The Political Allegory of Animal Farm
I read extensively in the history of the Russian Revolution before writing this essay. In contrast to many critics who claimed the meaning of this satirical fable was so obvious that there was nothing more to say about it, I likened Animal Farm to the attacks on Stalin by Trotsky, Gide and Koestler, and showed that every detail in the book has a precise political significance.
Orwell's hostility to the Russian Communists was a direct result of his experiences in Spain in 1937 when the Loyalists, like the revolutionaries in China in 1927, were betrayed by the Russians, and the Trotskyists whom Orwell had joined were mercilessly persecuted by their former comrades.1 Orwell writes in his Preface to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm (1947): “These man-hunts in Spain went on at the same time as the great purges in the USSR and were a sort of supplement to them…. Nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of Socialism as the belief that Russia is a Socialist country and that every act of its rulers must be excused, if not imitated. And so, for the past ten years I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the Socialist movement.” Orwell often discussed and repeated the theme of this book. In “Inside the Whale” (1940), he states, “The Communist movement in western Europe began as a movement for the violent overthrow of capitalism, and degenerated within a few years into an instrument of Russian foreign policy”; and he writes in his essay on James Burnham (1946), “history consists of a series of swindles, in which the masses are first lured into revolt by the promise of Utopia, and then, when they have done their job, enslaved over again by new masters.”
Orwell's attempt to communicate the terrible discoveries he made in Spain was a failure in practical terms, for Homage to Catalonia sold badly and was largely ignored. Yet he felt it was vital to stimulate others into political awareness. As he writes in the Preface to Animal Farm: “Up to 1939, and even later, the majority of English people were incapable of assessing the true nature of the Nazi regime in Germany, and now, with the Soviet regime, they are still to a large extent under the same sort of illusion…. It was of the utmost importance to me that people in western Europe should see the Soviet régime, for what it really was.”
An experimentation with literary techniques that could most forcefully convey his social and political ideas is characteristic of all Orwell's nonfiction: the autobiographical Down and Out in Paris and London; the sociological reportage, The Road to Wigan Pier; and the personal, political and military history Homage to Catalonia. Orwell had considerable success as a polemicist and pamphleteer, but this genre was too blunt and too direct, and his views were extremely unpopular at the time he expressed them. Animal Farm was written between November 1943 and February 1944, after Stalingrad and before Normandy, when the Allies first became victorious and there was a strong feeling of solidarity with the Russian allies, who even in retreat had deflected Hitler from England. Distinguished writers like Wells, Shaw, Barbusse and Rolland had praised Russia highly. Orwell's book belongs with Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed (1937),2 Gide's Return from the USSR (1937) and Koestler's Darkness at Noon (1941), three prescient attacks on the Stalinist regime; and it anticipates postwar denunciations like Crossman's compilation, The God That Failed (1949), and Djilas’ The New Class (1957).3 Animal Farm was rejected in 1944 by Gollancz, Cape and Faber & Faber because it criticized a military ally, and Orwell planned to publish it himself as a two-shilling pamphlet until Secker & Warburg accepted what became Orwell's first financial success.
Orwell believed “the business of making people conscious of what is happening outside their own small circle is one of the major problems of our time, and a new literary technique will have to be evolved to meet it.” His choice of a satiric beast fable for Animal Farm (1945) was exactly what he needed. The fantastic genre enabled him to avoid the difficulty of assimilating his personal experience into a traditional novel, a form in which he was never entirely at ease. Orwell's portrayal of character was always rather weak, and the flat symbolic characters of the fable did not have to be portrayed in depth. The familiar and affectionate tone of the fable and its careful attention to detail allowed the unpopular theme to be pleasantly convincing, and the Soviet myth was exposed in a subtle fashion that could still be readily understood. It was written in simple language that could be easily translated, and was short so that it could be sold cheaply and read quickly. The gay genre was a final attempt to deflect his profound pessimism, which dominated his final realistic vision of decency trampled on and destroyed in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Orwell fused his artistic and political purpose so well that the animals are completely convincing on the literal level. His precise portrayal of the beasts is based on his practical experience as a farmer in Wallington, Hertford (where he had a goat named Muriel) between 1936 and 1940. Though critics emphasize his statement, “Most of the good memories of my childhood … are in some way connected with animals,” the most important animals in the story, the pigs (and their dogs) are frightening and ferocious. Orwell utilizes the repulsive associations of Circean and Gadarene swine that have prevailed since ancient times,4 and was undoubtedly influenced by the talking horses in Book IV of Gulliver's Travels. Yahoos slave for Houyhnhnms as animals do for pigs, and horses “milk their Cows, and reap their Oats, and do all the Work which requires Hands”5 just as “the pigs sent for buckets and milked the cows fairly successfully, their trotters being well-adapted to this task.”6 He also has strong personal feelings about pigs. In Coming Up for Air (1939), Bowling is frightened by “a herd of pigs [that] was galloping, a sort of huge flood of pig-faces. The next moment, of course, I saw what it was. It wasn't pig faces at all, it was only schoolchildren in their gas-masks…. But I tell you that for a moment they looked exactly like a herd of pigs.”7 Orwell wrote from Jura in 1948, “I have tried the experiment of keeping a pig. They really are disgusting brutes…. The pig has grown to a stupendous size and goes to the butcher next week. We are all longing to get rid of him, as he is so destructive and greedy, even gets into the kitchen sometimes.”
