Animal Farm Themes
Power: Leadership and Corruption
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There's a reason you don't want your prom queen to also be your school president: absolute power corrupts absolutely, and pretty soon she'll be sending...
Power: Control over the Intellectually Inferior
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American conservative William F. Buckley once said that he'd rather be governed by the first 2000 names in the Boston phonebook than the 2000 faculty m...
Lies and Deceit
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Animal Farm runs on pig fat and lies. By the end, "truth" has become so malleable that the animals can't even remember what actually happened. A lie is...
Rules and Order
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Out with the old, in with the new: in Animal Farm, the animals get rid of an old set of rules just to find themselves oppressed by a new one. At first,...
Foolishness and Folly
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Talk about blaming the victim: it sounds a lot like Orwell is faulting the lower-class animals for not being smart enough to realize what's going on. Ei...
Dreams, Hopes, and Plans
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Do you dream of a world full of pillows in which you can lie around eating Doritos and listening to drone music all day? Keep dreaming. (Eventually, you...
Cunning and Cleverness
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Keep an eye on your local Mensa chapter: they may look like harmless nerds, but they're just waiting for the right opportunity to oppress us all. Or, so...
Violence
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For a fairy tale about a self-governing farm, Animal Farm sure does pile up the bodies. Old Major may have dreamed about animals frolicking in green pas...
Pride
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The animals in Animal Farm don't have much in the way of food, dignity, or leisure—but they do have pride. They take pride in banding together to over...
Religion
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Karl Marx may have said that religion was the opiate of the masses, but he also said that it was the "sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a hea...