Oh well, Orwell
A bit of word play that seems to go very well with the themes of ‘Animal Farm’… If you need to look at any creature that grasps the idea of communism, ants should be on the top of your list.
You have to wonder though, how they manage to keep it all together, or perhaps they too have revolutions and counter revolutions.
My favourite ant, incidentally, is the Argentine ant, Iridomyrmex humilis. They’ve been known to topple houses with their nests and considering that, individually, they’re about an eighth of an inch long, that’s pretty impressive.
You might have noticed some down-time recently. This is due to the Transplant comics site that hosts my comic… we’re not sure exactly what has caused it, though it seems to have stopped. My money is on the ants.
Technorati Tags: ants, communism, orwell, books
Similar to bees and they definately have revolitions.
I completely forgot about bees, though I imagine them to be the pacifists of the insect world… except for killer bees, they’re a bit angsty.
oh my. animal farm. we spent like entire term reading it in english, and then we watched part of the film. it was the most horrible book i’d read, up until the point i read “the picture of Dorian Gray”. animal farm is worse thn frankensteins monster.
Bees rock. When the queen dies, they have a massive orgy in the hope to produce more queens or what ever it is that they need to keep going.
Animal farm was a great book, I should read it again.
But why ants are cooler then bees
Ants in Science
Indeed, it is a bit of a grimfest.
I too read it at school, but I must admit to not getting it at the time – I think my knowledge of the world and of politics in general was still in its infancy.
I re-read it last week and it made me feel a little sick.
The film however, has a different ending, a slightly more upbeat one at that, but only marginally so.
Conversely, I also read Clockwork Orange last week, where the film misses out the final, redemptive chapter (I think the original US version of the book also had this ommission).
I don’t care for that last chapter of A Clockwork Orange. I think the story is best ended at Alex resolving to continue being a total dick. I don’t agree with Burgess’s assertion that the central character in a story has to change, I find this to be ironically a rather traditionalistic view about a story that was written in a concocted dialect.
I think Burgess had to write the ending that way for his own personal redemption… considering the slightly autobiograpical content… rather than that of Alex.
However, In the UK at the moment we’re starting to go after the youth agian, demonising them for drinking and fighting and being less intelligent than the older generation, and what I think that last chapter highlighs well is the fact that every teenager is wayward to some degree and that we all grow out of it to some extent, that it is part of growing up, and that the older generation are no different. I remember the football hooliganism, then the rave culture… it’s nothing new.
I think ‘A Clockwork Orange’ allows us all to be redeemed and that is the point of the final chapter. The one piece of advice my dad has always given me is:
You look back at your actions when you were a teenager and think ‘I was an idiot’
Then you look back on your twenties and think ‘I was still an idiot’
Therefore you are always being an idiot in some way, it is just whether you can realise that and try a bit harder not to be an idiot.
I think it definitely works on a conceptual level but I feel it fails the book on a dramatic level. The natural dramatic ending is the second to last chapter, it just pops: THE END! But then it continues and the last chapter finishes in a very soft way, sort of in the way that every end is the beginning of another story, but this ending is the beginning of a fairly dull story you don’t really want to read. I feel the theme of redemption is a bit out of place there just thrown in at the end of a story about an irredeemable psychopath.
Still, the redemption ending does give me a bit of a case of the warm-fuzzies.
I understand what you are saying there, Joe and i agree that it can be disappointing when a book ends in a way that works but slightly betrays the characters. ‘Brideshead Revisited’ is such a beautiful book and has a terrible ending, although many think it is a great ending, but what do they know?
I’ve never read the clockwork orange. maybe the idea that some invented an alternate potato clock scares me? i don’t really know. but, as i told my friend, it’ll take less therapy to solve anything than to realise captain jack sparrow is a fictional character. she won’t believe me.
(see, this is what happens when i attempt HUMOUR! it’s like that woman who got her ukalale out and said “this is my guitar, which i foolishly put on a hot wash”. see, there i go again. will nobody save these poor people?!)
Dorian Gray (Grey?) was an amazing story!