Like the American publisher who rejected Animal Farm because “it was impossible to sell animal stories in the USA,” critics have been deceived and disarmed by the apparent simplicity of this “fairy story.” Atkins writes in 1954, “In his revaluation of Animal Farm in World Review (June 1950) Tom Hopkinson says that this novel is one of the two modern works of fiction before which the critic must abdicate…. There is so much truth in this that I find it very difficult to say anything useful about the book and yet a study of Orwell cannot ignore it altogether.”8 Two years later Hollis concurs that “the story of Animal Farm is so familiar that it hardly needs detailed recapitulation. The interpretation of the fable is plain enough…. As I say, there is no difficulty in interpreting the symbolism of the story.”9 In 1962 Rees agrees, “Animal Farm is so well known that it cannot be necessary to do more than mention some of its major felicities”;10 and Thomas repeats three years later, “The story is too-well known for anything but a brief summary to be given here.”11 The next year Woodcock reaffirms that Orwell “produced a book so clear in intent and writing that the critic is usually rather nonplussed as to what he should say about it; all is so magnificently there.”12 Though critics have often interpreted the book in terms of Soviet history, they have never sufficiently recognized that it is extremely subtle and sophisticated, and brilliantly presents a complex satiric allegory of Communist Russia in which virtually every detail has political significance.
Orwell describes the creative impulse of the book in his Preface: “I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge cart-horse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat. I proceeded to analyse Marx's theory from the animals’ point of view.”
Major's speech is an accurate exposition of orthodox Marxism and is very similar to the last paragraph of the Communist Manifesto (1848).13 The Communists
openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at the Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!
All the evils of this life of ours spring from the tyranny of human beings. Only get rid of Man, and the produce of our labour would be our own. Almost overnight we could become rich and free. What then must we do? Why, work night and day, body and soul, for the overthrow of the human race! This is my message to you, comrades: Rebellion! (8)
In his Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx stated, “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”; when Animal Farm is established, “everyone worked according to his capacity” (25). Squealer's ingenious gloss of “Four legs good, two legs bad” is a witty and ironic example of specious Marxist polemics: “A bird's wing, comrades … is an organ of propulsion and not of manipulation. It should therefore be regarded as a leg” (29).
Comrade Napoleon, the poem of Minimus (who is based on the poet Mayakovsky),14 is a close imitation of adulatory Soviet verse like the “Hymn to J. V. Stalin”:
The world has no person
Dearer, closer.
With him, happiness is happier,
And the sun brighter.15
Fountain of happiness!
Lord of the swill-bucket! Oh, how my soul is on
Fire when I gaze at thy
Calm and commanding eye,
Like the sun in the sky,
Comrade Napoleon! (78)
Parts of the revolutionary song, “Beasts of England,” is a close paraphrase of certain lines of “L’Internationale” (1871):
C’est l’éruption de la fin
Soon or late the day is coming
Paix entre nous, guerre aux tyrans!
Tyrant Man shall be o’erthrown
La terre n’appartient qu’aux hommes
And the fruitful fields of England
Shall be trod by beasts alone
Foule esclave, debout! Debout!
Rings shall vanish from our noses
Le soleil brillera toujours!
Bright will shine the fields of England.
