BRITISH & AMERICAN LITERATURE

• "1984" George Orwell
• "A Farewell to Arms" Ernest Hemingway
• "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" James Joyce
• "A Streetcar Named Desire" Tennessee Williams
• "All the King's Men" Robert Penn Warren
• "Animal Farm" George Orwell
  

"1984" GEORGE ORWELL

Context
George Orwell was primarily a political novelist; 1984 was his masterpiece. Born Eric Blair in India in 1903, Orwell was educated as a scholarship student at prestigious boarding schools in England. Because of his family background--he famously described his family as "lower-upper-middle class"--he never quite fit in, and felt oppressed and outraged by the dictatorial control the schools exercised over their students' lives. After graduating from Eton, Orwell decided to forego college in order to work as a British Imperial Policeman in Burma. He hated his life in Burma, where he was required to enforce the strict laws of a political regime he despised. His failing health, which troubled him throughout his life, caused him to be sent back to England on convalescent leave; in England, he quit the Imperial Police and dedicated himself to becoming a writer.
Inspired by Jack London, Orwell bought ragged clothes from a second-hand store and went to live among the very poor in London; he published a book about the experience. Later, he lived among destitute coal miners in northern England, an experience that caused him to subscribe to democratic socialism. He traveled to Spain in 1936 to cover the Spanish Civil War, where he witnessed firsthand Fascism's nightmarish atrocities. The rise to power of dictators such as Adolf Hitler in Germany and Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union inspired Orwell's mounting hatred of totalitarianism and political authority, and he began to devote himself to writing more politically charged novels, first in Animal Farm in 1944, then in 1984 in 1949.
1984 is Orwell's most perfect novel, and it remains one of the most powerful warnings ever made against the dangers of a totalitarian society. In Spain, Germany, and Russia, Orwell had seen for himself the peril of absolute political authority in an age of advanced technology; he illustrated that peril harshly in 1984. Along with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Orwell's book is the most famous member of the genre of the negative utopian novel. In a utopian novel, the writer aims to portray the perfect human society; in a novel of negative utopia, the goal is the exact opposite--to show the worst human society imaginable, and to convince readers to avoid any path that might lead toward such societal degradation.

Orwell succeeded dazzlingly, and terrifyingly. In the world of 1949, at the dawn of the nuclear age, before the television had become a fixture in the family home, Orwell's world of post-atomic dictatorship--in which every individual is ceaselessly monitored through the telescreen--seemed just possible enough to terrify. And that Orwell postulated such a society only 35 years into the future, in 1984, made the horror caused by the novel seem more relevant and more real.
Of course, the year 1984 has come and gone, and the world Orwell describes has not materialized in England or America. But just as it did in 1949, the novel remains just relevant enough to frighten, just accurate enough to feel possible. In the novel, for instance, war is used as a device for political manipulation on television--a concept presented strikingly in the recent film Wag the Dog. In the novel, historical records are rewritten to match the political ideology of the ruling Party--a technique used as recently as a decade ago by the Soviet Union, and still common in some parts of the world. The year 1984 may have passed, but the warning of Orwell's novel remains important; the world has not completely escaped from the dystopian dangers Orwell describes.

Characters
Winston Smith - A minor member of the ruling Party in near-future London, Winston Smith is a thin, frail, 39 year-old man who wears blue Party coveralls. Winston is sick of the Party's rigid control over his life and world, and begins trying to rebel against the Party--writing defiant thoughts in a secret diary and starting an illegal affair with Julia. Winston is a fatalist, harboring no illusions about his chances of rebelling successfully: the moment he begins to write in his diary, he knows he has condemned himself to death at the hands of the thought police. Even as he joins the legendary anti-Party order called the Brotherhood, Winston considers himself a dead man.
Julia - Winston's lover, a beautiful dark-haired girl working in the Fiction Department at the Ministry of Truth. Julia enjoys sex, and claims to have had affairs with dozens of Party members. Where Winston is contemplative and fatalistic, Julia is pragmatic and optimistic--she plans their affair, explains to Winston why the Party prohibits sex, and is content to rebel in small ways, for her own enjoyment, without worrying about the overall social order. Unlike Winston, Julia is content to accept the world as it is; also unlike Winston, she believes she can lead a relatively happy life as long as she plans carefully and tempers her rebellious activities.
O'Brien - A mysterious, powerful, and sophisticated member of the Inner Party whom Winston believes is a member of the Brotherhood. Throughout the novel, Winston is obsessed with O'Brien, dreaming he will meet him one day in "the place where there is no darkness." O'Brien secretly contacts Winston and inducts him into the Brotherhood, but appears later at the Ministry of Love to oversee Winston's torture--apparently, he was on the side of the Party all along, though his history and his motives remain mysterious, as does the Brotherhood's existence. It might be real or it might be an invention used by the Party to trap the rebellious. When Winston asks O'Brien in the Ministry of Love whether he has been caught, O'Brien says "They got me long ago," suggesting a rebellious past that may confirm Winston's belief in the Brotherhood.
Big Brother - Though he never appears in the novel, and though he may not actually exist, Big Brother is nevertheless extremely important to the book as the perceived dictator of Oceania. Winston seems to remember Big Brother coming to power around the time of the revolution in 1960, but now the official histories record Big Brother's exploits as far back as the '30s. Everywhere Winston looks he sees posters of Big Brother's face bearing the message BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU. Big Brother's face is stamped on coins and broadcast on the telescreen; it haunts Winston's life and fills him with hatred and fascination. At the end of the novel, after being tortured and brainwashed into accepting the Party's authority, Winston realizes that he has learned to love Big Brother, a sign of how effective the Party's methods have been in "healing" Winston's rebellious nature.
Mr. Charrington - A kindly old man who runs a second-hand store in the prole district. Winston buys his diary at Mr. Charrington's store, and also buys a paperweight there that becomes very important to him. Mr. Charrington seems to share Winston's interest in the past; he even shows Winston the room above his shop, which has no telescreen, only an old picture of St. Clement's church. Winston later rents this room for his affair with Julia. Of course, neither the room nor Mr. Charrington are, as they seem: a telescreen is hidden behind the picture of the church, and Mr. Charrington himself is a member of the Thought Police.
Syme - An intelligent and outgoing little man who works with Winston at the Ministry of Truth. Syme specializes in language; as the novel opens, he is working on a new edition of the Newspeak dictionary. Winston thinks that Syme is too intelligent to stay in the Party's favor, and sure enough, he disappears shortly before Hate Week.
Parsons - A fat, obnoxious, dull Party member who lives near Winston and works at the Ministry of Truth. Parsons is in charge of decorating for Hate Week, and solicits a contribution from Winston. He has a dull wife and a group of suspicious, ill-mannered children, who eventually turn him in for thoughtcrime. Winston later encounters Parsons at the Ministry of Love, where they briefly share a cell.
Emmanuel Goldstein - Another figure who exerts an influence on the novel without ever appearing in it. According to the Party, Goldstein is the legendary leader of the Brotherhood. He seems to have been a Party leader who fell out of favor with the regime; in any case, the Party trumpets him as the most dangerous and treacherous man in Oceania. O'Brien gives Winston a book that is supposedly Goldstein's manifesto for the Brotherhood; later, in the Ministry of Love, Winston learns that O'Brien himself wrote the book.

Summary
Winston Smith is an insignificant member of the ruling Party in London, in the nation of Oceania. Everywhere Winston goes, even his own home, he is watched through telescreens, and everywhere he looks he sees the face of the Party's omniscient leader, a figure known only as Big Brother. The Party controls everything, even the people's history and language: The Party is currently forcing the implementation of an invented language called Newspeak, which attempts to prevent political rebellion by eliminating all words related to it. Even thinking rebellious thoughts is illegal-- thoughtcrime is the worst crime of all.
As the novel opens, Winston feels frustrated by the oppression and rigid control of the Party, which prohibits free thought, sex, and any expression of individuality. Winston has illegally purchased a diary in which to write his criminal thoughts, and has become fixated on a powerful Party member named O'Brien, whom Winston believes is a secret member of the Brotherhood, the legendary group that works to overthrow the Party.
Winston works in the Ministry of Truth, where he alters historical records to fit the needs of the Party. He notices a co-worker, a beautiful dark-haired girl, staring at him, and worries that she is an informant who will turn him in for his thoughtcrime. He worries about the Party's control of history: it claims Oceania has always been allied with Eastasia in a war against Eurasia, but Winston seems to recall a time when this wasn't true; the Party also claims that Emmanuel Goldstein, the leader of the Brotherhood, is the most dangerous man alive, but Winston doubts the claim. He spends his evenings wandering through the poorest neighborhoods in London, where the proletarians, or proles, live relatively free of Party monitoring.
One day, Winston receives a note from the dark-haired girl that reads, "I love you." Her name is Julia, and they begin a covert affair, always on the lookout for signs of Party monitoring; they rent a room above the second-hand store in the prole district where Winston bought the diary. Finally, he receives the message he has been waiting for: O'Brien wants to see him.
O'Brien indoctrinates Winston and Julia into the Brotherhood, and gives Winston a copy of Emmanuel Goldstein's book. Winston reads the book to Julia in the room above the store, but suddenly soldiers barge in and seize them; the proprietor of the store has been a member of the Thought Police all along. Torn away from Julia and taken to a place called the Ministry of Love, Winston finds that O'Brien is a Party spy as well; O'Brien spends months torturing and brainwashing Winston, finally sending him to the dreaded Room 101. Here, O'Brien straps a cage full of rats onto Winston's head and prepares to allow the rats to eat his face. Winston snaps, pleading with O'Brien to do it to Julia, not to him. His spirit broken, Winston has been fully brainwashed and is released to the outside world. He meets Julia, but no longer feels anything for her. Winston has accepted the Party entirely. He has learned to love Big Brother.

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"A FAREWELL TO ARMS" E.HEMINGWAY

Author
Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in the summer of 1899. As a young man, he left home to become a newspaper writer in Kansas City. Early in 1918, he joined the Italian Red Cross and became an ambulance driver in Italy, serving in the battlefield in the First World War, in which the Italians allied with the British, the French, and the Americans, against Germany and Austria-Hungary. In Italy, he observed the carnage and the brutality of the Great War firsthand. On July 8, 1918, a trench mortar shell struck him while he crouched beyond the front lines with three Italian soldiers. Though Hemingway embellished the story of his wounding over the years, this much is certain: He was transferred to a hospital in Milan, where he fell in love with a Red Cross nurse named Agnes von Kurowsky. Scholars are divided over Agnes' role in Hemingway's life and writing, but there is little doubt that his affair with her provided the background for A Farewell to Arms, which many critics consider to be Hemingway's greatest novel.
Published in 1929, A Farewell to Arms tells the story of Frederic Henry, a young American ambulance driver and first lieutenant ("Tenente") in the Italian army. Hit in the leg by a trench mortar shell in the fighting between Italy and Austria-Hungary, Henry is transferred to a hospital in Milan, where he falls in love with an English Red Cross nurse named Catherine Barkley. The similarities to Hemingway's own life are obvious.
After the war, when he had published several novels and become a famous writer, Hemingway claimed that the account of Henry's wounding in A Farewell to Arms was the most accurate version of his own wounding he had ever written. Hemingway's life certainly gave the novel a trenchant urgency, and its similarity to his own experience no doubt helped him refine the terse, realistic, descriptive style for which he became famous and which made him one of the most influential American writers of the twentieth century.

