An Analysis Of Animal Farm Under The Rhetoric Of Aristotle

George Orwell (1903-1950) was the most politically influential writer in the20thcentury.He had keen insight and his writing style was very sharp. Since1936, the works he hadwritten were directly or indirectly against totalitarianism. Among them, Animal Farm firstpublished in England in1945is the most influential, rated as the most famous politicallyallegorical novel in the world. Most attractively, Orwell put extraordinary emphasis onexposing how the totalitarianism used language power to fool and manipulate people.Therefore, this thesis intends to analyze the novel under Rhetoric.The paper analyzes how the animal politicians made use of Rhetoric from three aspectsunder Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Chapter One analyzes how they stirred up the animal masses bymeans of the three persuasive appeals, such as ethos, pathos, and logos. Chapter Twoillustrates how they set the three civic rhetoric means including judicial, deliberative, andepideictic rhetoric, corroding to different people, so as to defend their guilt. Chapter Threeshows how they carried on the five canons to propagandize and manipulate animals.The concluding part of the thesis makes it crystal clear that animal politicianpropagandized by successfully utilizing Rhetoric step by step, and finally achieved theirtotalitarian goals by depriving the public’s voice. In Why I Write, Orwell wrote “…I am notgoing to produce a work of art. I write it because there is some lie that I want toexpose…”That is also the purpose of this thesis, to further analyze how George Orwellexposes the lies from the perspective of Rhetoric of Aristotle.