“L’Internationale” expresses the brief but idealistic exhilaration that Orwell experienced in Barcelona. As he wrote to Cyril Connolly from Spain in 1937, “I have seen wonderful things & at last really believe in Socialism, which I never did before.” His moving description of life in the Spanish militia is similar in feeling to the joyous freedom of the animals after the Rebellion:
One had been in contact with something strange and valuable. One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word “comrade” stood for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug. One had breathed the air of equality…. In that community where no one was on the make, where there was a shortage of everything but no privilege and no boot-licking, one got, perhaps, a crude forecast of what the opening stages of Socialism might be like. And, after all, instead of disillusioning me it deeply attracted me.”16
Yes, it was theirs—everything that they could see was theirs! In the ecstasy of that thought they gambolled round and round, they hurled themselves into the air in great leaps of excitement…. Then they made a tour of inspection of the whole farm and surveyed [it] with speechless admiration…. It was as though they had never seen these things before, and even now they could hardly believe that it was all their own (18–19).
Immediately after the pigs celebrate their victory and bury “some hams hanging in the kitchen” (a wonderful detail), the revolutionary principles of Major are codified by Snowball into “The Seven Commandments” (which are reminiscent of the Five Chief Beatitudes of the Pukka Sahib in Burmese Days). The corruption inherent in the Rebellion is manifested as each of the Commandments is successively betrayed, until none of the original revolutionary idealism remains. The structure of the book is circular, and by the time the name is changed back to Manor Farm, there has been a painful return to the status quo (or worse) with whiskey and whips in the trotters of the pigs.
In the Preface to Animal Farm, Orwell writes: “although various episodes are taken from the actual history of the Russian Revolution, they are dealt with schematically and their chronological order is changed.” Thus, the human beings are capitalists, the animals are Communists, the wild creatures who could not be tamed and “continued to behave very much as before” (27) are the muzhiks or peasants, the pigs are the Bolsheviks, the Rebellion is the October Revolution, the wave of rebelliousness that ran through the countryside afterwards is the abortive revolution in Hungary and Germany in 1919 and 1923, the hoof and horn is the hammer and sickle, the Spontaneous Demonstration is the May Day celebration, the Order of the Green Banner is the Order of Lenin, the special pig committee presided over by Napoleon is the Politbureau, and the revolt of the hens—the first rebellion since the expulsion of Jones (the Czar)—is the sailors’ rebellion at the Kronstadt naval base in 1921.
The carefully chosen animals’ names are both realistic and highly suggestive of their owners’ personality and role in the novel. The imperious Major (Marx-Lenin) is military, dominant and senior (in public school slang); the rather stupid and self-sacrificing Boxer (the proletariat), who is contrasted to the cynical Benjamin and the indifferent and unenthusiastic cat, is named after the Chinese revolutionaries who drove out foreign exploiters and were themselves crushed; Mollie (the White Russians) suggests folly, and her retrogressive defection for vanity and luxury is a paradigm of the entire revolution; Moses (the Russian Orthodox and later the Catholic Church) brings divine law to man; Squealer (a living Pravda) is onomatopoetic for a voluble pig; and Whymper, the pigs’ agent, suggests a toady. Pilkington (Churchill-England), the capitalist exploiter, connotes bilk and milk (slang): he is an old-fashioned gentleman who enjoys country sports on Foxwood, which has associations of both craftiness and the Tory landed gentry. Frederick (Hitler) refers to Frederick the Great, the founder of the Prussian military state and Hitler's hero. Frederick is a tough, shrewd man who drives hard bargains, steals other people's land for his own farm, Pinchfield, and practices terrible cruelties upon his subjects. These cruelties are related to the most moving scene in the novel—when Boxer is taken to the slaughterhouse. The knacker's van recalls the terrible gas vans used by the Einsatzgruppen for mobile extermination. Though Clover screams out, “They are taking you to your death!” the sound of Boxer's drumming hoofs inside the van “grew fainter and died away” (102).
