Animal Farm, Childhood's End, and Harrison Bergeron

2226 Words9 Pages
Utopia is an ideal perfect state of government and civilization. The premise: All men are created equal and altruistic. Every problem has a solution and was solve through rational logic, free from arbitrary judgment. Science and fairness is valued and religion is deprived from real power. In a Utopia, every basic necessity has been taken care of for because everyone is equal and people are free to achieve their own ends. Or do they? The problem with this form of this idealistic government is that it is impossible to achieve it purely. In the stories, “Animal Farm”, a moral fable and satire that forebodes dystopia while “Childhood’s End,” a sci-fi novel illustrates the difficulty of preserving a Utopia and its inevitable downfall. In Animal Farm, the story begins with Old Major, the elder and diplomatic pig gathering the animals of the farm to listen to his speech about his ideals and vision for a perfect society where animals are free from man’s tyrant. The animal’s struggle at this time is to endure man’s abusive reign and his oppression. Old Major seems to have claimed a false brotherhood with the other animals in order to garner their support for his vision (deception is a one of the motifs in both works) but it is effective because after he taught them the national anthem, “Beasts of England” and died, the animals are united under the leadership of Napoleon and Snowball, who are also pigs. Immediately the irony is that people with superior intelligence are left to run and control the affairs of lower, unsophisticated (naïve), working classes and asserts their power over their subjects. In Childhood’s End, the Overlords appear in their spaceships and hover above earth when the Soviet Union and the United States have been in a race to create the first spaceship with a nuclear drive. Instead of an “alien invasion” they didn’t blow up earth and take over the
Open Document