A farm is taken over by its overworked, mistreated animals. With flaming idealism and stirring slogans, they set out to create a paradise of progress, justice, and equality. Thus the stage is set for one of the most telling satiric fables ever penned –a razor-edged fairy tale for grown-ups that records the evolution from revolution against tyranny to a totalitarianism just as terrible.
Animal Farm is a popular book that is read in schools normally, my mom read it when she was in high school. For some reason though I was never assigned to read Animal Farm while in high school, so I decided to pick it up and give it a go. I ended up finishing the book in less than a day, I liked it that much. I think reading it now with a bit of an understanding of life, society and government the main themes shown through a bit more than they would have when I was younger.
The author beautifully portrays the way a revolution is started to stop what is happening and going full circle comes to the same point it started from. Just the face of power is changed. This book tells how the ruling class makes fool of the working class, uses their energies and resources for their own pleasure. What happens behind the closed doors of power. How the working class is being brain washed that they are happy and satisfied and free despite of the obvious slavery they have been undergoing.
As it is already a very popular book read in schools, I would continue on with the trend because it is an impactful story. Although the characters are animals, the hold so much humanity that is easily stripped away by their peers and don’t even understand what is happening to them. I think if I were to do a bit more research into communist ideology and even Orwell that I would learn a lot more about the book.
The Metamorphosis is a story about George Samsa, a young man that one morning awakes as a giant insect in his own bed. The story follows the struggles of George and his family as they have to deal with this new affliction that has come to terrorize the family. A rather short short story with only around 40 pages, Franz Kafka beautifully writes a story about the struggles of human existence.
The problem of alienation is explored to depth in the novel- Gregor may have transformed to something unusual at the core he is still the same however he faces problem of acceptance by society due to his transformed appearance, which ridicules his being- his existence- as if he is thrown into the hell of nothingness without any notice. The feebleness of his existence disintegrates his being into nothingness, under the sheer pressure of the society- the ‘Other’. The author robs Gregor-the protagonist- of every sense of his inauthentic existence by stealing off all assumptions of his life, now he is striped down to the very core of his existence.
Gregor Samsa can make us ponder our own character, our identity, about the smoothness of what we take to be steady and fixed, and about the dangers and supernatural occurrences of our own metamorphosis. Kafka gives us that how the conventions of normal society are twisted because of our incompetence to look past the surface to the individual inside.
This novella is much different than a lot of things I have read before, more focused into a philosophical ideology on existentialism. Kafka uses Gregor to show the existence of an individual determining his own development and fate once he becomes less than a human at the expense for his past. I am unsure whether I would be able to use this book in a classroom, I definitely believe that it is a good book but I would need to do a lot of research into existentialism and Franz Kafka’s ideology.
— Anthony Andrew Albano (@AnthonyAndrewA2) May 26, 2021
I just finished reading “Animal Farm” for the first time a week or two ago. I never read this book in high school for some reason, I feel like a lot of people have read it then. I decided to read it because it is one of the classics and is a really good book in my opinion. I read most of the book in a day because of how invested in the story I was. It wasn’t too hard to tell what the book was about, especially when somehow I knew it was about communism and the Cold War kinda. A lot of the actions that the pigs take in the book can be seen as outlandish and crazy but they happen, and it’s even crazier that similar things happen in real life. The disguise of using the animals to show big political events and ideas covers up the inhumanity of how people are treated, because they are animals it seems almost comical and strange; animals can’t talk, can’t think like humans, and definitely can’t walk like us. In the end though it was never about the animals, it’s about how easily power can change certain people and cause them to ruin the lives of others. But yeah, The pigs are communist.
