Scarica ANIMAL FARM, MAIN CHARACTERS DESCRIPTION e più Esercizi in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! INTRODUCTION It will be clear that some of the main animal characters represent important figures in the story of the Russian Revolution. We have chosen five main characters that in our opinion are really important for the development of the novel: Boxer, Old Major, Snowball, Napoleon and Squealer. BOXER (A HORSE) Boxer is the strongest and probably the most admired animal in the entire farm. The narrator decribes him as “a huge beast, almost fifteen feet tall and as strong as two normal horses together”. As the story progresses, we quickly see that Boxer is a tireless worker, but his firmness, very often, becomes a blind loyalty that will get him in trouble. In his initial speech, Old Major warns Boxer "the same day that your big muscles will lose their strength, Jones will sell you to the quacker, who will cut your neck and cook you for hunting dogs". Boxer appreciates Old Major's words, but once Jones is expelled from the farm, the horse believes that the threat is gone. His mind isn’t subtle enough to see that pigs, who are supposedly descendants of Old Major, are becoming more and more like Jones. After the rebellion, Boxer amazes everyone with his work ethic. He creates his own motto "I will work harder". As we can read, in The Battle of the Cowshed, he fights bravely for farm security. It is very likely that the battle could not have been won without him. When things start to thin on the farm, Boxer experiences a vague sense of worry. The problem is that he is not intelligent enough to understand exactly what is happening, and instead of thinking about himself, he prefers remaining stubbornly loyal to the cause of Animal Farm. After Snowball is expelled, Boxer tries to think of himself, but all he can conclude is "... if Comrade Napoleon says so, he must be right" and creates another personal motto "Napoleon is always right". His intentions are good, but he needs someone else to tell him what to think. With the cunning pigs handling the threads, there is no doubt that they will take advantage of Boxer. As time passes, the other animals continue to notice Boxer. Because of the fact that Boxer remains loyal to the pigs, everyone remains loyal to the pigs. When Napoleon begins to execute other animals, Boxer only manages to say “… I don't understand. I would not have believed that such things could happen on our farm. That is surely due to some defect of ours. The solution, as I see it, is to work harder ”. The reason why Boxer creates and adopts personal slogans is that he needs them to be able to live for something. When things get tough, all you can do is take refuge in them. After the destruction of the mill in The Battle of the Mill, Boxer aims to have a new one before retiring, but in the process, he is overloaded and that’s when the Old Major's prophecy reappears. The pigs replace Mr. Jones, and their solution for a retired horse is the same. However, the pigs need to appear faithful to the animals, and that is why they say they that they will take Boxer to the hospital. The narrator tells us “In other times, a few kicks from Boxer's hooves would have shattered the van. But, unfortunately, his strength had abandoned him; and soon the noise of hooves became weaker and died out ”. Boxer and Stalin's Russia As an allegorical figure, Boxer is the mimesis of the Russian proletariat, the strong but often ignorant working class. Although pigs are the object of the toughest satire, at times you cannot help wondering how much responsibility Orwell gave the proletariat in that Russian situation. After all, it was that force that allowed the Russian Revolution to triumph in 1917. vital project for the future success of Animal Farm. Snowball is the pig that thinks ahead. In contrast, Napoleon seems more concerned with consolidating the power they have already won. Snowball's strengths are, in a way, his ruin. Snowball is much more charismatic, and when he was finishing his speech "there was no doubt about the outcome of the vote". Napoleon, the confabulator, has to invent an answer, and the only thing he can think of is throwing the dogs at Snowball. After Snowball is kicked out, he becomes a scapegoat. Napoleon makes Squealer spread any kind of bad rumors regarding Snowball, destroying his great reputation, and eventually turning it into the symbol of the internal enemy. The real Snowball, however, is never seen again after its expulsion. Leon “Snowball” Trotsky In the first chapters, it seems that Snowball could be the mimesis of Lenin, the leader of The October Revolution in 1917. But as time goes by, it is clear that the strongest connections are with Leon Trotsky, who was the second to command after Lenin