Over Analyzing Animal Farm: Part 1

 

Spoiler Warning: This blog will go into detail about the first 3 chapters of Animal Farm, effectively spoiling the story, so read at your own risk. It also assumes that you have read the book already.

Animal Farm is an interesting book about communism. So I am over analyzing the first three chapters of the book. But first, a general summary of Animal Farm’s first 3 chapters. Jones owns Manor Farm and lately he has been managing the farm rather poorly. Old Major gathers all the animals to tell them about a time when all the animals will be free from the humans. Eventually Jones and his men forgot to feed the animals. By this point, the animals overthrow the humans and drive them off the farm. The pigs are the leaders in this new animal society with the two most important ones are Snowball and Napoleon.

 In order to discuss the book, I will posit that the book almost mirrors the communist revolution and the time period afterwards.  Assuming that is true then Jones likely represents the Tsar specifically, while humans in general represent the Bourgeois. We can assume that Snowball is Trotsky and Napoleon is Stalin. One of the animals who is less obvious is Old Major, who does he represent? My first thought would be to say he represents Lenin, but Old Major died before the revolution not after. Old Major likely represents Karl Marx.

Most of the other animals represent the working class. The Seven Commandments I don’t think reference anything yet. The first three chapters are rather idyllic but with some foreshadowing of the times ahead. There are some questions unanswered like who does Benjamin the donkey represent? Seriously who does he? Does he even represent anything? He’s cryptic, old, and unchanged at all. On page 30, “When asked whether he was not happier now that Jones was gone, he would say only ‘Donkeys live a long time. None of you has ever seen a dead donkey.’” What does this even mean? It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. What he said makes sense but in context it doesn’t, he didn’t answer the question at all.

Now, on to random, overly specific details. Using page 25, in 24 hours the cows produce 5 buckets of milk, assuming each bucket is 1 gallon that is 5 gallons of milk produced each day. We know that all the milk goes to the pigs, but we don’t know how many pigs there are. But on top of that on according to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactose_intolerance) pigs are lactose intolerant once they are adults. So it is kind of odd, but also gives Squealer’s statement on page 35 how most pigs dislike milk mostly correct. And this concludes me over analyzing Animal Farm.