Characters
Frederic Henry - The novel's protagonist. A young American ambulance driver in the Italian army during the First World War, Henry is disciplined and courageous but feels detached from life. When introduced to Catherine Barkley, Henry discovers a capacity for love he had not known he possessed, and he begins a process of development that culminates with his desertion of the Italian army. Throughout the novel, the Italian soldiers under Henry's command call him "Tenente"--the Italian word for "lieutenant."
Catherine Barkley - An English nurse who falls in love with Frederic Henry. Catherine's fiance was killed in the battle of the Somme before she met Henry. Catherine has cast aside conventional social values and lives according to her own values, devoting herself wholly to her love for Henry. Her long, beautiful hair is her most distinctive physical feature.
Rinaldi - Frederic's friend an Italian surgeon. Mischievous and wry, Rinaldi is nevertheless a passionate and skilled doctor. Rinaldi makes a practice of always being in love with a beautiful woman, and at the beginning of the novel he is attracted to Catherine Barkley; Rinaldi's infatuation causes him to introduce Frederic and Catherine to one another.
Helen Ferguson - A friend of Catherine's. Though she remains fond of the lovers and helps them, Helen is much more committed to social convention than Henry and Catherine; she vocally disapproves of their "immoral" love affair.
Miss Gage - An American nurse. Miss Gage becomes a friend to both Catherine and Henry--in fact, she may be in love with Henry. Unlike Helen Ferguson, she sets aside conventional social values to support their love affair.
Miss Van Campen - The superintendent of nurses at the American hospital where Catherine works. Miss Van Campen is strict, cold, and unlikable; she is obsessed with rules and regulations and has no patience for or interest in individual feelings.
Dr. Valentini - An Italian surgeon who comes to the American hospital. Self-assured and confident, Dr. Valentini is also a highly talented surgeon. Frederic Henry takes an immediate liking to him.
Count Greffi - A spry 94-year-old nobleman. Henry knows Count Greffi from his time in Stresa, and the two play billiards together toward the end of the novel. Despite his advanced age, the count is intelligent, disciplined, and fully committed to life.

Summary
Frederic Henry, a young American ambulance driver with the Italian army in World War I, meets a beautiful English nurse named Catherine Barkley near the front between Italy and Austria-Hungary. At first Henry's relationship with Catherine is an elaborate game based on his attempt to seduce her, but when he is wounded and sent to the American hospital where Catherine works, their relationship progresses and they begin a passionate affair.
After his convalescence in the hospital, Henry returns to the war front. During a massive retreat from the Austrians and Germans, the Italian forces become disordered and chaotic. Henry is forced to shoot an engineer sergeant under his command and, in the confusion, is arrested by the Italian military police for the crime of not being Italian. Disgusted with the army and facing death at the hands of the battle police, Henry decides he has had enough of war; he dives into the river to escape.
After swimming to safety, Henry boards a train and reunites with Catherine--now pregnant with Henry's child--in Stresa. With the help of an Italian bartender, they escape to Switzerland and attempt to put the war behind them forever. They spend a happy time together in Switzerland and plan to marry after the baby is born. When Catherine goes into labor, however, things go terribly wrong: the doctor announces that her pelvis is too narrow to deliver the baby. He attempts an unsuccessful Caesarian section, and Catherine dies in childbirth. To Henry, her dead body is like a statue; he walks back to his hotel without finding a way to say good-bye.

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"A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN" J.JOYCE

Author
James Joyce was born on February 2, 1882, in the town of Rathgar, near Dublin, Ireland. He was the oldest of ten children, the son of a well-meaning but financially inept father and a solemn, pious mother. His parents managed to scrape together enough money to send their talented son to the Clongowes Wood College, a prestigious boarding school, and then to the less-expensive Belvedere College, where Joyce excelled as an actor and a writer. Later, he attended University College in Dublin, where he became increasingly committed to language and literature as a champion of modernism. In 1902, Joyce left the university, and moved to Paris, but he returned to Ireland briefly for the death of his mother in 1903. Shortly after his mother's death, Joyce began work on the story that would later become A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Published in serial form in 1914-15, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man draws very, very heavily on details from Joyce's early life. Its protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, is in many ways Joyce's fictional double--Joyce had even published stories under the pseudonym "Stephen Daedalus" before writing the novel. Like Joyce himself, Stephen is the son of an impoverished father and a highly Catholic mother; like Joyce, he attends Clongowes Wood, Belvedere, and University College, and like him, he struggles with questions of faith and nationality before leaving Ireland to make his own way as an artist. Many of the scenes from the book are fictional, of course, but some of the most powerful are virtually autobiographical: both the Christmas-dinner scene shortly after the death of Charles Parnell and Stephen's first sexual experience with the Dublin prostitute accord closely to actual experiences in Joyce's life.
After completing Portrait of the Artist in Zurich in 1915, Joyce returned to Paris, where he wrote, over the course of the next several years, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. These three works, along with the story collection Dubliners, form the core of his remarkable literary career. He died in 1941.
Joyce was one of the great literary pioneers of the twentieth century--he was one of the first writers to make extensive and convincing use of a stylistic form called stream-of-consciousness, a type of writing in which the written prose seeks to mirror the thoughts and perceptions of particular characters, rather than rendering them in an objective, external portrait. This technique (used in Portrait mostly during the opening sections and in the fifth chapter) can make a prose passage confusing to read. But with effort, the jumbled perceptions can crystallize into a coherent and sophisticated portrayal of experience.

Characters
Stephen Dedalus - The protagonist and main character of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. A sensitive, thoughtful boy, Stephen is the son of Simon and Mary Dedalus. His large family runs into deepening financial difficulties over the course of the book, resulting in several moves to different parts of Ireland. They manage to send Stephen to prestigious schools, however, and eventually to university. As he grows up, Stephen grapples with questions of nationality, religion, family, and sin, and finally decides to reject all socially imposed bonds and live freely as an artist.
Simon Dedalus - Stephen's father, an impoverished former medical student with a strong sense of Irish patriotism. Simon spends a great deal of his time reliving past experiences, lost in his own sentimental nostalgia. Joyce often uses Simon to symbolize the bonds imposed on Stephen by his family and the burden of his country.
Mary Dedalus - Stephen's mother, Simon Dedalus's wife. Mary is not a devoted Irish nationalist like her husband, but she is deeply religious and strongly committed to the Roman Catholic faith. She is often melancholy, and seems to have been defeated by the circumstances of her life and her marriage.
Uncle Charles - Stephen's lively great uncle. Charles lives with Stephen's family. During the summer, the young Stephen enjoys taking long walks with him and listening to Charles and his father discuss the history of both Ireland and the Dedalus family. Dante - The extremely fervent and piously Catholic governess of the Dedalus children. Dante (whose real name is Mrs. Riordan) becomes involved with Mr. Casey in a long and unpleasant argument over the fate of Parnell during Christmas dinner when Stephen is about six.
Mr. John Casey - Simon Dedalus's friend, who attends the Christmas dinner at which young Stephen is allowed to sit with the adults for the first time. At the dinner, Mr. Casey, like Simon a believer in Irish nationalism, argues with Dante over the fate of Parnell.
The Dedalus Children - Though his siblings do not play a major role in the novel, Stephen has several brothers and sisters, including Maurice, Katey, Maggie, and Boody.
Eileen Vance - A young girl who lives near Stephen when he is a young boy. When Stephen tells Dante that he wants to marry Eileen, Dante is enraged, because Eileen is a Protestant. Later, Stephen remembers Eileen's long, white hands.
Father Conmee - The rector at Clongowes Wood College, where Stephen attends school as a young boy. Father Conmee is kind to Stephen after Father Dolan beats the young boy with the pandybat, and promises to resolve the matter with Father Dolan. Later, however, Stephen learns to his humiliation that Conmee and Dolan had later laughed about the incident with Stephen's father.
Father Dolan - The cruel prefect of studies at Clongowes Wood College, where Stephen attends school as a young boy. Father Dolan punishes Stephen severely in Latin class one day for not doing his lessons. Stephen says he has been excused from lessons because of his broken glasses--which is the truth--but Father Dolan accuses him of lying and beats his palm with a pandybat.
Father Arnall - Stephen's stern Latin teacher at Clongowes Wood College. He later delivers three fiery sermons at a religious retreat Stephen attends; his fierce depiction of the torments of hell is enough to frighten Stephen into temporarily embracing his Catholicism.
Brother Michael - The kindly monk who tends to Stephen and Athy in the infirmary after Wells pushes Stephen into the cesspool. Brother Michael reads the newspaper aloud to cheer up his patients, and it is from this source that Stephen first hears about Parnell's death.
Athy - A friendly boy whom Stephen meets in the infirmary. Athy likes Stephen because they both have unusual names ("Dedalus" being a highly unusual last name for a young boy in Ireland). Athy's father owns and cares for racehorses.
Wells - The bully at Clongowes Wood College. Wells taunts Stephen for kissing his mother before he goes to bed, and one day he pushes Stephen into the infected cesspool, causing Stephen to catch a bad fever. Wells later apologizes, seeming to feel guilty--but he is also worried that Stephen will report him to the priests.
Mike Flynn - A friend of Simon Dedalus's who tries, with little success, to train Stephen to be a runner during their summer at Blackrock.
Aubrey Mills - A young boy with whom Stephen plays imaginary adventure games at Blackrock.
Cranly - Stephen's friend at the university, to whom Stephen confides his thoughts and feelings. Eventually, though, Cranly begins to encourage Stephen to conform to the wishes of his family and to try harder to fit in with his peers, advice Stephen fiercely resents.
Lynch - Stephen's friend at the university, a coarse and often unpleasantly dry young man. Stephen explains his theory of aesthetics to Lynch in Chapter 5.
Davin - Stephen's friend at the university. Davin comes from the Irish provinces, and has a simple, solid nature. Stephen admires his talent for athletics, but is repelled by his unquestioning Irish patriotism, which Davin encourages Stephen to adopt.
McCann - A fiercely political student at the university who tries to convince Stephen to be more concerned with politics. He is offended when Stephen refuses to sign his petition.
Temple - A young man at the university who openly admires Stephen's keen independence, and who tries to copy his friend's ideas and sentiments.
Emma Clere - Stephen's "beloved," the young girl to whom he is fiercely attracted over the course of many years. Stephen does not know Emma particularly well, and is generally too embarrassed or afraid to talk to her, but whenever he sees her, she unleashes a powerful response within him. His first poem ("To E----- C----- -") is to her.
Charles Stewart Parnell - Not a fictional character in the novel, but a real Irish political leader whose death influences many characters in Portrait. During the late nineteenth century, Parnell was the powerful leader of the Irish National Party, and his influence seemed to promise Irish independence from England. But when Parnell's affair with a married woman was exposed, he was condemned by the Irish Catholic Church and fell from grace. His fevered attempts to regain his former position of influence led to his death from exhaustion. Many in Ireland (such as John Casey) considered him a hero and blamed the Church for his death; many other (such as Dante) thought the church had done the right thing to condemn him.

