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 pursuing the possibility that the political cartoonist David Low might illustrate "Animal Farm". Low had written a letter saying that he had had "a good time with "ANIMAL FARM"—an excellent bit of satire—it would illustrate perfectly." Nothing came of this, and a trial issue produced by Secker & Warburg in 1956 illustrated by John Driver was abandoned, but the Folio Society published an edition in 1984 illustrated by Quentin Blake and an edition illustrated by the cartoonist Ralph Steadman was published by Secker & Warburg in 1995 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the first edition of "Animal Farm". Orwell