Essay Sample: Absolute Power in George Orwell's Animal Farm

There is a path that individuals follow throughout their lives that divides and multiplies, leaving them with not only opportunities, choices, and decisions, but obstacles and mazes. These paths aren’t always wondrous and liberating, but controlling and tyrannical. When exploring the notion of secret destinations, there is powerful importance to understanding Orwell's methodical reasoning behind the quotes and character arcs within Animal Farm. The novella demonstrates Orwell's active portrayal of the characters' lives being altered by hidden physical and inner journeys. He encapsulates the animals going through vicious cycles of oppression and exploitation in which they submit to passive conformity as a result of this cyclic narrative.

"For the others, their life, so far as they knew, was as it had always been. They were generally hungry, they slept on straw, they drank from the pool, they laboured in the fields...When Jones's expulsion was still recent, things had been better or worse than now. They could not remember. There was nothing with which they could compare their present lives."This quotation demonstrates how the concept of equality, upon which Animalism was founded, gets perverted into a self-destructive commitment to endless toil. Deriving from this statement, the animals cannot compare whether their lives were better or worse than they are now, which illustrates the sublimation of self under the concept of the greater good. The animals dreamt and anticipated a life of freedom, only to be apprehended by their own comrades' deceptive, cruel ways; being forcefully tyrannised into an ongoing cycle of brutality. This cyclic narrative greatly impacts the collectives' journeys physically and intellectually. Towards the end of Orwell's novella, the pigs had effectively transitioned to a self-serving government whose "progress" on the farm was centred around the exploitation of inferior and significantly less intelligent animals, as well as manipulation tactics aimed at maintaining their subservience through menial labour, lack of rights, and suppression of their voices. Through their leadership positions, the pigs slowly stripped the other animals of their liberties. Orwell's intention here is clear. Utilising his judicious emphasis on the psychological abuse and maltreatment the animals endure, he aims to reinforce the idea that the animals are victims of a vicious cycle of oppression. Thus, through the animals' allowing themselves to be overpowered by Jones and then the pigs, it epitomises the premise that regardless of who holds power, they will be oblivious to the manipulation and suffering they inevitably endure, leading them to their secret destination of inescapable oppression.