NTHS - Animal Farm

[juliagoolia]

Has anyone else noticed that the words "animal" and "farm" always show up red? Wierd...

[keelybug10]

Hello!!
I think that there was deffinatly foreshadowing in this novel. The one that stood out most to me was in the beginning when the leader pig, Old Major, was giving his speach and all the pigs were in the front row. I feel that this means that the pigs are greater than any of the other animals and get more priority. Later in the book they become the leaders of everyone.

[DHarley]

i want to know why the pigs sent boxer to the glue factory. i think that if Boxer would have rested for a few weeks and and once his strength had returned he could have contributed more work to the farm.

[Triskele]

i don't think it was about his ability to contribute, the pigs feared him, that is the key thing. he had power they didn't, he had respect that they didn't. he was a threat and so the pigs had to remove him from the picture. please, correct me if i am wrong but this seems to be the most logical scenario, especially considering the pigs as bolsheviks.

[Hannahpanda]

DHarley said i want to know why the pigs sent boxer to the glue factory. i think that if Boxer would have rested for a few weeks and and once his strength had returned he could have contributed more work to the farm.

replying to davidsons quote they got rid of him because he probably wouldn't have recovered and would have supposedly gone into retirement in a couple weeks working on the farm so they thought that they probably would have lost money and food because of him and boxer was no longer in need.

So you all said that Benjamin didnt speak up because hed seen it before but why didnt clover speak up?

[DHarley]

i was wondering why the pigs didnt feed the other animals more, they had enough food if the pigs shared but mabey they wanted to keep the other animals weak so they could not rebel.

[superkristen120]

davidson i think that the pigs did not give the other animals as much food because they did not want them to rebel...but then the animals would get weak and they could not contribute to work that needs to be done on the farm, so the farm would not be as successful. which would mean that the pigs would not get as much food for themselves. another reason that the pigs did not give the other animals as much food was that the pigs were greedy. they did not want to share their food because they thought they were supperior to the rest of the animals on the farm. yes the pigs were the brains of the farm but without the rest of the animals to contribute the farm would cease to exist.

[ben lurie]

the whole point of the book in a way is to show why the pigs ran a BAD government. if they did all the things you said then they would have been bad but not thaaaattt bad. they didndt only take advantage of the other animals but many of their decisioins didnt even make sense. that kind of shows that thepigs werent only greedy and evil they were also not ery good at running a country.. they could have given themselves all the luxuries they needed by staying true to the 7 commandments and treating the animals nicer but evens o they didnt.

[ben lurie]

if anyone here has read eragon and harry potter davidson has a thread going comparing stuff with the 2 books and seeing which one is better check it out just search eragon and harry potter

[baileyboo]

the whole point of the book in a way is to show why the pigs ran a BAD government. etc

BENNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN :
Do you think that the book was written with that as one of the main concerns? To "show why the pigs ran a bad government" ? I beg to differ ...something tells me that wasn't George Orwell's inspiration.
Moreover, what exactly is the point of this book? To teach of the past Russian problems/occurrences in a way so that readers understood, but perhaps did not immediately recognize and had to look deeper to find the connection? Or just to demonstrate the failure of communism maybe??

[CheyRose]

Does anyone know if Benjamin represents/ed a group of people or one indivdual person?

[juliagoolia]

People seem to be confused about Boxer. The pigs did not consider him a threat- if anything, he helped them in his own way. His hard work and good attitude made him a role model to the other animals, but he was also completely devoted to Napoleon ("Comrade Napoleon is always right"). This served the pigs well, and they encouraged the other animals to follow Boxer's example and put their faith in animalism. In the end, the pigs sent Boxer to the glue factory not because they feared his power, but because he was old and no longer of any use to them. Boxer put in 200% of his effort into building the windmill and harvesting the crops, only to be rewarded with a death sentence.

[juliagoolia]

Hey, I just saw this from Ms. Paul and wanted to make everyone else does, too.

Hey characters! I hope your break is going well - please remember to ask one question and make any two comments...Print out your threads for proof (in case I don't see you here)
Anyone else who isn't in my North Tahoe High's Honors class - feel free to join in with my freshman - they are brilliant!

QUESTIONS

1) Was there any forshadowing in the novel? Can you think of any specifics.

2) Is there a way that communism CAN work? How?

3) What one - two aspects would you change about the plot, or what happens to the animals?

4) It is hard to believe that this is a satire; showing the happenings of what people actually went through...think of another instance - real life example of when a shocking historic event took place and the people didn't realize what was happening to them...

5) Why do you read Animal Farm and feel worse because animals are being taken advantage of, not people...Meaning, people wouldn't make you feel as badly

.

[CheyRose]

wait, julia, does that mean that we have to talk about those "questions" and then print out what we said about them? ahh help

[Mr Hat]

baileyboo, i do not think that the book is about the failure of communism. George Orwell was actually known to have been a supporter of communism and believed that it was the next logical step in societies evolution. (interesting how it turned out, yeah?) Rather if we look at the original concept of communism as lenin and karl max envisoned, we can see quite a deviation from Stalin's communist rule. This in seen in animal farm when Old Major (Lenin) inspires the animals to a better future is sharply contrasted to the bleak reality offered by napoleon (Stalin).

In reality issues with productivity, efficiency, quality and worker motivation (just to name a few) made communism difficult and impractical. The result was that communism had to be abandoned in favour of dictatorship in order for those in power (the Pigs) to remain in power

George Orwell was critisizing Stalin's government with the parallel world depicted in Animal farm. It is interesting to note that pigs were chosen as the metaphors for Stalin's government...

on benjamin: "Benjamin is a donkey who is cynical about the revolution — and just about everything else. In general, he represents the skeptical people in and out of Russia who believed that Communism would not help the people of Russia. More specifically, he represents the Jewish population in Russia who were there before the Revolution and fully expected to be there after the Soviet Union fell (which they were). "None of you have ever seen a dead donkey" is a nicely allegorical way of expressing the Jewish community's attitude towards changes in national politics. His penchant for pessimism and occasional self-deprecation is also in keeping with Jewish forms of humor. He is one of the wisest animal on the farm, and is able to "read as well as any pig". However, this is an ability he does not exercise until the end of the book." quoted from wikipedia