Orwells Portrayal of the Characters in the Last Chapter...

This essay will examine how Orwell portrays the characters and develops the plot in the last chapter of Animal Farm to demonstrate the satirical techniques utilised in the text, such as allusion, sarcasm, exaggeration, metaphor and irony, to undermine Russian revolution indirectly. Most characters are allusion to certain figures in the revolution. To present them in a subtle yet suggestive way, their names are carefully selected with implications of their personalities and roles. Take the pigs for example. In order to parody Stalin, the pig Napoleon is named after Napoleon Bonaparte, who also transformed the revolution into dictatorship one century ago. Squealer, the living Pravda, playing the role of ‘the tongue and throat’ of Napoleon,†¦show more content†¦On the contrary, their magnified traits are more straightforward and effective in revealing targets’ foibles and absurdity, which, in turn, will contribute to a more powerful attack. When it comes to the narration structure, metaphor goes hand in hand with situational irony in the representation of key symbolic objects like the windmill. For most animals, this windmill is a metaphor of the promising life where electricity can be generated to provide light and warmth and spare the animals from the hard work in fields. At the same time, however, it is also a proof of Napoleon’s tyranny as the animals are suffering from laborious work to build and re-build the windmill like slaves and left no time to question or even speculate his dominant power. This juxtaposition of these two metaphors leads the irony to the peak when the first windmill is completed and no electrical power is generated. Although â€Å"it brought in a handsome money profit†, the animals, expect the pigs, get nothing in return but the command to build another one. In addition to the allusion to the failure of Stalin’s ‘Five-Year Plan’, this ironic contrast between i ntentions and results goes further to criticise the whole Stalinist system of oppressing the proletarians with a hypothetical and unattainable utopia (Communism). Verbal irony, another form of irony, established by the contradiction between what is said and what is reality, canShow MoreRelatedAnimal Farm by George Orwell1100 Words   |  4 PagesIntroduction: Widely acknowledged as a powerful allegory, the 1945 novella Animal Farm, conceived from the satirical mind of acclaimed author George Orwell, is a harrowing fable of a fictional dystopia that critiques the socialist philosophy of Stalin in terms of his leadership of the Soviet Union. Tired of their servitude to man, a group of farm animals revolt and establish their own society, only to be betrayed into worse servitude by their leaders, the pigs, whose initial virtuous intentionsRead MoreAnimal Farm Theme2655 Words   |  11 PagesTheme Analysis The theme of Animal Farm is not difficult to understand. Orwell intended to criticize the communist regime he saw sweeping through Russia and spreading to Europe and even the United States. Though he agreed with many Marxist principles, Orwell was unable to accept the communist interpretation of socialism because he saw many similarities between the communist governments and the previous czarist regimes in old Russia. Communism, he thought, was inherently hypocritical.In his self-proclaimed