Orwell's message in Animal Farm
Uploaded by semihatopal on Jun 02, 2002
In many of Orwell’s works, we can see some marks from his real life or the events of his era. To understand the influences on his works we should look at his life beginning from his childhood. Orwell says that he was a lonely child and unpopular at school, and “knew that he had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, which created a sort of private world where he could get his own back for his failure in everyday life.” After reading Milton’s Paradise Lost he decides what kind of books he want to write as he says in his work Why I Write “I wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also full of purple passages in which words were used partly for the sake of their own sound. And in fact my first completed novel, Burmese Days, which I wrote when I was thirty but projected much earlier, is rather that kind of book.” According to Orwell, there are four great motives for writing apart from the need to earn a living, the proportions of which vary from time to time in any writer, according to the circumstances of his time. He lists these motives like this:
- “Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc
- Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement.
- Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.
- Political purpose. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples' idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.”
Of these, the first three have a stronger influence than the fourth one, which means he does not write in order to change people’s minds and shape the politics of the world. He writes because he sees some errors and wants to express them, "I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”
Rhodri Williams explains Orwell’s aim in writing with “his political views, which were shaped by his...