Making sense of
Animal Farm
By George Orwell
Making sense of
Animal Farm
By George Orwell
Political Characters
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Mr. Jones
Mr. Pilkington
Mr. Frederick
Napoleon
Snowball
Squealer
Old Major
• Nicholas II, Tsar of Russia
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Leaders of England
Leaders of Germany
Joseph Stalin
Leo Trotsky
Russian media
Karl Marx/Lenin
Other Major Characters
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Boxer
Clover
Mollie
Dogs
Moses
Benjamin
Hens
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Working class
A female ‘Boxer’
Russian upper class
Military police
• Russian Orthodox Church
• Pessimism/ the tired
• Peasant Farmers
Places and Things
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Animal Farm
Manor Farm
Farmhouse
Sugar Candy Mountain
Animalism
Animal Committees
Windmill/& destruction of
Animal Revolt
Battle of Cowshed
Selling of wood to Frederick
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Soviet Union
Russia
Kremlin
Heaven
Communism
Soviet Committees
Stalin’s Five Year Plan
Russian Revolution
• Red October (Tsars vs Bolsheviks)
• Nazi-Soviet Pact
Political Powers: pros and cons?
• Communism
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No private ownership/ goods are owned
in common; form of totalitarianism/est’d
by Marx
• Socialism
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• Totalitarianism
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Gov’t ownership and collection and
unequal distribution of goods for work
done (theory between capitalism and
communism)
Autocratic leadership which operates with
coercive measures
• Capitalism
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Private ownership of goods; investments,
competition, no state control
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Gov’t by the people; majority rule;
supreme power is vested and exercised by
the people
• Democracy
Themes
• Power Corrupts
• Ignorance – oppression
• Revolutions-self-defeating?
• Society’s inequities/utopia?
• Abuse of Language
Definitions
• Proletariat
• Pravda
• Lowest social class;
laboring class
• Russian newspaper
• Cold War
• Tension following WWII
between US/NATO and
Soviet Union / Warsaw
• Bolsheviks
• Russian extremist/supreme
power during Revolution