Animal Farm by George Orwell is a mind-bending parable that makes the reader think about issues that go far deeper than a cursory reading of the novel’s text might suggest. While initially unclear, by the end of the novel the allegorical nature of Orwell’s phenomenal work of fiction is revealed. Although it took me longer than most, after ruminating on the themes and motifs of the novel, I came to the shocking realization that Orwell intended his readers to achieve by the end of his expertly crafted journey: It would be very scary if animals were real. 

On the surface, Orwell’s Animal Farm appears to be a sci-fi masterpiece about a distant planet populated by fantastic animals such as pigs, cows, hens, and even goats. While the story shares some parallels with the Russian Revolution of 1917 as well as the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union, including the betrayal of rebellion as written by Trotsky, there are too many differences for this parallel to be taken seriously. Primarily, the aforementioned historical events took place between humans while the novel is in reference to animals. 

Orwell’s deeper point is the sheer sublimity of a world in which animals exist in their corporeal forms beyond the stuff we buy in the grocery store and cook for dinner. Imagining a living, breathing pork, or rather “pig” as Orwell calls it, is a terrifying conceptual journey brought upon by Orwell’s descriptive and straightforward writing style. In this novel, Orwell trades in metaphor for literal interpretation, creating an unnerving, if not truly terrifying, understanding of a world in which animals are, somehow, able to exist within the same physical bounds as humanity.