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I guess a lot of people have been busy lately -including me. Wow, so many good points have been made here. I like them all. I agree with @overcomer… I like the telling in the book. It really works for this story, and it makes for a relaxing, thought-provoking read. I also like how simple (and bold, as you said @Daeus) the characters are.
Ahhhhhh @Daeus I’ve been so busy THANK YOU though for tagging me.
Haven’t had time to actually read the book, but since I’ve already read it earlier this year, I’ll just say that I really like the character development of the animals.
(By the way, is it just me or does anyone else have the problem called “I’ve been on Microsoft Word pressing command/control s to save every one minute, so when I type something else I keep wanting to save it after every paragraph”? AGH I JUST DID IT AGAIN.)
@the-happy-bookaholic Yes!!! I do that!
INTJ - Inhumane. No-feelings. Terrible. Judgment and doom on everyone.
Hahaha Sarah, me too!
@sarah-h I think you’re onto something; Orwell picked the only usable POV for this story. At first I was thinking that he could tell it from the perspective of the pigs themselves, giving us a glimpse into the inner workings of totalitarianism, but then I realized that doing so would make the story much darker and more cynical and make it lose its unbiased fairy-tale feeling.
@the-happy-bookaholic @hope and @kateflournoy LOL, that’s why I use Google Drive. It might be slow, but it automatically saves your work for you. 😉
Yay! @hannah-krynicki , I was beginning to think I was the only one. 🙂 Automatic saving is super, isn’t it?
@overcomer I’m so used to auto-save that I get surprised when a webpage doesn’t save my work. 🙂
Yeah, @hannah-krynicki , we’re spoiled aren’t we? 😉
Does anyone else here think that “Animal Farm” would be a bit too disturbing for small children? If I had read it, or had it read to me, when very small, well … I can imagine nightmares about my animals chasing me … I can imagine myself overthinking every bit of their care and loading them with treats and backrubs. 😉
@overcomer hahaha! I’m sure they wouldn’t protest that… 😛
Well, I guess it would depend heavily on the child. When I was little I used to be scared of my own shadow, so I can imagine it being pretty terrifying for me, but I’ve always been the sensitive/dramatic/over-imaginative one in my family. I don’t think any of my other siblings would have found it harrowing at all.
One thing Orwell used to minimize the terror of it, I think, was his quick, slightly run-together style that casts everything in a somewhat bleak light of matter-of-fact humor.
That style, in fact, is one of the things that makes Animal Farm work so well. If we had a lot of details and complexities and descriptions— if the story took place in a realistic world with more than one-dimensional characters— a lot of the message would be muddled. That’s something about allegories, I think. In allegories like this, each character is used to embody a single idea/concept. The sheep, for instance, are the gullible, easily led people in the world who will believe anything, say anything, do anything. Boxer represents the strong, honest, but underinformed/not-so-bright people who are so honest and innocent they cannot imagine guile in others, and so fall easy prey to those who would use them for their own ends.
If Boxer or the sheep were more complex or less one-dimensional, we would have an unnecessarily cluttered themescape and a lot of the message would be swallowed in meaningless details.
So I guess it goes to show that oftentimes, less really is more.
*cringe* I could really stand to remember that myself. 😛Not so much harrowing perhaps, but kinda confusing. You’re right though, the style of writing helps.
Good point about Animal Farm, @kate-flournoy ! 🙂
Sometimes, I guess less is more, but sometimes it really is the other way round. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings was hardly a simple series, being full of details, and dimension. However, his Santa Claus letters were simple and sweet. (If you forget about the slightly complex illustrations he drew for them) So I guess it really depends on what you are writing, or more specifically, what you are trying to portray through your writing.
When someone is trying to portray or teach something difficult, they usually simplify it or make it easy to understand, and vice versa.
I know sometimes when I read a story, especially a fairly new one, I find myself wishing for more. Some modern writing is so bare. I don’t just want to be entertained, I want to be enchanted by what I read. I want to go on an adventure! 🙂
Then again, I was tempted to make the novel I’m writing very complex, but I discovered (let’s hope I’m right!) that it would really work much better with the atmosphere of the tale if I went for something more in the middle ground. So I’ll have to wait and see how that turns out …
@overcomer and @kate-flournoy I think it depends on the kid. My siblings are able to sit through anything from the Little House books to LotR, but I also know kids who, like Kate was, get scared of the mildest things. I think that if a child could endure the scarier things in the story, Animal Farm would make an excellent read-aloud even for little ones, as it teaches them some useful lessons in a simple and straightforward way. Especially as they receive questionable messages in school or on television, it’s helpful for kids to learn to think critically about the ideas the world throws at them.
I would wait until the child was able to understand the idea of an allegory, that the animals are representing people and that real animals don’t act that way. There is quite a bit more violence toward the end of the book, and the ending is very bleak. (I hope that wasn’t a spoiler.) I’m sure most children could technically handle it, but I don’t know if they would like it because of the way the last half of the book is.
I haven’t read the whole book yet, @sarah-h , but that’s kinda what I was thinking. In my experience, the scariest, most troubling things to a child are the things they can’t understand, not so much the things we would label “scary.”
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