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 it; however, they did not, and "lectured Orwell on what they perceived to be errors in "Animal Farm"." In his "London Letter" on 17 April 1944 for "Partisan Review", Orwell wrote that it was "now next door to impossible to get anything overtly anti-Russian printed. Anti-Russian books do appear, but mostly from Catholic publishing firms and always from a religious or frankly reactionary angle." The publisher Jonathan Cape, who had initially accepted "Animal Farm", subsequently rejected the book after an official at the British Ministry of Information warned him off—although the civil servant who it is assumed gave the order