Summary of Animal Farm by George Orwell

Animal Farm by George Orwell in two minutes.

The story begins on a quiet night at Manor Farm.

In the barn, an old pig named Major tells the animals a

simple

truth: They do all the work, and humans keep all the

reward.

Major soon dies, but his dream lives on.

One day, the animals rise up and drive the owner away.

They called it Animal Farm, and on the barn wall, they painted

seven commandments. The most important one: All

animals are equal.

For a while, it held, but power has a way of finding the

ambitious.

Two pigs rose above the rest: Snowball, full of plans,

and Napoleon, who said little and watched everything.

And when their visions collide, Napoleon doesn't argue.

He whistles. And out of the shadows come dogs.

Dogs he had raised in secret, trained for exactly this

moment.

Snowball ran. He never came back.

Now Napoleon rules alone, and slowly, the farm

begins to change. The milk disappears.

The apples disappear. The pigs move into the farmhouse.

They sleep in beds. And when anyone dared to remember it

differently,

Squealer, smooth-tongued and always smiling, tells them,

"It is for the greater good."

Then, in the dead of night, the words on the barn wall would shift,

just slightly, just enough.

Through it all, one animal never stops believing.

Boxer, the cart horse, meets every hardship with the same

quiet vow: "I will work harder."

He works rigorously until his legs give out beneath him.

And when a van finally comes for him, they tell the others it was going to a

hospital. It wasn't. The pigs sell him to a

slaughterhouse and buy whiskey with the money.

The pigs learn to walk on two legs. They start wearing human

clothes. They carry whips now. And the seven rules

have withered to one:

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than

others.

One evening, the animals stand in the dark outside the

farmhouse window.

Through the glass, pigs and men, side by side,

glasses raised, voices rising in laughter.

The animals look for the line that used to divide them.

It wasn't there anymore.

George Orwell wrote Animal Farm primarily to expose and condemn

the brutal corruption of socialist ideals by Joseph Stalin and

the Soviet regime.

Freedom is rarely stolen all at once.

It slips away one small lie at a time until the promise is

forgotten and those in charge have become the very thing they

fought against.