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George Orwell's Animal Farm is a political fable novel and the direct targets of attack are Soviet society founded in 1917 after the Bolshevik revolution and it leaders, especially Stalin and his leadership of the government. This novel, one of his masterpieces, was published in England in 1945. George Orwell uses animals as the main characters in the novel, but actually he expresses his view of totalitarianism by using animals to represent the major characters in the period of Russian Revolution. He once explained: “I write a book because there is a lie to be exposed and a fact to be paid attention to everyone,… some scenes are adopted from the real history of the Russian revolution, but they have a contraction processing with a perversion of chronological order…”(Liu and Xu 33). The story describes the brewing, rising and final transformation of an “animal” revolution. Animals in a farm(Manor Farm) couldn’t bear the oppression of master (Mr. Jones), so they rebel and drive away the master under the guidance of pigs. They realize their ambition of “self-determination” and change farm’s name into “animal Farm” with creed of “all animals are equal”. Later, two leading pigs conflict with each other for power and the winner announces the other one is a traitor. Since then, the pig who is in the leadership has more and more power and becomes the new privileged class; once animals have slightly dissatisfied, they will incur a bloody cleaning. The creed of the farm is revised to “some animals are more equal than other animals”. Animals return to the former condition. The profound meaning of the story is that it reveals the tragedy of the animal revolution. After the successful revolution, animals bring in the personal dictatorship in the end due to lack of deep understanding of democracy and legal system and incomplete system of power restriction. At last, animals’ living condition comes back to the previous one or even worse.
Many readers like Orwell’s language in political novels very much and many writers have also followed his writing style, which has prompted more produce of similar political satiric novels. “Orwell is honored as the spokesperson and mediators in that generation and his language style and moral views deeply influence many west novelist and playwrights in the 1950s and 1960s”(Davison 147). Recent years, many domestic scholars have made a series of researches from perspectives of anti-totalitarianism, anti-utopia, symbolism and so on, but they seldom have a general study of writing style in Animal Farm. This political fable novel adopts a large number of rhetorical devices. This thesis will mainly focus on the studies of three rhetorical devices in the novel and how they are used to reveal the absurdity of reality.
Chapter One The Application of Symbolism in Animal Farm
1.1 The Definition of Symbolism
Symbol, a kind of literature techniques, is often used in short stories. Symbolism is using external characteristics of a specific thing to embody the artists’ some profound thoughts, or some special things. “It’s also a kind of moral, hidden in lines, allowing readers to understand and giving them hints to make them think about. Symbols and the things that they symbolize always have some connections. In a specific context, readers are easy to find out the correlation and can smoothly understand the author's real intention”(Zhang 223). Writes and poets often use symbolism to create another world which can’t be stated or described directly in order to express their disappointment to reality or alert people. This whole novel is an extending form of metaphor. The characters, objects and events in the novel all have their special symbols. George Orwell uses symbolism to imply his attitudes towards Russian Revolution or totalitarianism or something that he doesn’t agree with.