Vision of Society in George Orwell’s Animal Farm

Abstract

Vice and folly are the twin targets of satire. As a satirist, Orwell highlights all the unsavoury features and sore-spots of the society. He picks up the dangerous portents of contemporary reality and exaggerates them for the sake of urgent attention and effect. Cruelty, fraud and deception are bad enough. But the totalitarian umbrella that shelters these vices and gives legitimacy of truth to lies is worse still. So, as a humanist, Orwell views with concern the totalitarian trends in modern society.

Orwell firmly believes that if totalitarianism is allowed to grow unchecked, it would swallow the freedom and dignity of the individual. After experimenting with different set-ups e.g. imperialism, capitalism etc, he realizes that socialism is the only remedy for the intolerable conditions he has described in his books.

So, whether it is Burmese Days, The Road to Wigan Pier, Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell’s works expose clearly the evils of exploitation, authoritarianism and totalitarianism. That is why, there is continuous fight in his works against oppression, tyranny, injustice and inequality. In Animal Farm there is a bitter disillusion with political revolution which involves savage suppression of individual liberty. His Nineteen Eighty-Four is, in some ways, an extended metaphor of Animal Farm which witnesses a gradual suppression of the individual’s personality.

Orwell is a great champion of the underdogs. His purpose, in the novel always remains to associate himself with the oppressed half of humanity. His task has been to plead for the amelioration of the poor working class. But he is hard – headed enough not to be taken in by any utopias. He tells us in Nineteen Eighty-Four “if there is any hope it lies in the Proles”.[i] As an agent of British imperialism Orwell had experienced, for some years, the tyranny and cruelty of an oppressive system in Burma, the reaction of which is plainly to be seen in his book The Road to Wigan Pier.