Summary
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man tells the story of Stephen Dedalus, a boy growing up in Ireland at the end of the nineteenth century, who gradually decides to cast off all his social, familial, and religious constraints and live a life devoted to artistic pursuits. As a young boy, Stephen is influenced heavily by his Catholic faith and his Irish nationality. He attends a strict religious boarding school called Clongowes Wood College. The death of Irish political leader Charles Stewart Parnell becomes the subject of a furious argument over Christmas dinner.
Stephen's father Simon is inept with money, and his family sinks deeper and deeper into debt. After a summer spent in the company of his spry old Uncle Charles, Stephen learns that the family cannot send him back to Clongowes. He moves to a prestigious day school called Belvedere, where he grows to excel as a writer and as an actor in the student theater. His first sexual experience--with a young Dublin prostitute--unleashes a storm of guilt and shame as Stephen tries to reconcile his physical yearnings with the stern Catholic moralism of his surroundings. On a three-day religious retreat Stephen hears a trio of fiery sermons about sin, judgment, and hell. Deeply shaken, the young man resolves to rededicate himself to a life of Christian piety.
Stephen begins attending Mass every day, but his belief quickly wavers, and--despite a talk about entering the priesthood with the director of his school--his old religious doubts creep back in. Stephen hopes attending the university will enable him to make some sense out of his life. One day, Stephen learns from his sister that the family will be moving, once again for financial reasons. Stephen goes for a walk on the beach, where he observes a young girl wading in the tide. He is struck by her beauty, and realizes in an epiphanic moment that to love and desire beauty should not be a source of shame. He resolves to live his life to the fullest, and not to be constrained by the boundaries of his family, his nation, and his religion.
At the university, Stephen works to formulate his theories about art while cultivating an independent existence liberated from the expectations of his family and friends. He becomes more and more determined to remain free from all limiting pressures, and eventually decides to leave Ireland to escape them. Like his mythical namesake Daedalus, Stephen hopes to build himself wings on which he can fly above all obstacles and achieve a life as an artist.

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"A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE" T.WILLIAMS

Author
Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus, Mississippi, in 1911. Much of his childhood was spent in St. Louis. The nickname 'Tennessee' seems to have been pinned on him in college, in reference to his father's birthplace or his own deep Southern accent, or maybe both. Descended from an old and prominent Tennessee family, Williams's father worked at a shoe company and was often away from home. Williams lived with mother, his sister Rose (who would suffer from mental illness and later undergo a lobotomy), and his maternal grandparents.
At sixteen, Williams won $5 in a national competition for his essay, "Can a Wife be a Good Sport?" published in Smart Set. The next year he published his first story in Weird Tales. Soon after, he entered the University of Missouri, where he wrote his first play. He withdrew from the university before receiving his degree, and went to work at his father's shoe company. After entering and dropping out of Washington University, Williams graduated from the University of Iowa in 1938. He continued to work on drama, receiving a Rockefeller grant and studying play writing at The New School in Manhattan. During the early years of World War Two, Williams worked in Hollywood as a scriptwriter.
In 1944, The Glass Menagerie opened in New York, won the prestigious New York Critics' Circle Award, and catapulted Williams into the upper echelon of American playwrights. Two years later, A Streetcar Named Desire cemented his reputation, garnering another Critics' Circle and adding a Pulitzer Prize. He would win another Critics' Circle and Pulitzer for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955.
Tennessee Williams mined his own life for much of the pathos in his drama. His most memorable characters (many of them complex females, such as Blanche DuBois) contain recognizable elements of their author or people close to him. Alcoholism, depression, thwarted desire, loneliness in search of purpose, and insanity were all part of Williams's world. Certainly his experience as a known homosexual in an era and culture unfriendly to homosexuality informed his work. His setting was the South, yet his themes were universal and compellingly enough rendered to win him an international audience and worldwide acclaim. In later life, as most critics agree, the quality of his work diminished. He suffered a long period of depression after the death of his longtime partner in 1963. Yet his writing career was long and prolific: twenty-five full-length plays, five screenplays, over seventy one act plays, hundreds of short stories, two novels, poetry, and a memoir. Five of his plays were made into movies.
Williams died of choking in an alcohol-related incident in 1983.

Characters
Blanche - Stella's older sister, until recently a high school English teacher in Laurel, Mississippi. She arrives in New Orleans a loquacious, witty, arrogant, fragile, and ultimately crumbling figure. Blanche once was married to and passionately in love with a tortured young man. He killed himself after she discovered his homosexuality, and she has suffered from guilt and regret ever since. Blanche watched parents and relatives--all the old guard--die off, and then had to endure foreclosure on the family estate. Cracking under the strain, or perhaps yielding to urges so long suppressed that they now cannot be contained, Blanche engages in a series of sexual escapades, which trigger an expulsion from her community. In New Orleans she puts on the airs of a woman who has never known indignity, but Stanley sees through her. Her past catches up with her and destroys her relationship with Mitch. Stanley, as she fears he might, destroys what's left of her. At the end of the play she is led away to an insane asylum.
Stella Kowalski - Blanche's younger sister, with the same timeworn aristocratic heritage, but who has jumped the sinking ship and linked her life with lower-class vitality. Her union with Stanley is animal and spiritual, violent but renewing. She cannot really explain it to Blanche. While she loves her older sister, and pities her, she cannot bring herself to believe Blanche's accusation against Stanley. Though it is agony, she has her sister committed.
Stanley Kowalski - Stanley is the epitome of vital force. He is a man in the flush of life, a lover of women, a worker, a fighter, new blood--a chief male of the flock, with his tail feathers fanned and brilliant. He is loyal to his friends, passionate to his wife, and heartlessly cruel to Blanche.
Mitch - An army buddy, coworker, and poker buddy of Stanley. He is the sensitive member of that crowd, perhaps because he lives with his slowly dying mother. Mitch and Blanche are both people in need of companionship and support. Though Mitch is of Stanley's world, and Blanche is off in her own world, the two believe they have found an acceptable companion in the other. Mitch woos Blanche over the course of the summer until Stanley reveals secrets about Blanche's past.
Eunice - Stella's friend and landlady. Lives above the Kowalskis with Steve.
Steve - Poker buddy of Stanley. Lives upstairs with Eunice.
Pablo - Poker buddy of Stanley.
A Negro Woman - Two brief appearances. She is sitting on the steps talking to Eunice when Blanche arrives. Later, in the 'real-world-struggle-for-existence' sequence, she rifles through a prostitute's abandoned handbag.
A Doctor - Comes to the door at the play's finale to whisk Blanche off to an asylum. After losing a struggle with the nurse, Blanche willingly goes with the kindly seeming doctor.
A Nurse - Comes with the doctor to collect Blanche and bring her to an institution. A matronly, unfeminine figure with a talent for subduing hysterical patients.
A Young Collector - A young man (seventeen, perhaps), who comes to the door to collect for the newspaper. Blanche lusts after him but constrains herself to flirtation and a passionate farewell kiss. The boy leaves bewildered.
A Mexican woman - A vendor of Mexican funeral decorations who frightens Blanche by issuing the plaintive call: Flores para los muertos. The Mexican woman later reprises this role in the underrated comedy Quick Change (1990), starring Bill Murray and Geena Davis.

Summary
Stanley and Stella Kowalski live on a street called Elysian Fields in a rundown but charming section of New Orleans. They are newly married and desperately in love. One day Stella's older sister, Blanche DuBois, arrives to stay with them, setting up the drama's central conflict: an emotional tug-of-war between the raw, brute sensuality of Stanley and the fragile, crumbling gentility of Blanche. Truth is told, it is not an even match, for Blanche is already sliding down a slippery slope. Blanche and Stella are the last in a line of landed Southern gentry. Stella has renounced the worn dictates of class propriety to follow her heart and marry an uncultured blue-collar worker of Polish extraction. Meanwhile, Blanche has played nursemaid to the old guard on its deathbed and watched the family estate slip through her fingers into foreclosure. Her professed values are those of an older South, of charm and wit and chivalry, gaiety and light, appearance and code.
Blanche claims she has been given a leave of absence from her high school teaching job to recover from a nervous breakdown. She settles in with the Kowalskis but things do not go smoothly. Her disapproval of Stanley and the station in life her sister Stella has chosen is obvious, though she strives to be polite. Her feelings against Stanley are galvanized when she witnesses him strike Stella in a fit of drunken rage. Stanley's feelings for her are similarly hardened when he overhears her describe him as animal-like, neolithic, and brutish. Blanche's imposition, her airs, and her distortions of reality infuriate Stanley. He begins to chip away at her thin veneer of armor.
Of Stella and Stanley's friends, one seems to stand above the rest in sensitivity and grace. This is Mitch, who works at the same factory as Stanley, and lives with his sick mother. He has no refinement, but his native gentleness and sincerity inspire Blanche to return his affection. The two seem to need each other. They see a great deal of one another as the summer wears on, but Blanche places strict limits on their intimacy. She has old-fashioned ideals and morals, she tells him. Meanwhile, Stella's first pregnancy progresses and Stanley continues his subtle campaign of intimidation against Blanche.
Blanche's past catches up with her. When she was younger, she fell in love with and married a man whom she later caught in bed with another man. When she confronted him, he killed himself for shame. This knocked the foundations out from under her, and the subsequent poverty and emotional hardships were too much for her. She sought solace or oblivion in the intimacy of strangers; apparently many intimacies with many strangers, and a disastrous affair with a seventeen-year-old student at her high school. Blanche departed Mississippi in disgrace and arrived in New Orleans with nowhere else to go. Stanley discovers this sordid account. He tells Mitch and effectively ends the budding relationship. For Blanche's birthday, Stanley presents her with a one-way bus ticket back to Mississippi. And then, while Stella is in labor at the hospital, Stanley rapes Blanche.
Stella cannot believe the story Blanche tells her about the man she loves. And Blanche's grasp on reality is otherwise shattered. So, with supreme remorse, Stella has Blanche committed. In the final scene of the play, Stella sobs in agony and the rest look on indifferently as a doctor and a nurse lead Blanche away.