The most important animals are Napoleon (Stalin) and Snowball (Trotsky), whose personalities are antithetical and who are never in agreement. Both characters are drawn fully and accurately, though with simple strokes, and reflect almost all the dominant characteristics of their historical models. Like Trotsky, Orwell compares Stalin to Napoleon, for both turned revolutions into dictatorships (Bonapartism was the successor to Thermidor), and both transformed a national popular “revolution from below” into a foreign conqueror's “revolution from above” and forcibly imposed their revolutionary ideology on other countries. Napoleon the pig is fierce-looking, “not much of a talker [his speeches are “short and to the point”], but with a reputation for getting his own way” (13). He dominates the party machinery, controls the education of the young and is superb at plotting and “canvassing support for himself” in between meetings.17 Napoleon never presents any plans and always criticizes Snowball's, though he eventually adopts these plans and even claims he invented them. He first distorts and then changes history, blames Snowball for all his own failures, accuses him of plotting with foreign enemies, drives him into exile and finally pronounces his death sentence. He also publishes fantastic production figures, takes “credit for every successful achievement and every stroke of good fortune” (78), wins elections unanimously, names cities after himself and replaces the cult of Major (“the animals were required to file past the skull in a reverent manner”) with a more elaborate one of his own (49). As Orwell wrote in 1941, “One could not have a better example of the moral and emotional shallowness of our time, than the fact that we are now all more or less pro-Stalin. This disgusting murderer is temporarily on our side, and so the purges etc are suddenly forgotten.”
The name Snowball recalls Trotsky's white hair and beard and the fact that he melted before Stalin's opposition. Snowball is a brilliant speaker, sometimes unintelligible to the masses but always eloquent and impressive, more vivacious and inventive than Napoleon, and a much greater writer. He is also intellectual and energetic. For as Deutscher writes of Trotsky in 1921, besides running the army and serving on the Politbureau, “He was busy with a host of other assignments each of which would have made a full-time job for any man of less vitality and ability. He led, for instance, the Society of the Godless…. He was at this time Russia's chief intellectual inspirer and leading literary critic. He frequently addressed audiences.”18 Orwell's description of Snowball's activities, though comic, is close to reality: “Snowball also busied himself with organising the other animals into what he called Animal Committees…. He formed the Egg Production Committee for the hens, the Clean Tails League for the Cows, the Wild Comrades Re-education Committee … and various others, besides instituting classes in reading and writing” (27). Snowball studies military history, organizes, commands and leads the Army to victory in the Battle of the Cowshed (the Civil War) when foreign powers help Mr. Jones and invade the farm (Russia). After the War he “was full of plans for innovations and improvements” (41).
Two of the most important battles between Trotsky and Stalin are allegorized in the novel. Trotsky advocated manufacturing over agricultural priorities and fought for accelerated industrialization, and his ideas for the expansion of the Socialist sector of the economy were eventually adopted by Stalin in the first five-year plan of 1928 (which called for collectivization and industrialization): “Snowball conjured up pictures of fantastic machines which would do their work for them while they grazed at their ease in the fields … so much labour would be saved that the animals would only need to work three days a week” (42–43).19 Stalin wanted comprehensive and drastic collectivization of private farms: Napoleon “argued that the great need of the moment was to increase food production, and that if they wasted time on the windmill they would all starve to death” (43).
The central ideological issue between Stalin and Trotsky concerned the theory of “Socialism in One Country” against the idea of “Permanent Revolution.” Deutscher writes that “two rival and quasi-Messianic beliefs seemed pitted against one another: Trotskyism with its faith in the revolutionary vocation of the proletariat of the West; and Stalinism with its glorification of Russia's socialist destiny.”20 Orwell presents this controversy in simpler but entirely accurate words: “According to Napoleon, what the animals must do was to procure firearms and train themselves in the use of them. According to Snowball, they must send out more and more pigeons and stir up rebellion among the animals on the other farms. The one argued that if they could not defend themselves they were bound to be conquered, the other argued that if rebellions happened everywhere they would have no need to defend themselves” (44).
When Snowball comes to the crucial points in his speeches, “It was noticed that [the sheep] were especially liable to break into ‘Four legs good, two legs bad’” (41), just as in the party Congress in 1927, at Stalin's instigation, “pleas for the opposition were drowned in the continual, hysterically intolerant uproar from the floor.”21 The Trotsky-Stalin conflict reached a crucial point in mid-1927 after Britain broke diplomatic relations with Russia and ruined Stalin's hopes for an agreement between Soviet and British trade unions; the Russian ambassador to Poland was assassinated; and Chiang Kai-shek massacred the Chinese Communists who had joined him at Stalin's orders. Trotsky and the Opposition issued a declaration attacking Stalin for these failures, but before they could bring this before the party Congress and remove Stalin from power, he expelled Trotsky and Grigori Zinoviev from the Party.22 Orwell writes of this vital moment in Soviet history, which signaled the final defeat of Trotsky, “by the time he [Snowball] had finished speaking, there was no doubt as to the way the vote would go. But just at this moment,” Napoleon's dogs (the GPU or Secret Police) attack Snowball and force him to flee the farm and go into exile (45).
