In “George Orwell's Animal Farm: A Twentieth-Century Beast Fable”, Laraine Fergenson evaluates Animal Farm specifically as a fable, to explore its underlying meaning. Fergenson is an english professor emerita of the City University of New York and has written several articles about politics and literature. She opens her article proclaiming that Animal Farm was Orwell's greatest work of art and Orwell himself considered it a masterpiece. This article was written due to the volume of deliberation about Animal Farm’s political purpose and target of the satire. At the time of publication, the public saw the novel as anti-communist. Fergenson summarizes the novel, along with its parallels to the Russian revolution and the Soviet Union. Fergenson agrees with
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In Animal Farm, Orwell portrays many of the characters as unselfish, but these animals are not intelligent enough to be leaders. Brains appear to be the monopoly on Animal Farm, as Fergenson write, “Orwell seems to be saying not that people are no good, but that the most vicious and selfish of people often[...] gain control over their moral betters”(115). The exception, as she clearly explains, is Benjamin the donkey, an uninvolved intellectual that “rejecting the principles of animalism because of deep-rooted pessimism that [...] manifested itself in political quietism, refuses to believe that life can be made better”(116). By definition, a fable illustrates a moral, which often attains the power of a proverb. The motto the pigs have written on the side of the barn at the end of Animal Farm illustrates the basic inequality that subverted the revolution, as Fergenson cites from another author. This proverb means that basic inequalities may make the virtues of great kindness, nobility, and sacrifice, insufficient to guarantee
In Animal Farm, Orwell portrays many of the characters as unselfish, but these animals are not intelligent enough to be leaders. Brains appear to be the monopoly on Animal Farm, as Fergenson write, “Orwell seems to be saying not that people are no good, but that the most vicious and selfish of people often[...] gain control over their moral betters”(115). The exception, as she clearly explains, is Benjamin the donkey, an uninvolved intellectual that “rejecting the principles of animalism because of deep-rooted pessimism that [...] manifested itself in political quietism, refuses to believe that life can be made better”(116). By definition, a fable illustrates a moral, which often attains the power of a proverb. The motto the pigs have written on the side of the barn at the end of Animal Farm illustrates the basic inequality that subverted the revolution, as Fergenson cites from another author. This proverb means that basic inequalities may make the virtues of great kindness, nobility, and sacrifice, insufficient to guarantee