Analysis
One entry into A Streetcar Named Desire is to look at Blanche and Stanley as polar opposites along several different, though related, axes. The first might be Fantasy vs. Reality. Blanche clearly represents the former. As she admits to Mitch, she wants to misrepresent things, and wants things misrepresented to her. She lives for how things ought to be, not how they are. She prefers magic and shadows to facing facts in bright light. Stanley, on the other hand, is a no-nonsense, cut-to-the-chase kind of guy. That's not to say he's dour or humorless in the least. On the contrary, he looks for joy in life, and where he finds it he celebrates it. But he expects, as he says, people to lay their cards on the table. Idle chitchat, social compliments, and humoring fools and frauds are not for him.
Blanche calls the area behind the apartment the "ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir." "Those are the L&N tracks," Stella corrects her. Since her husband shot himself many years ago, Blanche has been avoiding reality in one way or another. In New Orleans, it catches up to her in the person of Stanley Kowalski.
A similar polarity describes the question of an Old South vs. a New South. Blanche and Stella are the last aboard the sinking ship that is the old decadence of Southern aristocracy. Years of "epic fornications," as Blanche puts it, have swallowed up the material resources of the family. All that remain are the manners and pretensions. Yet Blanche clings to threads and imagines a world in which they are still relevant. Stella, however, has jumped ship. She has turned her back on the decadence and degeneration of her ancestors and married someone who would be considered below her station, if that station were worth anything anymore. Not coincidentally, Stanley is the child of immigrants. He works in a factory, engaged in the industrialization of the South, in sharp contrast to Blanche and Stella's plantation roots. He's a new breed, without breeding; new blood for a new South in transition. But Williams portrays Stanley as possessing a fare share of brutality--a brutality that is echoed on a more pervasive scale in the scene with the prostitute and the drunk. The changing world in which Stanley so perfectly fits is not necessarily kind. The reality of the new South is that gentility is dead. A struggle for survival has replaced it. There will be casualties; in a sense Blanche is one of them.
Primitive and Civilized mark another set of poles. The exact terms change, but Blanche repeatedly refers to Stanley and his world as brutish, primitive, ape-like, rough, and uncivilized. This sort of superiority is perhaps what offends Stanley the most. But there is something primal and brutish about Stanley. If Stanley represents Early Man, though, Blanche's version of civilization is one decidedly on the decline. She speaks vaguely of art, music, and poetry as proof of progress, but in practice the coin of her culture is manner, witty banter, snippets of French, puff and fluff worn on the sleeve. Blanche does not give Stanley credit for any higher feelings, but the root of Blanche's problem seems to be her inability to reconcile herself to her own "lower" feelings.
This comparison of Primitive and Civilized leads to the issue of desire. Blanche is the victim of a culture that has civilized itself out of a healthy connection to its passions, to its primal and natural urges. For her, all but a narrow realm of sex becomes illicit; love is proscribed across boundaries of class, race, and "normal" gender relationships. Of course, Blanche and her forebears were no less in thrall of desire, but they had demonized it and made it taboo. Suppressed, this desire from time to time erupted in the "epic fornications," to which Blanche adds her own chapter. In an over-civilized society, in which desire cannot be acknowledged, it must instead be hidden. This comes at a cost. Blanche's ancestors paid for their lust with their wealth; Blanche pays with her sanity.
Stanley and Stella's relationship, on the other hand, merges the dual "primitive" elements of desire and spirituality. Their bond is animal and spiritual, rather than intellectual or practical. If Blanche cannot understand why her sister would enter into such a rough and tumble union, it is because she has never reconciled her identity with her own profound desire. The divide is too great between her aristocratic sense of self and the "animal" urges that have at times controlled her. Instead, she makes up a reality that conveniently ignores her own animality, her own brutishness. She knows that a streetcar named Desire has brought her to her present predicament, but she separates that desire from herself, as if that wasn't really her on board. And so she presumes to look down on Stella and Stanley, from an imagined height.
But Williams isn't simply saying Primal desire is good, civilization is bad. Stanley is no one's prototype for the perfect man, and a relationship in which a husband strikes his pregnant wife deserves no awards. But desire is an ineluctable fact of life and a driving force in the lives of Williams's characters, and Blanche's way of dealing with it--or rather, trying not to deal with it--clearly does not work. Desire is a pole on another of Streetcar's axes. As Blanche herself remarks, death is its opposite. Blanche turned to sex, to intimacies with strangers, when she could no longer bear the death that surrounded her. Her parents died, her relatives died, and she nursed them all. What's more, she had never recovered from the suicide of her husband. To wantonly follow her immediate desires and detach herself from the consequences can be seen as a sort of survival mechanism: to find a deathlike oblivion apart from death itself. Williams the symbolist underscores the relationship between death and desire in the very first act. Blanche: "They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at--Elysian Fields!" There you have desire, you have death, and together they lead to an oblivion (pagan, in this case) called Elysian Fields. Unable to deal with desire, unable to deal with death, Blanche ultimately finds a third oblivion: dementia.

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"ALL THE KING'S MEN" R.P.WARREN

Author
Robert Penn Warren was one of the twentieth century's outstanding men of letters. He found great success as a novelist, a poet, a critic, and a scholar, and enjoyed a career showered with acclaim. He won two Pulitzer Prizes, was Poet Laureate of the United States, and was presented with a Congressional Medal of Freedom. He founded the Southern Review and was an important contributor to the New Criticism of 1930s and '40s. Born in 1905, Warren showed his exceptional intelligence from an early age; he attended college at Vanderbilt University, where he befriended some of the most important contemporary figures in Southern literature, including Allan Tate and John Crowe Ransom, and where he won a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford University in England.
During a stay in Italy, Warren wrote a verse drama called Proud Flesh, which dealt with themes of political power and moral corruption. As a professor at Louisiana State University, Warren had observed the rise of Louisiana political boss Huey Long, who embodied, in many ways, the ideas Warren tried to work into Proud Flesh. Unsatisfied with the result, Warren began to rework his elaborate drama into a novel, set in the contemporary South, and based in part on the person of Huey Long. The result was All the King's Men, Warren's best and most acclaimed book. First published in 1946, All the King's Men is one of the best literary documents dealing with the American South during the Great Depression. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize, and was adapted into a movie that won an Academy Award in 1949.
All the King's Men focuses on the lives of Willie Stark, an upstart farm boy who rises through sheer force of will to become Governor of an unnamed Southern state during the 1930s, and Jack Burden, the novel's narrator, a cynical scion of the state's political aristocracy who uses his abilities as a historical researcher to help Willie blackmail and control his enemies. The novel deals with the large question of the responsibility individuals bear for their actions within the turmoil of history, and it is perhaps appropriate that the impetus of the novel's story comes partly from real historical occurrences. Jack Burden is entirely a creation of Robert Penn Warren, but there are a number of important parallels between Willie Stark and Huey Long, who served Louisiana as both Governor and Senator from 1928 until his death in 1935.
Like Huey Long, Willie Stark is an uneducated farm boy who passed the state bar exam; like Huey Long, he rises to political power in his state by instituting liberal reform designed to help the state's poor farmers. And like Huey Long, Willie is assassinated at the peak of his power by a doctor--Dr. Adam Stanton in Willie's case, Dr. Carl A. Weiss in Long's. (Unlike Willie, however, Long was assassinated after becoming a Senator, and was in fact in the middle of challenging Franklin D. Roosevelt for the Presidential nomination of the Democratic Party.)

Characters
Jack Burden - Willie Stark's political right-hand man, the narrator of the novel and in many ways its protagonist. Jack comes from a prominent family (the town he grew up in, Burden's Landing, was named for his ancestors), and knows many of the most important people in the state. Despite his aristocratic background, Jack allies himself with the liberal, amoral Governor Stark, to the displeasure of his family and friends. He uses his considerable skills as a researcher to uncover the secrets of Willie's political enemies. Jack was once married to Lois Seager, but has left her by the time of the novel. Jack's main characteristics are his intelligence and his curious lack of ambition; he seems to have no agency of his own, and for the most part he is content to take his direction from Willie. Jack is also continually troubled by the question of motive and responsibility in history: he quit working on his Ph.D. thesis in history when he decided he could not comprehend Cass Mastern's motives. He develops the Great Twitch theory to convince himself that no one can be held responsible for anything that happens. During the course of the novel, however, Jack rejects the Great Twitch theory and accepts the idea of responsibility.
Willie Stark - Jack Burden's boss, who rises from poverty to become the governor of his state and its most powerful political figure. Willie takes control of the state through a combination of political reform (he institutes sweeping liberal measures designed to tax the rich and ease the burden on the state's many poor farmers) and underhanded guile (he blackmails and bullies his enemies into submission). While Jack is intelligent and inactive, Willie is essentially all motive power and direction. The extent of his moral philosophy is his belief that everyone and everything is bad, and that moral action involves making goodness out of the badness. Willie is married to Lucy Stark, with whom he has a son, Tom. But his voracious sexual appetite leads him into a number of affairs, including one with Sadie Burke and one with Anne Stanton. Willie is murdered by Adam Stanton toward the end of the novel.
Anne Stanton - Jack Burden's first love, Adam Stanton's sister, and, for a time, Willie Stark's mistress. The daughter of Governor Stanton, Anne is raised to believe in a strict moral code, a belief which is threatened and nearly shattered when Jack shows her proof of her father's wrongdoing.
Adam Stanton - A brilliant surgeon and Jack Burden's closest childhood friend. Anne Stanton's brother. Jack persuades Adam to put aside his moral reservations about Willie and become director of the new hospital Willie is building, and Adam later cares for Tom Stark after his injury. But two revelations combine to shatter Adam's worldview: he learns that his father illegally protected Judge Irwin after he took a bribe, and he learns that his sister has become Willie Stark's lover. Driven mad with the knowledge, Adam assassinates Willie in the lobby of the Capitol towards the end of the novel.
Judge Montague Irwin - A prominent citizen of Burden's Landing and a former state Attorney General; also a friend to the Scholarly Attorney and a father figure to Jack. When Judge Irwin supports one of Willie's political enemies in a Senate election, Willie orders Jack to dig up some information on the judge. Jack discovers that his old friend accepted a bribe from the American Electric Power Company in 1913 to save his plantation. (In return for the money, the judge dismissed a case against the Southern Belle Fuel Company, a sister corporation to American Electric.) When he confronts the judge with this information, the judge commits suicide; when Jack learns of the suicide from his mother, he also learns that Judge Irwin was his real father.
Sadie Burke - Willie Stark's secretary, and also his mistress. Sadie has been with Willie from the beginning, and believes that she made him what he is. Despite the fact that he is a married man, she becomes extremely jealous of his relationships with other women, and they often have long, passionate fights. Sadie is tough, cynical, and extremely vulnerable; when Willie announces that he is leaving her to go back to Lucy, she tells Tiny Duffy in a fit of rage that Willie is sleeping with Anne Stanton. Tiny tells Adam Stanton, who assassinates Willie. Believing herself to be responsible for Willie's death, Sadie checks into a sanitarium.
Tiny Duffy - Lieutenant Governor of the state when Willie is assassinated. Fat, obsequious, and untrustworthy, Tiny swallows Willie's abuse and contempt for years, but finally tells Adam Stanton that Willie is sleeping with Anne. When Adam murders Willie, Tiny becomes Governor. Sugar-Boy O'Sheean - Willie Stark's driver, and also his bodyguard--Sugar-Boy is a crack shot with a .38 special and a brilliant driver. A stuttering Irishman, Sugar-Boy follows Willie blindly.
Lucy Stark - Willie's long-suffering wife, who is constantly disappointed by her husband's failure to live up to her moral standards. Lucy eventually leaves Willie to live at her sister's poultry farm. They are in the process of reconciling when Willie is murdered.
Tom Stark - Willie's arrogant, hedonistic son, a football star for the state university. Tom lives a life of drunkenness and promiscuity before he breaks his neck in a football accident. Permanently paralyzed, he dies of pneumonia shortly thereafter. Tom is accused of impregnating Sibyl Frey, whose child is adopted by Lucy at the end of the novel.
Jack's mother - A beautiful, "famished-cheeked" woman from Arkansas, Jack's mother is brought back to Burden's Landing by the Scholarly Attorney, but falls in love with Judge Irwin and begins an affair with him; Jack is a product of that affair. After the Scholarly Attorney leaves her, she marries a succession of men (the Tycoon, the Count, the Young Executive). Jack's realization that she is capable of love--and that she really loved Judge Irwin--helps him put aside his cynicism at the end of the novel.
Sam MacMurfee - Willie's main political enemy within the state's Democratic Party, and governor before Willie. After Willie crushes him in the gubernatorial election, MacMurfee continues to control the Fourth District, from which he plots ways to claw his way back into power.
Ellis Burden - The man whom Jack believes to be his father for most of the book, before learning his real father is Judge Irwin. After discovering his wife's affair with the judge, the "Scholarly Attorney" (as Jack characterizes him) leaves her. He moves to the state capital where he attempts to conduct a Christian ministry for the poor and the unfortunate.
Theodore Murrell - The "Young Executive," as Jack characterizes him; Jack's mother's husband for most of the novel.
Governor Joel Stanton - Adam and Anne's father, governor of the state when Judge Irwin was Attorney General. Protects the judge after he takes the bribe to save his plantation.
Hugh Miller - Willie Stark's Attorney General, an honorable man who resigns following the Byram White scandal.
Joe Harrison - Governor of the state who sets Willie up as a dummy candidate to split the MacMurfee vote, and thereby enables Willie's entrance onto the political stage. When Willie learns how Harrison has treated him, he withdraws from the race and campaigns for MacMurfee, who wins the election. By the time Willie crushes MacMurfee in the next election, Harrison's days of political clout are over.
Mortimer L. Littlepaugh - The man who preceded Judge Irwin as counsel for the American Electric Power Company in the early 1900s. When Judge Irwin took Littlepaugh's job as part of the bribe, Littlepaugh confronted Governor Stanton about the judge's illegal activity. When the governor protected the judge, Littlepaugh committed suicide.
Miss Lily Mae Littlepaugh - Mortimer Littlepaugh's sister, an old spiritual medium who sells her brother's suicide note to Jack, giving him the proof he needs about Judge Irwin and the bribe.

