Old Major
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Old Major is the first major character described by Orwell in Animal Farm. This "purebred" of pigs is the kind, grandfatherly philosopher of change – an obvious metaphor for Karl Marx, though some elements of Old Major are directly from Vladimir Lenin. Old Major proposes a solution to the animals' desperate plight under the Jones "administration" (the Joneses represent the tsar and autocracy) when he inspires a rebellion of sorts among the animals. Of course the actual time of the revolt is unsaid. It could be the next day or several generations down the road. But Old Major's philosophy is only an ideal.
After his death (three days after the barn-yard speech), the socialism he professes is drastically altered when Napoleon and the other pigs begin to dominate. It's interesting that Orwell does not mention Napoleon or Snowball at any time during the great speech of Old Major. This shows how distant and out-of-touch they really were; the ideals Old Major proclaimed seemed to not even have been considered when they were establishing their new government after the successful revolt. It almost seemed as though the pigs fed off Old Major's inspiration and then used it to benefit themselves (an interesting twist of capitalism) instead of following through on Old Major's honest proposal. This could be an attempted dig at Stalin, whom many consider to be someone who totally ignored Marx's political and social theory.
Using Old Major's seeming naïveté, Orwell shows that although Marx was right about a lot of things, he underestimated the force of corruption and desire for power. Unfortunately when Napoleon and Snowball take over, Old Major becomes more and more a distant fragment of the past in the minds of the farm animals. Old Major resurfaces late in the novel, when his skull is dug up and mounted outside the barn (based on the establishment of Lenin's Mausoleum) as one of Napoleon's last-ditch efforts to improve morale.
[edit] Old Major in the allegory
With Animal Farm being parallel to the formation of the Soviet Union, Old Major was based on both Lenin and Marx. The animals hold him in high esteem, and dig up his skull and walk past it and salute it every day, much as Lenin's body was preserved and is kept on display in Moscow. Marx, author of the Communist Manifesto, died before the first communist revolution, whereas Old Major, founder of Animalism, dies before the Animal Farm revolution.
| Animal Farm | |
|---|---|
| By George Orwell | |
| Main Characters | Old Major | Napoleon | Snowball | Squealer |
| Secondary Characters |
Frederick | Pilkington | Jones | Boxer |
| Battles | Battle of the Cowshed | Battle of the Windmill |
| Songs | Beasts of England | Comrade Napoleon |
| Miscellaneous | Animalism | Seven Commandments |