Orwell is not primarily interested in the practical or ideological merits of these controversies, for he believed (wrongly, I think) that both men had betrayed the revolution. He told a friend “that Trotsky-Snowball was potentially as big a villain as Stalin-Napoleon, although he was Napoleon's victim. The first note of corruption was struck when the pigs secretly had the cows’ milk added to their own mash and Snowball consented to this first act of inequity.”23 He wrote in 1939, the year before Trotsky's murder, “It is probably a good thing for Lenin's reputation that he died so early. Trotsky, in exile, denounces the Russian dictatorship, but he is probably as much responsible for it as any man now living, and there is no certainty that as a dictator he would be preferable to Stalin, though undoubtedly he has a much more interesting mind.”
The three main Russian political events that are most extensively allegorized in Animal Farm are the disastrous results of Stalin's forced collectivization (1929–33), the Great Purge Trials (1936–38) and his diplomacy with Germany that terminated with Hitler's invasion in 1941. Orwell writes that “after Snowball's expulsion, the animals were somewhat surprised to hear Napoleon announce that the windmill was to be built after all” (49). The first demolition of the windmill, which Napoleon blames on Snowball, is the failure of the first five-year plan. The destructive methods of the hens during the “Kronstadt Rebellion”—they “made a determined effort to thwart Napoleon's wishes. Their method was to fly up to the rafters and there lay their eggs, which smashed to pieces on the floor” (65)—are precisely those used by the muzhiks in 1929 to protest against the forced collectivization of their farms: “In desperation they slaughtered their cattle, smashed implements, and burned crops. This was the muzhiks’ great Luddite-like rebellion.”24 The result of this enormous ruin was, as Orwell writes in a 1938 review of Eugene Lyons’ book on Russia, “years of appalling hardship, culminating in the Ukraine famine of 1933, in which a number estimated at not less than three million people starved to death.” Deutscher mentions the recurrent cannibalism during times of starvation.25 Orwell refers to this famine when he writes that “For days at a time the animals had nothing to eat…. Starvation seemed to stare them in the face…. It was being put about that all the animals were dying of famine and disease … and had resorted to cannibalism and infanticide” (63).
The most dramatic and emotional event of the thirties was the Great Purge Trials, the minute details of which were published in the official translation in 1938. Stalin's motive, according to the editors of the trial's transcript, was a craving “to achieve an unrestricted personal dictatorship with a totality of power that he did not yet possess in 1934.”26 They also state, “What unfolds before us in the trial, then, is a gigantic texture of fantasy into which bits and pieces of falsified real history have been woven along with outright fiction.”27 A perfect example of this is when the animals “remembered that at the critical moment of the battle Snowball had turned to flee” but forgot that it was a deliberate ruse to set up the victorious ambush (69). In the trial of Trotsky's friend, Karl Radek, in February 1937, the Prosecution claimed Trotsky “was organizing and directing industrial sabotage in the Soviet Union, catastrophes in coal mines, factories, and on the railways, mass poisonings of Soviet workers, and repeated attempts on the lives of Stalin and other members of the Politbureau.”28 After the destruction of the windmill, Napoleon roars: “In sheer malignity, thinking to set back our plans and avenge himself for his ignominious expulsion, this traitor has crept here under cover of night and destroyed our work of nearly a year…. A rumour went around that Snowball had after all contrived to introduce poison into Napoleon's food” (60, 90). In the last and most important trial of Bukharin in March 1938, Gorky's secretary, Kryuchkov, confessed, “I arranged long walks for Alexei Maximovich, I was always arranging bonfires. The smoke of the bonfire naturally affected Gorky's weak lungs.”29 During the purge in Animal Farm, two other sheep confessed to having murdered an old ram, an especially devoted follower of Napoleon, by chasing him round and round a bonfire when he was suffering from a cough (71).30
In his review of Lyons’ book, Orwell is horrified by the fact that “the GPU are everywhere, everyone lives in constant terror of denunciation…. There are periodical waves of terror … [and] monstrous state trials at which people who have been in prison for months or years are suddenly dragged forth to make incredible confessions.” In Animal Farm, hens “stated that Snowball had appeared to them in a dream and incited them to disobey Napoleon's orders…. Then a sheep confessed to having urinated in the drinking pool [Napoleon had urinated on Snowball's plan during their dispute]—urged to do this, so she said, by Snowball” (71). Tucker and Cohen state that nine million people were arrested during the purges and that the number of people executed has been reliably estimated “at three million.”31 In Animal Farm, all the “guilty” animals are “slain on the spot” and the most terrifying moment of the satire comes after the confessions and executions, when “there was a pile of corpses lying before Napoleon's feet and the air was heavy with the smell of blood” (71–72).