Gummy Larson - MacMurfee's most powerful supporter, a wealthy businessman. Willie is forced to give Larson the building contract to the hospital so that Larson will call MacMurfee off about the Sibyl Frey controversy, and thereby preserve Willie's chance to go to the Senate.
Lois Seager - Jack's sexy first wife, whom he leaves when he begins to perceive her as a person rather than simply as a machine for gratifying his desires.
Byram B. White - The State Auditor during Willie's first term as governor. His acceptance of graft money propels a scandal that eventually leads to an impeachment attempt against Willie. Willie protects White and blackmails his enemies into submission, a decision that leads to his estrangement from Lucy and the resignation of Hugh Miller.
Hubert Coffee - A slimy MacMurfee employee who tries to bribe Adam Stanton into giving the hospital contract to Gummy Larson.
Sibyl Frey - A young girl who accuses Tom Stark of having gotten her pregnant; Tom alleges that Sibyl has slept with so many men, she could not possibly know he was the father of her child.
Marvin Frey - Sibyl Frey's father, who threatens Willie with a paternity suit. (He is being used by MacMurfee.)

Cass Mastern - The brother of Jack's grandmother. During the middle of the nineteenth century, Cass had an affair with Annabelle Trice, the wife of his friend Duncan. After Duncan's suicide, Annabelle sold a slave, Phebe; Cass tried to track down Phebe, but failed. He became an abolitionist, but fought in the Confederate Army during the Civil War, during which he was killed. Jack tries to use his papers as the basis of his Ph.D. dissertation, but walked away from the project when he was unable to understand Cass Mastern's motivations.
Gilbert Mastern - Cass Mastern's wealthy brother.
Annabelle Trice - Cass Mastern's lover, the wife of Duncan Trice. When the slave Phebe brings her Duncan's wedding ring following his suicide, Annabelle says that she cannot bear the way Phebe looked at her, and sells her.
Duncan Trice - Cass Mastern's hedonistic friend in Lexington, Annabelle Trice's husband. When he learns that Cass has had an affair with Annabelle, Duncan takes off his wedding ring and shoots himself.
Phebe - The slave who brings Annabelle Trice her husband's wedding ring following his suicide. As a result, Annabelle sells her.

Summary
All the King's Men is the story of the rise and fall of a political titan in the Deep South during the 1930s. Willie Stark rises from hardscrabble poverty to become governor of his state and its most powerful political figure; he blackmails and bullies his enemies into submission, and institutes a radical series of liberal reforms designed to tax the rich and ease the burden of the state's poor farmers. He is beset with enemies--most notably Sam MacMurfee, a defeated former governor who constantly searches for ways to undermine Willie's power--and surrounded by a rough mix of political allies and hired thugs, from the bodyguard Sugar-Boy O'Sheean to the fat, obsequious Tiny Duffy.
All the King's Men is also the story of Jack Burden, the scion of one of the state's aristocratic dynasties, who turns his back on his genteel upbringing and becomes Willie Stark's right-hand man. Jack uses his considerable talents as a historical researcher to dig up the unpleasant secrets of Willie's enemies, which are then used for purposes of blackmail. Cynical and lacking in ambition, Jack has walked away from many of his past interests--he left his dissertation in American History unfinished, and never managed to marry his first love, Anne Stanton, the daughter of a former governor of the state.
When Willie asks Jack to look for skeletons in the closet of Judge Irwin, a father figure from Jack's childhood, Jack is forced to confront his ideas concerning consequence, responsibility, and motivation. He discovers that Judge Irwin accepted a bribe, and that Governor Stanton covered it up; the resulting blackmail attempt leads to Judge Irwin's suicide. It also leads to Adam Stanton's decision to accept the position of director of the new hospital Willie is building, and leads Anne to begin an affair with Willie. When Adam learns of the affair, he murders Willie in a rage, and Jack leaves politics forever.
Willie's death and the circumstances in which it occurs force Jack to rethink his desperate belief that no individual can ever be responsible for the consequences of any action within the chaos and tumult of history and time. Jack marries Anne Stanton and begins working on a book about Cass Mastern, the man whose papers he had once tried to use as the source for his failed dissertation in American History.

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"THE ANIMAL FARM" GEORGE ORWELL

Author
George Orwell was the pen name of Eric Blair, a British political novelist and essayist that lived during the first half of the twentieth century. Born to British colonists in Bengal, India, Orwell was educated at Eton, an elite school in England. His painful experiences with snobbishness and social elitism at Eton made him deeply suspicious of the entrenched class system in English society. Orwell became a socialist, but unlike many British socialists in the early years of the Soviet Union, Orwell did not hope for the success of the Soviet Union or consider it a representative socialist society. He could not turn a blind eye to the cruelties and hypocrisies of the totalitarian Communism that subsumed the Russian government under the dictatorial reign of Joseph Stalin. Orwell became a vicious critic of both capitalism and Communism, and though he was a dedicated socialist, he is remembered today chiefly as an advocate of freedom and a committed opponent of Communist oppression; his two greatest anti-Communist novels, Animal Farm and 1984, are the works on which his reputation rests. Orwell died in 1950, only three years after the completion of 1984.
1984 is a dystopian novel, which attacks the idea of totalitarian Communism (a political system in which one ruling political party plans and controls the collective social action of a nation) by painting a terrifying picture of a world under its control. Animal Farm, written in 1945, is much shorter, and in some ways much simpler: written as a "fairy story" in the style of Aesop's fables, it tells the history of Soviet Communism as a fable taking place among farm animals on a single English farm. Certain animals are based directly on Communist leaders in Russia (Napoleon and Snowball are based on Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky, for instance). Orwell carries out this reduction of the massive history of the Russian Revolution to a short, ugly fable about farm animals for a number of aesthetic and political reasons; in understanding these reasons, it is helpful to know at least the rudiments of Soviet history under Communism, beginning with the October Revolution of 1917.
In February 1917, Czar Nicholas II, the monarch of Russia, had abdicated, and Alexander Kerensky became premier; at the end of October (November 7 on current calendars), Kerensky was ousted, and Vladimir Lenin, the architect of the Revolution, became Chief Commissar. Almost immediately, as wars raged on virtually every Russian front, Lenin's chief allies began jockeying for power in the newly formed state; the most influential included Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, Gregory Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenev. Trotsky and Stalin in particular emerged as the most likely heirs of Lenin's vast power. Trotsky was a popular and charismatic leader, famous for his impassioned speeches, while the taciturn Stalin preferred to consolidate his power behind the scenes. After Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin orchestrated an alliance against Trotsky between himself, Zinoviev, and Kaminev; in the following years, Stalin became the unquestioned dictator of the Soviet Union, while Trotsky was expelled first from Moscow, then from the Communist Party, and finally from Russia altogether. Permanently exiled in 1936, Trotsky fled to Mexico, where he was assassinated on Stalin's orders in 1940.
In 1934, Stalin's ally Serge Kirov was assassinated in Leningrad, prompting Stalin to begin his infamous purges of the Communist party. Holding show trials whose outcomes were already decided, Stalin had his enemies denounced and executed as enemies of the people, and as participants in Trotskyist or anti- Stalinist conspiracies. As Communist economic planning faltered and failed, violence, fear, and starvation swept across Russia. Stalin used his former opponent as a tool to help keep the suffering populace docile under his rule: Trotsky became a common national enemy, a frightening specter used to conjure even worse eventualities than the current one, and a ready-made excuse for Stalin to use in eliminating his enemies from the Communist Party.
These and many other developments in Soviet history before 1945 have direct parallels in Animal Farm: the pig Napoleon ousts the pig Snowball from the farm, and after the windmill collapses he uses Snowball in his purges just as Stalin used Trotsky; Napoleon becomes a dictator, while Snowball is never heard from again. Orwell was inspired to write Animal Farm in part by his experiences in a Trotskyist outfit during the Spanish Civil War, and Snowball certainly receives a more sympathetic portrayal than Napoleon. But though Animal Farm was written as a specific attack against a specific government, its general themes of oppression, suffering, and injustice have far broader application, and today the book is recognized as a powerful attack on any political, rhetorical, or military powers which seek unjustly to control human beings.

