A Satire of Human Nature in Animal Farm

“Animal Farm,” the novel by George Orwell, is a satire of human nature. Through the use of animals, it ridicules certain human traits and characteristics. The novel illuminates man’s selfishness and greed, inherent in our nature, and shows how many “innocent bystanders” are swept under and destroyed by these unrelenting traits. In the story, these naive bystanders are the animals of Manor Farm who succumb first to their human masters and then to the pigs. Orwell’s transformation of the pigs into mirror images of the humans shocks the reader when they realize our race’s tremendous similarity with the pigs in Orwell’s narrative.

There’s conspicuous symbolism in Orwell’s choice of the pig for this transformation. Reading between the lines, it becomes clear he is implying that humans are equivalent to pigs. Pigs are traditionally seen as greedy, selfish, and dirty — a mirror image of what Orwell purports the human race to be. The selection of the pig as the symbol of human traits is evident from the start of the novel. A pig instills hope of a rebellion against Mr. Jones in all the other animals. Pigs plan for and carry out the rebellion. They’re the ones to take charge after the rebellion. The leadership shown by the pigs is another apparent reflection of human nature.

This pig leadership is prominent throughout the novel, notably after the Rebellion, when Napoleon and Snowball vie for supreme power and when Napoleon transforms Sunday meetings from debates into platforms for issuing orders and instating punishment. Humans naturally fancy themselves as leaders. When reading the novel, we’re quick to accept the pig as a logical choice for the human representation, but only after self-introspection do we realize why they were chosen.

Toward the end of the novel, the animals of Animal Farm are portrayed differently than they were under Mr. Jones’s rule. With a human master, all the animals’ miseries were due to human cruelty. If they were hungry, it was because their human master denied them food. However, when the pigs ruled, the animals unwittingly facilitated their own downfall. Although starved, they still trusted the pigs, who assured them they were being fed twice as much as Mr. Jones did. By trusting their “fellow comrades,” the pigs, all the freedoms they once yearned for were stripped away because of their misplaced trust and ignorance. They weren’t just “dumb animals,” as humans often labeled them; under the pig rule, they were blind as well.

The prosperity that the animals had hoped to achieve after the Rebellion was reached, but in a different way than they had planned. The animals had hoped to make Animal Farm the most productive in the county, which they did, but they had planned to keep all the benefits of their labors for themselves and to work only for the sake of knowing that they were working for themselves. However, this was not to be so. The farm’s new and bigger productivity was reached, but in the same way that it was reached under Mr. Jones. Both man and pig used the animals to their benefit, took advantage of them, and then denied them the fruits of their labors. With the pigs as masters, the increased productivity was reached at the full expense of the animals – excluding the pigs, of course. The animals worked harder than ever before, received less food than ever before, and existed under worse conditions than there had ever been before. All of the profit that the animals worked their bodies and souls for went entirely to the pigs. Indeed, the farm was the most prosperous in the county, but the pigs were the only ones who benefitted from it. At the conclusion of the novel, the pigs became so much like humans that the reader was unable to tell the two apart. The pigs, with their greed, selfishness and lust for power, had become exactly like the humans. They cheat, drink, intimidate, kill and carry on like humans. The transformation is now complete. Orwell best sums it up in his final paragraph, “… No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” The attempt by the animals to reach utopia has failed. They have returned to the same place from whence they came.

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