.
The contributors to The God that Failed 51 confirm his belief that many intellectuals turned to communism as to a religious faith to which they surrendered their whole personality. My whole being is bent towards one single goal, all my thoughts even involuntary — lead me back to it. After their disillusionment some found a refuge in religion, a few were driven to fascism, but the majority gave their life a new purpose when the Second World War broke out.
Their recantation of communism proved that Orwell had on the whole been right when he accused them of committing themselves irresponsibly. Orwell himself had always been an opponent of Russian Communism. Even while he advocated a Socialist Revolution, he opposed those of its corollaries that threatened the human values which can only exist in a liberal society.
Already before the Second World War he was drawing attention to the dangers of Right- or Left-wing totalitarianism. The Russo-German Pact obviously bore out for him his conviction that fascists and communists had much in common.
What if the pigs manipulate the animals into thinking they are the most intelligent? How do authors come up with the stories that they write? George Orwell, the creator of Animal Farm, based his book on the time period he was living through, the Russian Revolution.
After the success of the book, the allegorical novel was adapted into a film. The works follow the same line most of the time, but the audience can view a few significant differences between the novel and film.
Orwell and the director of the film, both picked how the material would be portrayed to the audience. The sections that need to be examined between the book and the film are Jessie, Napoleon, theme, central idea, use of audio, and endings.
In the book, Jessie was one of the three dogs on the farm. She was a secondary character that wasn't discussed very …show more content… Orwell denounced the aspect of power in totalitarian governments. After the Rebellion, the pigs guarantee equal rules and make everyone work together. Over time, Napoleon and Squealer become cruel tyrants who take the power of the farm and slowly return the farm to the initial condition of totalitarianism.
The power is proved to be too much for the pigs, who begin to create small privileges for themselves. The privileges expand into huge advantages and corruption. The two main followers being Boxer and the sheep. Boxer continued to elucidate the other animals that Napoleon was always right Orwell The sheep helped the other animals understand that all creatures that had four legs were better than two-legged creatures Orwell The other animals were just as naive, and because of this, they believed everything Napoleon said.
They were too ignorant to question or examine their situation on the farm. The animals are unable and unwilling to act against him, which allowed them to suffer even more at the command of Napoleon.
The pigs started treating the other animals with the same treatment Mr. Jones had. Animal Farm had become Manor Farm all over again. The audience throughout the book could sense the ending being miserable for the animals. However, the director of the film created a different take on the ending. After the death of Boxer, Jessie found a place the animals could go to get away from the farm, where they would be saved from Napoleon Animal Farm. After the death of Napoleon, the animals returned to the farm.
The animals saw what had become of their old home, how the pigs destroyed everything they wanted to become. They made a packed to never let anything like what they experienced happen again. The ending of the film has the audience hoping for a new beginning for the. Show More. Effects Of Communism In Animal Farm Words 4 Pages The sheep had been instructed to shout loudly because Napoleon knew that the animals would disapprove of the pigs walking.
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