Characters
Napoleon - The pig who emerges as the leader of Animal Farm after the Rebellion. Based on the figure of Joseph Stalin, Napoleon uses military force (his nine loyal attack dogs) to have Snowball expelled from the farm, then proceeds to consolidate and expand his power. By the end of the novel, he is an uncontested dictator who walks on two feet and carries a whip, and the animals are no longer able to tell the difference between him and a human being.
Snowball - The pig who challenges Napoleon for control of Animal Farm after the Rebellion, based on the figure of Leon Trotsky. Intelligent, passionate, and eloquent where Napoleon is crafty, subtle, and manipulative, Snowball seems to cement his power over the issue of the windmill; but just as his speech seems poised to sway the vote, Napoleon's attack dogs make their first appearance and chase him from the farm. Snowball is never heard from again, though Napoleon continues to use him a specter in his show trials and purges, and to blame anything that goes wrong on the farm on Snowball's secret and malign influence.
Boxer - The great carthorse whose incredible strength, dedication, and loyalty enable the early prosperity of Animal Farm and the later completion of the windmill. Beloved of all the animals, Boxer is slow-witted, and naively decides to trust the pigs to make all his decisions for him; his two mottoes are "I will work harder" and "Napoleon is always right." Boxer is injured in a late battle with Mr. Frederick's forces, and falls while working on the windmill shortly after that. His usefulness exhausted, he is betrayed by Napoleon, who sells him to a glue-maker for money to buy a crate of whisky.
Squealer - The pig who spreads Napoleon's propaganda among the other animals, justifying the pigs' monopolization of resources and spreading false statistics that supposedly prove that the farm is thriving and prosperous. Orwell uses the figure of Squealer to explore the ways in which rhetoric and language can be twisted and manipulated into an instrument of social control.
Old Major - The prize-winning boar that has the first great vision of a socialist utopia for animals, beginning the fervor that leads to the Rebellion. Old Major dies three days after he tells the animals of his vision and teaches them the song "Beasts of England," leaving Snowball and Napoleon to struggle for control of his legacy.
Moses - The tame raven who spreads stories of Sugarcandy Mountain, the paradise to which animals are supposed to go when they die. A minor figure in Animal Farm, Orwell uses Moses to explore the interactions between Communism and religion.
Clover - The good-hearted female carthorse, Boxer's close friend. Clover often suspects the pigs of violating one or another of the Seven Commandments, but whenever she has Muriel read the commandment to her, there is always more to it than she remembered. The pigs, of course, simply change the commandments to suit their desires, but Clover does not suspect them.
Mollie - The vain, flighty mare who pulls Mr. Jones's carriage. Mollie loves ribbons in her mane and attention from human beings, and has a difficult time with her new life on Animal Farm. She eventually runs away and becomes a carriage-horse for a new master.
Old Benjamin - The long-lived donkey who refuses to become excited by the Rebellion, assuming that life will be unpleasant no matter who is in charge.
Muriel - The white goat who reads the Seven Commandments to Clover whenever she suspects the pigs of violating one of them.
Mr. Jones - The drunken farmer who runs the Manor Farm before the animals stage their Rebellion and establish Animal Farm.
Mr. Frederick - The tough, shrewd operator of Pinchfield, a neighboring farm. Mr. Frederick betrays Napoleon by giving him forged bank notes for a pile of lumber and then attacking the farm with his men. His men dynamite the newly completed windmill into oblivion.
Mr. Pilkington - The easy-going gentleman farmer who runs Foxwood, a neighborhing farm. Mr. Pilkington is Mr. Frederick's bitter enemy, and attends Napoleon's dinner at the end of the novel.
Mr. Whymper - The human solicitor whom Napoleon hires to represent Animal Farm among human beings.
Jessie and Bluebell - Two dogs, each of whom give birth early in the novel. In the interest of "education", Napoleon takes their puppies, who reappear later as an army of slavishly loyal attack dogs.
Minimus - The poet pig who writes verse about Napoleon, and who pens the song "Animal Farm, Animal Farm" to replace "Beasts of England."

Summary
Old Major, the prize-winning boar, gathers the animals of the Manor Farm together for a meeting in the big barn. He tells them of a dream he has had, in which all animals lived together in a communal paradise with no human beings to oppress or control them; he tells the animals that they must work toward such a paradise, and teaches them a song called "Beasts of England," in which his dream vision is lyrically described. The animals are deeply enthusiastic about Old Major's vision. When he dies, only three days after the meeting, two younger pigs, Snowball and Napoleon, formulate his main principles into a philosophy called Animalism. One night the animals manage to defeat the farmer Mr. Jones in a battle and run him off the farm. They rename it Animal Farm and dedicate themselves to achieving Old Major's dream. In particular the great carthorse Boxer devotes himself to the cause, taking "I will work harder" as his maxim and committing his great strength to the prosperity of the farm.
At first everything goes well, and there is food for all; Snowball works at teaching the animals to read, and Napoleon takes a group of young puppies to educate them in the principles of Animalism. The animals defeat Mr. Jones's forces again, in what comes to be known as the Battle of the Cowshed, and erect a monument to the event. As time passes, however, Napoleon and Snowball are increasingly at odds, and struggle for power and influence among the other animals. Snowball concocts a scheme to build a windmill that could be used to generate electricity for the animals, and Napoleon declares himself roundly opposed to it. At the meeting to vote on whether to build the windmill, Snowball gives a passionate speech that seems to have won the day. But Napoleon gives a strange signal, and nine attack dogs--the puppies Napoleon has been "educating"--burst in to the barn and attack Snowball, chasing him from the farm. Napoleon becomes the leader of Animal Farm, and declares that there will be no more meetings; from now on, the pigs will make all the decisions in private--for everyone's best interest.
Napoleon changes his mind about the windmill, and the animals, especially Boxer, devote their efforts to completing it. After a storm one night, the windmill is found toppled. The human farmers in the area declare smugly that the animals made the walls too thin, but Napoleon claims that Snowball returned to the farm to sabotage the windmill. He stages a great purge during which any animal found to be in Snowball's great conspiracy--meaning any animal who opposes Napoleon's uncontested leadership--is killed by the dogs. His leadership unquestioned (Boxer makes "Napoleon is always right" his second maxim), Napoleon begins expanding his powers, rewriting history to make Snowball a villain. Napoleon also begins to act more and more like a human being--sleeping in a bed, drinking whisky, and engaging in trade with neighboring farmers. His propagandist, the pig Squealer, justifies every action to the common animals, convincing them that Napoleon is a great leader--this despite the fact that they are cold, hungry, overworked, and miserable.
Mr. Frederick, a neighboring farmer, cheats Napoleon in the purchase of some timber, and then attacks the farm and dynamites the windmill, now rebuilt. After the windmill explodes a pitched battle ensues, during which Boxer is badly wounded. The animals rout the farmers, but Boxer is weakened, and when he falls while working on the windmill not long after the battle the outlook is grim. Napoleon sells his most loyal worker to a glue-maker for whisky money, while claiming to have sent him to a human hospital, where, according to Squealer, he died in peace.
Years pass on Animal Farm, and the pigs become more and more like human beings-- walking upright, carrying whips, and wearing clothes. Eventually the seven principles of Animalism, known as the Seven Commandments and inscribed on the side of the barn, are replaced with a single principle reading "ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL, BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS." Napoleon entertains Mr. Pilkington, a human farmer, at a dinner, and declares his intent to change the name of Animal Farm back to The Manor Farm. Looking in at the party through the farmhouse window, the common animals are unable to tell who are the pigs and who are the human beings.

Analysis
Animal Farm is a simple story with a complex field of reference, an Aesopian fable that viciously attacks the history and rhetoric of Soviet Communism by retelling it as the story of a group of farm animals. Animal Farm is a miniature nation, surrounded by a county full of farms that parallel the other nations of the world. Each phase of Joseph Stalin's rise to dictatorial power in Russia is present in Animal Farm: the Russian Revolution, here represented by the animals' overthrow of Mr. Jones and their human oppressors; the consolidation of power in the hands of the Communist Party, here represented by the pigs' emergence as the animals in charge of the farm; the struggle for pre-eminence between Trotsky and Stalin, here represented by the struggle between the pigs Napoleon and Snowball, which, as with Trotsky, leads to Snowball's expulsion from the farm; the Party purges and show trials with which Stalin eliminated his enemies, here represented by the false confessions and executions of animals Napoleon distrusts following the collapse of the windmill; Stalin's emergence as a figure so powerful he was essentially a tyrant, here represented by Napoleon and the other pigs' adoption of human characteristics such as walking upright and carrying whips.
But Animal Farm is more than just an invective against Stalin. One of the book's most impressive qualities is its evocation not just of the figures in power, but of the oppressed people themselves. Animal Farm is not told from the perspective of any particular character, though occasionally it does slip into Clover's consciousness. Rather, the story is told from the perspective of the common animals as a whole. Gullible, loyal, slow-witted, and hard working, the common animals give Orwell a chance to sketch the human qualities that enable oppression to flourish, rather than simply the motives of the oppressors. Napoleon's psyche is not the only important terrain explored in Animal Farm; Boxer's is just as central to the novel, and the betrayal of the great horse forms the novel's grotesquely melodramatic climax.
Grotesque melodrama of a certain kind is the heart and soul of Animal Farm, which makes a very big point by telling a very small story. Orwell's reduction of the novel to the form of a children's fable works on a number of levels: it makes the anti-Communist moral of the novel seem fundamental and obvious, so basic it can form the foundation of a children's story; it makes the reader see the real events it refers to from a new perspective, because they are told in such a startlingly different way; it makes the real story of Communism seem massive and pressing, simply because the novel itself is so small and so un-pressing, a kind of catastrophic understatement more effective than a thousand-page treatise; and it makes the reader marvel at how such a thing could come to pass in reality, simply by making the story so alien and implausible. Orwell calls his book a "fairy story," but unlike most frightening fairy tales, this one almost literally came true. Perhaps most importantly, the form of fable enables Orwell to assume complete control over the tone and mood of Communist history in a way that would have been impossible had he been writing about historically-based human characters; he is able to portray the Communists as grotesque pigs, the suffering people as noble horses, and the complicit masses as mindless sheep. Orwell takes everything impressive and grand away from the sweep of Communist history, as if to say that they do not deserve it, as if to say that at its heart, the story of Communism is simple an ugly melodrama that could have happened on a farm.
This is not to say that Orwell underestimates the Communists' power or their ability to maintain control of their subjects even when the improvements promised by the Revolution have visibly made things worse. One of Orwell's central concerns, both in Animal Farm and in 1984, is the way in which language can be manipulated as an instrument of control. In 1984, the very structure of language has been altered so that dissident thoughts are literally impossible to express. In Animal Farm, a simpler rhetoric of socialist revolution is gradually twisted and distorted to justify the pigs' behavior and keep the other animals in the dark. The animals wholeheartedly embrace Old Major's visionary ideal of socialism. After Old Major dies, the pigs gradually inject new nuances of meanings into his words, so that the other animals are seemingly unable to oppose them without also opposing the ideals of the Revolution. Thus by the end of the novel, after Squealer's repeated rephrasings of Old Major's Seven Commandments, the main principle of the farm can be openly stated as "ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL, BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS." This garish abuse of the word "equal" and of the ideal of equality generally is wholly typical of the pigs' method, which becomes increasingly audacious as the novel progresses. (When the pigs decide to walk upright, they simply change the motto "Four legs good, two legs bad" to "Four legs good, two legs better.") Orwell's sophisticated deconstruction of this use of language is one of the most compelling and most enduring features of his novel, worthy of close study even after the parallelisms of the fable have been exhausted.