during the revolution. Immediately after the revolution, Trotsky became an important person in Russia, just as Snowball was a vital personality in Animal Farm. Trotsky was a Commissioner of the town of external affairs, and played an important role leading the Red Army to victory in the Russian Civil War (the parallelism would be the role of Snowball in The Battle of the Cows Stable). But Trotsky's differences with Stalin would be his ruin. Theoretically, the biggest difference between Trotsky and Stalin was that Trotsky was in favor of watering the Communist Revolution to the rest of the world. Stalin, in contrast, developed the idea of maintaining communism in a country; he thought that they should consolidate their power where they had already won it, in the limits of Russia. The attack on Snowball is an allusion to the way in which Stalin forced Trotsky out of the Communist Party in 1928.. NAPOLEON (A PIG) Napoleon doesn’t play an important role in the initial rebellion, even so, he is one of the smartest pigs in the place. The narrator describes him as “a big fierce-looking boar, the only Berkshire pig on the farm”. It is also important to note that Snowball is a better speaker and a better comrade than him. But, Napoleon is the most treacherous and the most cunning of the pigs, and always manages to do what he wants. For example when he snatches the nine cubs and decides to raise them: in the future they will be at his service. No one knows exactly what he is doing until the dogs appear and throw out Snowball. When the dogs return "it was observed that they wagged their tails before him as the other dogs used to do with Mr. Jones". Napoleon may not have as many ideas as Snowball, but he likes power, and learns from the best: in this case, Mr. Jones. After Snowball's exile, Napoleon completely takes power over the farm. He eliminates any opportunity of protest and gets rid of public meetings, saying that committees, which will be chaired by himself, must decide everything. In general, his public image is very well controlled: “In those days, Napoleon rarely appeared in public; He spent all his time inside the house, whose doors were guarded by fierce-looking dogs. When he appeared, he was ceremoniously, with an escort of six dogs that surrounded him closely and growled if someone got too close”. With the help of Squealer and the other pigs, he rewrites history, making Snowball look like a villain, and increasing his own role in the rebellion. When everyone questions Napoleon's historical version, he makes a horde of sheep sing louder to silence the protests. It's not just a pig: Napoleon as Joseph Stalin Napoleon is the mimesis of Joseph Stalin, who was General Secretary of the Communist Party from 1922 until his death, thirty years later. Like Napoleon, Stalin was a teacher driving the ropes behind the scenes. He formed a secret police, the NKVD (later the KGB), which behaved like Napoleon's dogs. Stalin always maintained control over the media, ordering propaganda of himself in which children looked at him with adoration. He used his political power to rewrite Russian history, giving himself a much more important role in the 1917 Revolution, in addition to self-appointing himself, the responsibility of the victory of the Second World War. As Stalin used the secret police to hold on to power, Napoleon uses his dogs' attack to get rid of the opposition. One of the biggest parallels between Napoleon and Stalin has to do with the way production collapses in Animal Farm under Napoleon’s power. This is an allusion of how Stalin disrupted agricultural production with his Five-Year Plans (which began in 1928). When the plans resulted a failure, Stalin did everything to hide it. At the end of the novel, Animal Farm is a machine that works according to Napoleon's will. A psychopathic pig: Napoleon's violent acts Napoleon begins to force several animals to make false confessions in front of the group. He gets rid of anyone who contradicts him, and then makes them remain traitors "dogs, without wasting time, tore their throats". Napoleon also gets rid of the four pigs and the chickens that act as leaders of the rebellion. The narrator describes the scene as follows: "And so the series of confessions and executions continued until a pile of corpses layed at Napoleon's feet and the air was impregnated with the smell of blood, a smell that was unknown since Jones's expulsion". The violence in the middle of Orwell's "fairy tale" is an allusion to the Great Purge, also known as the Great Terror, which was carried out by Stalin in the late 1930s. Napoleon's methods are too similar to Stalin's. People simply disappeared; others were sent to gulags, others forced to discredit themselves publicly, confessing crimes they had never committed.