Classics often feel daunting to me because I worry I won’t fully grasp their themes or concepts. However, Animal Farm is very straightforward in its message. I struggled a bit to stay interested in the first 20ish pages, but when this story gets going it’s incredibly difficult to put down. 

When you begin reading, you can already see where things will most likely head but I don’t think this takes anything away from the story itself. You know the animals will eventually become just like the humans they initially rebelled against but how you get there is  fascinating to watch. The journey this story takes from beginning to end is so important to witness. It would’ve been easy for Orwell to simply say ‘power corrupts, and history will repeat itself if we refuse to learn from it’ but he did so in a way that truly makes you take in the meaning and digest it fully. I think this book does a wonderful job showing how much of life is just history repeating itself when we are not taught or forget the road that has brought us to this place in time. I think the message is just as impactful now, if not more so, than it was when it was written 80 years ago. We are living in an age where we are truly regressing as a society and falling back into ignorant ways, like in this book we are seeing history be rewritten or scratched out all together. I worry for the state of the world today, as I’m sure George Orwell did in 1945 but I also mourn heavily for everything we stand to lose if we keep progressing in this downward spiral. 

I mourn for those who lost their lives fighting for human rights, only to see those same rights up for debate less than a century later. Women are losing the rights to their own bodies. Transgender people are unable to get gender-affirming care. Black people are losing their lives as a result of police brutality and medical racism. Children are dying in their classrooms. So many hard-fought battles are now at risk of being undone because our leaders refuse to learn from the past.  

Seeing the evolution of characters like Napoleon, Boxer, and Benjamin is incredibly interesting. Boxer represents so many people in the world today, working tirelessly, waiting for the promises of retirement, only to have wasted his life away at a job that never cared about him in the first place. Watching Boxer push himself harder and harder for Napoleon made me a little sick to my stomach. Benjamin, to me, is a character who clearly reflects a form of complacency—one born from deep cynicism and a belief that nothing he does will change the outcome. That being said, he ended up being one of my favorite characters in the end. I wanted him to make it out at the end, but more so because I wanted him to be forced to live with his guilt.  He had all the power to help the other animals when Napoleon rose to power and yet decided to not act on it and in the end lost his best friend. Napoleon himself is so clearly an example of ‘the hero’, he comes in and claims he will save the day, making all these promises that sound perfect to those in need. When Napoleon eventually rises to power, it quickly becomes clear that he never intended to keep any of those promises. He begins rewriting the seven commandments in a way that benefits only him and the other pigs, forcing the animals to work longer and harder on the same project he refused to put in motion with Snowball around. Squealer is a perfect representation of our major news outlets today, spreading only the information that shows Napoleon in a positive light and frames anyone against him as the enemy. 

In the end, I think this book will always be powerful, even when the future doesn’t feel so bleak, and I think now more than ever it is a must-read. I’ll leave you with the final line of the book, which also happens to be my favorite.