After solidifying his domestic power through massive liquidation, Stalin turned his attention to the increasing menace in Europe, and attempted to play off the democracies against Hitler. Deutscher describes how “he still kept his front doors open for the British and the French and confined the contact with the Germans to the back stairs…. It is still impossible to say confidently to which part of the game Stalin then attached the greatest importance: to the plot acted on the stage or to the subtle counter-plot which he was spinning in the twilight of the coulisse.”32
Similarly, the animals “were struck dumb with surprise when Napoleon announced that he had sold the pile of timber to Frederick…. Throughout the whole period of his seeming friendship with Pilkington, Napoleon had really been in secret agreement with Frederick” (82–83). But Napoleon is sadly deceived: Frederick's bank notes (the Hitler-Stalin nonagression pact of 1939) are forgeries, and he attacks Animal Farm without warning and destroys the windmill. Orwell's letter to his publisher in 1945 gives a fascinating insight into the precision of his allegorical technique: “In chapter VIII (I think it is Chapter VIII), when the windmill is blown up, I wrote ‘all the animals including Napoleon flung themselves on their faces.’ I would like to alter it to ‘all the animals except Napoleon.’ If the book has been printed it's not worth bothering about, but I just thought the alteration would be fair to Joseph Stalin, as he did stay in Moscow during the German advance.” Hitler's defeat in the Battle of Stalingrad (January 1943) was the turning point of the Russian campaign: when the enemy “saw that they were in danger of being surrounded, Frederick shouted to his men to get out while the going was good, and the next moment the cowardly enemy was running for dear life” (87).
Orwell also portrays one of Stalin's diplomatic blunders. The reappearance of the raven Moses “after an absence of several years” (97) and his eternal talk about the Sugarcandy Mountain represents Stalin's queer attempt, in the spring of 1944, “at reconciliation with the Pope.” In order to gain Catholic support for his Polish policy, he received a lowly and unaccredited American priest, Father Orlemanski, and “was twice closeted with him for long hours” during a most crucial period of the war. Nothing came of this, of course, and the result of this stunt, writes Deutscher, was that Stalin was made “the laughing-stock of the world.”33
The satire concludes, as Orwell says in the Preface, with “the Teheran Conference, which was taking place while I was writing.” Deutscher, who knew him, relates that Orwell was “unshakably convinced that Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt consciously plotted to divide the world, and to divide it for good, among themselves, and to subjugate it in common…. 'they are all power-hungry’, he used to repeat.”34 The disagreement between the allies and the beginning of the cold war is symbolized when Napoleon and Pilkington, both suspicious, “played an ace of spades simultaneously” (118). The point of the conclusion is not merely that the pigs are like men, but that men are like pigs.35
The political allegory of Animal Farm, whether specific or general, detailed or allusive, is pervasive, thorough and accurate, and the brilliance of the book becomes much clearer when the satiric allegory is compared to the political actuality. Critics who write “it makes a delightful children's story”36 and who emphasize that “the gaiety in his nature had completely taken charge”37 do Orwell a serious disservice by ignoring the depth and complexity of his satire. Orwell wrote to Middleton Murry the year he finished the book, “I consider that willingness to criticise Russia and Stalin is the test of intellectual honesty,” and by his own or any standard it is an honest and even a courageous book.
In its own subtle and compressed manner Animal Farm is as serious as Nostromo, whose theme it shares. In Conrad's novel Dr. Monygham states of the capitalistic revolutionaries: “They have their law, and their justice. But it is founded on expediency, and is inhuman; it is without rectitude, without the continuity and the force that can be found only in a moral principle. The time approaches when all that . . [it] stands for shall weigh as heavily upon the people as the barbarism, cruelty, and misrule of a few years back.”38 And Emilia Gould murmurs with deep grief: “There was something inherent in the necessities of successful action which carried with it the moral degradation of the idea.”39