Benjamin (Animal Farm) 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 a different social class, e.g. Boxer represents the working class.) Benjamin also represents the old people of
Squealer (Animal Farm) but becomes ever more cynical when Squealer again convinces the denizens of the Farm that Boxer was only taken to a hospital. In the end, this works out to Squealer's advantage. Terror and silver-tongued oration fool nearly everyone, and the sole animal who sees through these fronts, Benjamin, is simply too cynical to do anything. This reflected Orwell's view that events in Russia following the Revolution of 1917 had followed an unwelcome path, and that the egalitarian socialism he believed in had there become a brutal dictatorship built around a cult of personality and enforced by terror and lies. Orwell