| In these two books the authours show how that spending your life in labour although may put any other troubles out of the way, if they just try and ignore them it will not be any help to your life as with another solution they may have been able to get round their problems and lived a much better life spent in other ways. They both do this in a similar way but noticeably differently. In George Orwells Animal Farm Boxer is a very good example of this as his attitude is very clear and made the focul point of his character. His attitude was to work and work in sight of trying to improve things in his life and his optimism although clearly wrong and un-rewarding in the long term in the eyes of the reader was the reasoning behind his motto which was "Must try harder". Orwell shows this was a pointless motto to have and he does this by making the end of boxers life so ironic because he has worked hard all his life to make things better and as soon as he cant work then he is killed. This is tied into the story because the pigs think he is using their resources and not giving anything back which is also very hipocrytical because they have never done any workand they use everyone elses resources. So all his hard work did not imporove his life, only other peoples. In this case the Pigs mainly. The value that Silas Marner valued his gold was much higher than it was financially worth because it was his way of escaping the way he had been accused of stealing and made up for the lack of company and love in his life and as he spent such a large majority of his time with only his gold it replaced the things that others may treasure more than wealth and became his one true love that he could rely on because he had been let down before by his closest friend. A key part of Animal Farm that strongly showed how their commitment to working all their lives so hard was the windmill, this was very clearly showing that although they thought that all their work would pay off when it was all finished and it would finally be the answer to all their problems. It was really the main aim of all their work throughout their time in charge of the farm. They concentrated all their work into it and Orwell showed clearly how oblivious they were to how it was taking so much hard work to build and that it was getting them nowhere when in the book the windmill is destroyed just as it was finished which clearly gets Orwells point over to the reader that it was all a waste of time and how they could have saved a great deal of their time if only they had chosen a different option. He then points out how they really are completely set on their views that if they keep working then it will solve all their problems. In Silas Marner though it has a twist that Animal Farm does not have included in it. Silas has his gold stolen from him and which like the windmill was his one thing that he was trying to work towards and really had completely taken over his life. This can be compared to Animal Farms Windmill as that was destroyed and so was all his working for that wealth of gold. Except the animals decided to keep trying and so might Silas if there hadn't been the intervention of the young child turning up at his house. This baby that turned up could be taken by him and unlike the other people he knew, she would not judge him or mislead or betray him at all, so he could completely trust her. This was very much like the role that his gold was playing before this event in the book.And it sort of freed Silas from only living to work for his gold. The animals from Animal Farm didn't have this so kepy trying and this never stopped for them untill Orwell concluded with his final conclusion on the value of a life spent in labour. Which was when the pigs were seen as being just as bad as their human owners before had been and the animals that did all the working came away with nothing which confirms Orwells negative view of a life spent in constant labour. In both books though they could have stopped what was happening if only they could have seen that working harder was not the right solution. In Animal Farm this was made clear by examples like Benjamin, when they could see what was going to happen but was so sure the right thing to do was to work even harder and everything would work out fine. And in Silas Marner, Silas could have got out of his situation by taking more notice of his religion and still attending church when things had started to go wrong after being accused and emigrating so he could have socialised and not needed to have found comfort in his work in the first place. I think that Elliot concludes his book with a much more positive message than Animal Farm which shows a very dim picture of what could easily happen. |