Animal Farm | George Orwell | Longman

Written in 1944 by Eric Blair under his pen name George Orwell, Animal Farm is a short story that brings forth different emotions as one reads it at different stages of life.

In a nutshell, Animal Farm tells the story of a group of animals that overthrew the human owners of a farm to subsequently run it supposedly for the betterment of the animals.  Eventually however, it becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate the animals from humans.

Orwell had written Animal Farm as a satire, towards the tail end of World War II.  Contemporary readers familiar with affairs of the day would be able to quickly see parallels between many of the characters and events in Animal Farm and what had happened in at the end of Imperial Russia, the October Revolution and what happened after the death of Lenin.

Reading Animal Farm as a child (with no adult supervision and no inkling of what communism is) , I  thought the story was hilarious in the way the pigs eventually tried to mimic the humans they so detested and chased out of Manor Farm.  I felt sorry for the hardworking yet naïve Boxer, and wondered if horses were truly denser than pigs, which was why Boxer steadfastly refused to see that he was being made used of.

Reading Animal Farm when I was a lot older in school and having learnt about the October Revolution and the main characters of the Bolshevik Party, I began to see parallels in the characters in the story with happenings of those period - guided by teachers during Reading classes of course.  The similarity was startling, and I began to wonder if Orwell's life might be in danger then after the story was published.  It was also slightly disappointing that by the end of the story, nothing substantial seemed to have changed from the start of the story.  Manor Farm became Manor Farm again, and the pigs seemed to have taken the place of the Jones.

Reading Animal Farm again now (with no guidance from teachers in Reading classes), many moons after the collapse of communism in Russia signaling perhaps the eventual failure of the October Revolution, I thought Animal Farm could be re-interpreted in the current Zeitgeist.  The pigs resembled, not so much the higher echelons of the Bolsheviks, but rather the various technology platform companies today, where independent contractors believed in the spiel of flexible work delivering food and parcels in the neighborhood, where their pay were determined by algorithms that did not take into account bad weather, or that humans (unlike machines) do fall ill and cannot work 24/7.