Benjamin (Animal Farm) simply flees Napoleon's unendurable regime with some of the other animals. (Neither event occurs in the book.) Benjamin (Animal Farm) Benjamin is a donkey in George Orwell's novel "Animal Farm". He is also the oldest of all the animals (he is alive in the last scene of the novel). He is less straightforward than most characters in the novel, and a number of interpretations have been put forward to which social class he represents as regards to the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union. ("Animal Farm" is an allegory for the evolution of Communism in Russia, with each animal representing
Animal Farm to Yvonne Davet, Orwell described "Animal Farm" as a satirical tale against Stalin (""""), and in his essay "Why I Write" (1946), wrote that "Animal Farm" was the first book in which he tried, with full consciousness of what he was doing, "to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole". The original title was "Animal Farm: A Fairy Story," but U.S. publishers dropped the subtitle when it was published in 1946, and only one of the translations during Orwell's lifetime kept it. Other titular variations include subtitles like "A Satire" and "A Contemporary Satire". Orwell suggested the title