It is the history of a revolution that went wrong - and of the excellent excuses that were forthcoming at every step for the perversion of the original doctrine', wrote Orwell in the original blurb for the first edition of Animal Farm in 1945. His simple and tragic fable has become a world-famous classic of English prose.
George Orwell is the pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair. The change of the name corresponded to a profound shift in Orwell's life-style, in which he changed from a pillar of the British imperial establishment into a literary and political rebel.
Orwell is famous for his novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four. In 1944 Orwell finished Animal Farm, a political fable based on the story of the Russian Revolution and its betrayal by Joseph Stalin. In this book the group of barnyard animals overthrow and chase off their exploitative human masters and set up an egalitarian society of their own. Eventually the animals' intelligent and power-loving leaders, the pigs, subvert the revolution and form a dictatorship whose bondage is even more oppressive a heartless than that of their former masters.
Orwell derived his inspiration from the mood of Britain in the '40s. Animal Farm confronted the unpalatable truth that the victory over Fascism would in some respects unwittingly aid the advance of totalitarianism, while in Nineteen Eighty-four warns the dangers to the individual of enroaching collectivism. In these last, bleak fables Orwell attempted to make the art of political writing in the traditions of Swift and Defoe. The most world-known Gulliver's Travels. This satire? First published in 1726, relates to the adventures of Lemuel Gulliver, a surgeon on a merchant ship, and it shows the vices and defects of man and human institutions. So far as satire has become the subject of our research-work, it is necessary we look at the nature and sources of comic.
What is comic? Similar considerations apply to the historically earlier forms and theories of the comic. In Aristotle's view 'laughter was intimately related to ugliness and debasement'. Cicero held that the province of the ridiculous lay in the certain baseness and deformity. In 19th century Alexander Bain, an early experimental psychologist, thought alone these lines 'not in physical effects alone, but in everything where a man can achieve a stroke of superiority, in surpassing or discomforting а rival is the disposition of laughter apparent'. Sidney notes that 'while laughter comes from delight not all objects of delight cause laugh. We are ravished in delight to see a fair woman and yet are far from being moved to laughter. We laugh at deformed creatures, wherein certainly we can delight'. Immanuel Kant realized that what causes laughter is 'the sudden transformation of a tense expectation into nothing'. This can be achieved by incongruity between form and content, it is when two contradictory statements have been telescoped into a line whose homely, admonitory sound conveys the impression of a popular adage. In a similar way nonsense verse achieves its effect by pretending to make sense. It is interesting to note that the most memorable feature of Animal Farm - the final revision of the animals revolutionary commandments: 'All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others', is based on that device.
Other sources of innocent laughter are situations in which the part and the home change roles and attention becomes focused on a detail torn out of the functional defect on which its meaning depends. 'A bird's wing, comrades, is an organ of propulsion not of manipulation'. Orwell displaces attention from meaning to spelling. One of the most popular comic devices is impersonation. The most aggressive form of impersonation is parody, designed to deflate hollow pretence, to destroy illusion and to undermine pathos by harping on the weaknesses of the victim. Orwell resorts to that device describing Squealer:' The best known among them was a small fat pig named Squealer with very round cheeks, twinkling eyes, nimble movements and a shrill voice. He was a brilliant talker:'
A succession of writers from the ancient Greek dramatist Aristophanes through Swift to George Orwell, have used this technique to focus attention on deformities of society that, blunted by habit, are taken for granted. Satire assumes standards against which professions and practices vicious, the ironic perception darkens and deepens. The element of the incongruous point in the direction of the grotesque which implies an admixture of elements that do not march. The ironic gaze eventually penetrates to a vision of the grotesque quality of experience, marked by the discontinuity of word and deed and the total lack of coherence between the appearance and reality. This suggests one of the extreme limits of comedy, the satiric extreme in which the sense of the discrepancy between things as they are and things they might be or ought to be has reached to the borders of the tragedy.
Early theories of humour, including even those of Bergson and Freud, treated it as an isolated phenomenon, without attempting to throw light on the intimate connections between the comic and tragic, between laughter and crying. Yet these two domains of creative activity form a continuum with no sharp boundaries between wit and ingenuity. The confrontation between diverse codes of behaviour may yield comedy, tragedy or new psychological insights. Humour arouses malice and provides a harmless outlet for it. Comedy and tragedy, laughter and weeping yields further clues of this challenging problem. The detached malice of the comic impersonator that turns pathos into bathos, tragedy into travesty. Comedy is an imitation of common errors of our life, which represented in the most ridiculous and scornful sorts that may be.
Surely satire reflects changes in political and cultural climate and it had its ups and downs. George Orwell's satire of the 20th century is much more savage than that of Jonathan Swift in 18th century. It is only in the mid 20th century that the savage and the irrational have come to be viewed as part of the normative condition of the humanity rather than as tragic aberration from it. The savage and irrational amount to grotesque parodies of human possibility ideally conceived. Thus it is the 20th century novelists have recognized the tragicomic nature of the contemporary human image and predicament, and the principal mode of representing both is the grotesque. This may take various forms. In Animal Farm it takes a form of apocalyptic nightmare of tyranny and terror.
The satire in Animal Farm has two important aims - both based on the related norms of limitation and moderation. First, Animal Farm exposes and criticizes extremist political attitudes as dangerous. On the one hand, it satirizes the mentality of the utopian revolutionary - the belief at through the conscious effort of a ruling elite a society can be suddenly severed from its past and fashioned into a new, rational system. Implicit in Snowball's vision of high technology modernisation is the extirpation of the animals' resent agricultural identity as domesticated creatures and - if Boxer's goal of improving his mind is any indication, they're eventual transformation into Houyhnhnms. Instead, Snowball's futuristic incantations conjure up the power-hungry and pleasure-loving Napoleon.
An allegorical view of reality - the thing said or displayed really meaning something else-suited the Marxist-oriented social criticism of the 1930s,which was indefatigable in pointing out an economically self-serving motives underlying the surface features of modern bourgeois society. One form of allegory is the masque, a spectacle with masked participants.
Analyzing the novel we can hardly determine comedy from tragedy. We can't find those sharp boundaries that divide these two. Orwell can be called the true expert of man's psychology. Cause only a man who studied psychology of the crowd could create such a vivid image of characters, which we see in Animal Farm. Describing the characters Orwell attaches great significance to the direct remarks which help the reader to determine who is the victim and who is hunter in the novel. The features of the animals are 'A white stripe down his nose gave him somewhat stupid appearance', 'Mollie, foolish, pretty white mare'. Stupidity becomes a kind of leitmotif in the description of the animals. Pigs on the contrary are represented as very clever animals: 'the pigs were so clever that they could think of the way round every difficulty', 'with their superior knowledge...'
The author creates the image of the crowd that plays a very important role in the novel. What is a crowd? This is not only mass of individuals if to look deeper from the psychological point of view we shall find out that crowd is a gathering of people under the definite conditions which has its traits, which differ from that of single individual. The conscious person disappears, besides feelings and ideas of everyone who forms that gathering which is called crowd, receive united, indivisible direction. Orwell ridiculed that vice of the society. In this respect it takes the form of innocent laughter. Old Major found an answer to all problems of the animals and opened the thing on which 'the support and pleasure' of their days depend on. 'It is summed up in a single word- Man. Man is the only real enemy we have'. That episode makes the reader laugh but at the same time this very moment can be considered the tragic one, as the victim of the crowd has been chosen and pointed out and now nothing can stop the process. 'It is not crystal clear, then, comrades, that all the evels of the life of ours spring from the tyranny of human beings? Only get rid of Man, and the produce of our labour would be our own. Almost overnight we can become rich and free.'
Major provides animals with scapegoat. In the nature of individual the image of an enemy excites aggressiveness but in the dimensions of the crowd the hostility increases thousands times. S.Moskovichy wrote in his book 'The machine that creates Gods', that 'society is ruled by passions on which one should play and even stimulate them in order to have an opportunity to rule them and to subordinate to intellect'. Having read that episode we don't pay attention to its deep psychological sense, but simply enjoy the humour with which the author speaks of it.

