George Orwell’s Animal Farm

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One critic remarked of George Orwell that he wrote sympathetically about human beings only when he presented them as animals. The truth of this can be tested by comparing Animal Farm to Nineteen Eighty-Four; Napoleon (Stalin) is preferable to the torturer O’Brien, perhaps because even a whip-wielding boar is more tolerated by Orwell than a sadistic human. Poor Boxer, the martyred workhorse, is certainly more lovable than Winston Smith, and Mollie the flirtatious mare is more charming than poor Julia. Orwell’s dislike of people resembles that of a much greater moral satirist, Jonathan Swift: Each loved individual persons, while despising mankind in the mass. Whatever the aesthetic flaws of Animal Farm, it seems to me a better book than Nineteen Eighty-Four, primarily because it allows us a few animals with whom we can identify. Even Benjamin, the ill-tempered old donkey, silent and cynical, and incapable of laughing, still becomes somewhat dear to us, largely because of his devotion to the heroic Boxer. I’m not certain that I don’t prefer Snowball (Trotsky) to anyone at all in Nineteen Eighty-Four, because at least he is vivacious and inventive.

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