Orwell uses very popular device he gives the description of the character and at the end he gives a short remark which completely destroy the created image: 'Old Major was so highly regarded on the farm that everyone was quite ready to lose an hours sleep in order to hear what he had to say... they nestled down inside it and promptly fell asleep','she purred contentedly throughout Majors speech without listening to a word of what he was saying'. He uses the same device in the situation when Old Major is telling the animals about the song: 'Many years ago when I was a little pig, my mother and other sows used to sing an old song of which they knew only the tune and the first three words I had known that tune in infancy, but it had long since past out of my mind, last night however it came back to me in my dream'. The reader is carefully prepared to hear some kind of patriotic march but instead of that the author in one sentence breaks down the created image: 'It was a stirring tune something between 'Clementine' and 'La Cucaracha'. Through those short remarks we learn the attitude the author towards what is going on in his novel. He laughs at his heroes pretending that the things he speaks about to be very important while making the reader understand the contrary thing. We can see hear again an integral part of any kind of humour-incongruity between the reality and the situation as it is said to be. The lack of coherence between things in its turn lead to the very invisible boundary between comedy and tragedy.
Orwell's novel is always balancing between tragedy and comedy. In Animal Farm Orwell is exposing the selfish power-hunger of the few behind a collectivist rhetoric used to gull the many. And in at least two Orwell's allegorical exposure is also an exposure of allegory. Because the surface fiction tends to be considered of lesser importance than the implied meaning, allegory is inherently hierarchical, and the insistence on the dominant meaning makes it an authoritarian mode.
If allegory tends to subordinate narrative to thesis, the structure of allegory, its dualistic form can be emphasised to restore a balance between fictional events and conceptual massage. In Animal Farm there are signs of a balance struck between satiric devices allegorically martialed to expose and assault a dangerous political myth and collateral apolitical elements - the latter akin to the 'solid objects and useless scraps of information'. Orwell allows the reader to fix disgust at cruelty, torture and violence on one leading character-Napoleon. The way Orwell presents the figure is structural, in that the figure of the Napoleon clarifies his political intent for the reader. There is no doubt about the way the reader feels toward Napoleon, but Orwell's handling of him is all the more effective for combining 'humour with the disgust'. 'Napoleon was a large, rather fierce looking Berkshire boar, the only Berkshire on the farm, not much of a talker but with the reputation for going his own way'.
Orwell presents Napoleon to us in ways they are, at first amusing as, for example, in the scene where he shows his pretended disdain at Snowball's plans for the windmill, by lifting his leg and urinating on the chalked floor. 'One day, however, he arrived unexpectedly to examine the plans. He walked heavily round the shed, looked closely at every detail of the plans and snuffed at them once or twice, then stood for a little while contemplating them out of the corner of his eye; then suddenly he lifted his leg, urinated over the plans and walked out without uttering a word.' The increasing tension of description is broken down immediately this makes the reader smile. Besides the author speaks of Napoleon's ridiculous deeds in such a natural way, as that is the normal kind of behaviour that we just can't stand laughing. 'Napoleon produced no schemes of his own, but said quietly that Snowball's would come to nothing'. Napoleon is seen to have no respect for Snowball who creates the plans. This is most apparent in his urinating on them, which emphasises his brutal and uncivilised character. Animals urinate on objects to mark their territory. This is symbolic as Napoleon later takes the idea for the windmill as his own.
On the allegorical level the differing views of socialism held by Trotsky and Stalin are apparent. In contrast with Snowball's speeches, Napoleon merely makes the minimum response and when he does speak it is usually to criticise Snowball. Speech becomes less and less important to Napoleon. The sheep with their mindless bleating effectively silence the opposing opinions as no one else can be heard. ' It was noticed that they were especially liable to break 'Four legs good, two legs bad' in the crucial moments of Snowball's speeches. Snowball's reduction of Animalism for the benefit of stupider animals and the way the sheep mindlessly take it up, parodies the way socialist ideology reduces itself to simply formulas that everyone can understand, but which stop any kind of thought. In the Communist Manifesto, for example, there is the following sentence: 'The theory of the communists may be summed up in the single sentence: 'Abolition of private property''. Set this beside the basic principle of Animalism: 'Four legs good, two legs bad'. Orwell's feelings about dangers of over simplification are clear. 'The more short the statement is the more it is deprived from any kind of provement, the more it influences the crowd. The statement exerts influence only if it is repeated very often, in the same words'. Napoleon said that 'there is only one figure of the theory of orators art, which deserves attention -repetition. By the means of repetition an idea installs in the minds so deeply, that at last it is considered to be the proven truth.
What the truth is? The Russian dictionary gives the definition of truth as: the truth is, what corresponds to the reality. But is it always so? Very often it happens so that we accept as the true the false things which we want to be true, or the things that someone want us to accept. That is one of the most interesting peculiarities of man's psychology that Orwell ridicules. There is one universe truth, but the man has a strange habit to pervert truth.
Napoleon appears to have gained the support of dogs and sheep and is helped by the fickle nature of the crowd.
From the start it seems Napoleon turns events to his own advantage. When the farm is attacked in the 'Battle of Cowshed', Napoleon is nowhere to be seen. Cowardice is hinted ft and his readiness to rewrite history later in the novel shows the ways in which Napoleon is prepared to twist the truth for his own ends. The Seven Commandments in which are condified the ethnical absolutes of the new order, are perverted throughout the book to suit his aims.
There is an interesting thing to notice about Seven Commandments. That is an important device to use the 'lucky number' to deepen the impression of animals misfortune. Every time the changing of the commandment takes place, we see an example of how the political power, as Orwell sees it, is prepared to alter the past in peoples minds, if the past prevents it from doing what he wishes to do. Firstly the fourth commandment is altered in order that pigs could sleep comfortably in warm beds. A simple addition of two words does it. 'Read me the fourth commandment. Does it not say something about sleeping in beds? With some difficulty Muriel spelt it out. 'It says that ' no animal shall sleep in the bed with sheets''. Whenever the pigs infringe one of Major's commandments, Squealer is sent to convince the other animals that that is the correct interpretation. 'You didn't suppose, surely, that there was ever a ruling against beds? A bed merely means the place to sleep in. A pile of straw in a stall is a bed, properly regarded. The rule was against sheets, which are a human invention'.
Napoleon secures his rule through an unpleasant mix of lies distortion and hypocrisy / there are two scenes where Napoleon's cruelty and cold violence are shown in all their horror: the scene of the trials and the episode where Boxer is brought to the knacker's. The veil of mockery is drown aside. In these episodes humour is absent, the stark reality of Napoleons hunger for power and the cruelty< and death it involves are presented. Orwell reminds of the 'heavy' stink of blood, and associates that smell with Napoleon.
'And so the tale of confessions and executions went on, until there was a pile of corpses lying before the Napoleon's feet and the air was heavy with the smell of blood, which had been unknown there since the expulsion of Jones'.
Napoleon in the novel stands for Joseph Stalin, and of course we can't omit the way the author skilfully creates this character. Everything from pervasion of communist ideology to the cult of personality of Stalin found its reflection in the novel.
Orwell in the cruellest kind of parody gives to Napoleon such titles as: 'Our, leader, Comrade Napoleon', 'The Farther of all animals, Terror of Mankind, Protector of the Sheepfold, Ducklin's Friend.'
The novel mainly is based on the historical facts, and even the relationships of Soviet Union and Germany are shown in that fairy tale. For the all cleverness of the Napoleon, though, he is fooled by Frederic of Pinchfield (he stands for Hitler's Germany) who gets the timber out of him, pays him false money, then attacks the farm, and blows up the windmill.
Orwell's satire will be no iconoclastic wrecking job on the Stalinist Russia whose people had been suffering so cruelly from the war and whose soldiers, under Stalin's leadership, were locked in desperate combat with the German invader even as Animal Farm was being written. That Orwell's assault is primarily on an idea, the extremists fantasy of technological utopianism devoid of hard work, and less a living creature, the commander is chief, is demonstrating during the most dramatic moment of Farmer Frederick's attack on the farm-the juxtaposition of dynamited windmill and the figure of Napoleon alone standing unbowed. And despite Orwell's fascination with Gulliver's Travels, it is a sign of his attempt to draw back from the Swiftian revulsion at the flash - a disgust that, as Orwell later noted could extend to political behaviour - toward the more balanced and positive view of life that Animal Farm, despite it's violence, has few references to distasteful physical realities, and those two are appropriate to the events of the narrative.
Napoleon is a simple figure. Orwell makes no attempt as to give reasons as to why he comes to act the way he does. If Napoleon was a human character in the novel, if this where a historical novel about a historical figure Orwell would have had to make Napoleon convincing in human terms. But isn't human and this is not a novel. It is an animal fable and Orwell presents the figure of Napoleon in ways that make us see clearly and despise what he stands for. He is simplified for the sake of clarity. He lends force of Orwell's political massage, that power tends to corrupt, by allowing the reader to fix his disgust at cruelty torture and violence.
The primary objective of the tale is that we should loathe Napoleon for what he stands for. The other animals are used to intensify our disgust or else to add colour and life to the tale by the addition of the farmyard detail. The most significant of the other animals is undoubtedly the cart-horse Boxer, and in his handling of him Orwell shows great expertise in controlling the readers reactions and sympathies and in turning them against what is hates.
Throughout the novel boxer is the very sympathetic figure. Honest and hardworking, he is devoted to the cause in a simple-minded way, although his understanding of the principles of Animalism is very limited. He is strong and stands nearly eighteen feet high, and is much respected by the other animals. He has two phrases which for him solve all problems, one, 'I shall work harder', and later on, despite the fact that Napoleon's rule is becoming tyrannical, 'Napoleon is always right'. At one point he does question Squealer, when he, in his persuasive way, is convincing the animals that Snowball was trying to betray them in the Battle of Cowshed. Boxer at first can not take this, he remembers the wound Snowball received along his back from Jones's gun. Squealer explains this by saying that 'it had been arranged for Snowball to be wounded, it had all been part of Jones's plan'. Boxer's confused memory of what actually happened makes him 'a little uneasy' but when Squealer announces, very slowly that Napoleon 'categorically' states that Snowball was Jones's agent from the start then the honest cart-horse accepts the absurdity without question.
Orwell through the figure of Boxer is presenting a simple good nature, which wishes to do good, and which believes in the Rebellion. So loyal is Boxer that he is prepared to sacrifice his memory of facts, blurred as it is. Nevertheless, so little is he respected, and so fierce is the hatred the pigs hatred the pigs have for even the slightest questioning of their law that, when Napoleon's confessions and trials begin, Boxer is among the first the dogs attack. Wish his great strength he has no difficulty in controlling them: He just simply, almost carelessly 'put out his great hoof, caught a dog in mid-air, and pinned him to the ground'. At a word from Napoleon he lets the dog go, but still he doesn't realise he is a target. Boxer's blind faith in the pigs is seeming disastrous. Confronted with the horrifying massacre of the animals on the farm, Boxer blames himself and buries himself in his work. This show of power pleases us as a reader, in what we like to think of physical strength being allied to good nature, simple though a good nature may be. Boxer has our sympathy because he gives his strength selflessly for what he believes, whereas Napoleon gives nothing, believes in nothing and never actually works. Boxer exhausts himself for the cause. Every time the animals have to start rebuilding of the windmill he throws himself into the task without a word of complaint, getting up first half an hour, then three quarters of an hour before everybody else.
Boxer's sacrificial break down in the service of what he and the other worker animals believed to be technological progress might be interpreted as allegorically portending the future deterioration of the animal community.
At last his strength gives out and when it does his goodness is unprotected. The pigs are going to send him to the knacker's to be killed and boiled out into glue. Warned by Benjamin the donkey (his close, silent friend throughout the book) and by Clover he tries to kick his way out of the van, but he has given all his energy to the pigs and now has none left to save himself. The final condition of Boxer, inside the van about to carry him to the knacker's in exchange for money needed to continue work on the windmill, emblematically conveys a message close to the spirit of Orwell's earlier warnings: 'The time had been when a few kicks of Boxers hoofs would have smashed the van to mach wood. But alas! His strength had left him; and in the few moments the sound of drumming hoofs grew fainter and died away'. This is the most moving scene in a book Indeed our feelings here as reader's are so simple, deep and uninhibited that as Edward Thomas has said movingly, 'we weep for the terrible pity of it like children who meet injustice for the first time.
Boxer can be attributed to the tragic heroes cause he doesn't struggle with the injustice, as the tragic hero should do. And surely we can consider him a comical hero as all through the story the reader has compassion on him. Orwell managed to unite tragedy and comedy in one character. Boxer arouses mixed contradictory feelings. His story is no longer comic, but pathetic and evokes not laughter but pity. It is an aggressive element that detached malice of the comic impersonator, which turns pathos into bathos and tragedy into travesty.
Not only Boxer's story reminds us more of a tragedy. The destiny of all animals makes us weep. If at the beginning of the novel they are 'happy and excited' in the middle 'they work like slaves but still happy', at the end 'they are shaken and miserable'. After Napoleon's dictatorship has showed it's disregard for the facts and it's merciless brutality, after the animals witnessed the forced confessions and the execution, they all go to the grassy knoll where the windmill is being built Clover thinks back on Major's speech before he died, and thinks how far they had gone from what he would have intended: 'as Clover looked down the hillside her eyes filled with tears. If she could have spoken her thoughts, it would have been to say that this was not what they had aimed at when they had set themselves years ago to work for the overthrow of the human race. This scenes of terror and slaughter where not what they had looked forward to on that night when old Major first stirred them to rebellion. If she herself had had any picture of the future, it had been of a society of animals set free from hunger and whip, all equal, each working according to his capacity, the strong protecting the week. Instead - she did not know why - they had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes'.
From the sketch of the political background to Animal Farm it will be quite clear that the main purpose of that episode is to expose the lie which Stalinist Russia had become. It was supposed to be a Socialist Union of States, but it had become the dictatorship. The Soviet Union in fact damaged the cause of the true socialism. In a preface Orwell wrote to Animal Farm he says that 'for the past ten years I have been convinced that the destruction of Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of socialist movement'. Animal Farm attempts, through a simplification of Soviet history, to clarify in the minds of readers what Orwell felt Russia had become. The clarification is to get people to face the facts of injustice, of brutality, and hopefully to get them to think out for themselves some way in which a true and 'democratic socialism' will be brought about. In that episode Orwell shows his own attitude to what is happening on his fairy farm. And he looks at it more as at the tragedy than a comedy, but still he returns to his genre of satire and writes: 'there was no thought of rebellion or disobedience in her mind. She knew that even as things were they were far better than they had been in the days of Jones, and that before all else it was needful to prevent the return of the human beings'.
Finally, the moderateness of Orwell's satire is reinforced by a treatment of time that encourages the reader's sympathetic understanding of the whole revolutionary experiment from it's spontaneous and joyous beginnings to it's ambiguous condition on the final page. A basic strategy of scathing social satire is to dehistoricize the society of the specific socio-political phenomena being exposed to ridicule and condemnation.
In Animal Farm the past that jolts the creatures from the timeless present of the animal condition into manic state of historical consciousness is a quick, magically transformative moment.

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