Week 4 and 5: The Truth Behind It All

Hello everyone! I have decided to combine these two weeks because I worked on similar things for both weeks. These past two weeks have been focused on more research on the books I’ve already completed, and the authors who wrote these banned books we know and love. This week I accomplished finally finishing my We essay, edited and finalized my Animal Farm essay, began writing my 1984 essay, and did an analysis for all of the sources I found that could be used for my research essay before actually doing the Animal Farm research essay, and I found a few 1984 sources. If you would like to see the sources, you can check them out right here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/10GOkyzfGw9ysEBCwY5jRpPD_q4-qZTB-OzMckmEAhMk/edit?usp=sharing

If you would like to check out my finalized We and Animal Farm essays check them out right here:

Animal Farm: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1drIFZ9W0_LA6Xyu_aGdNf-SeamI5al0HLOOAoiSJwis/edit

We: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xfr_T1mc-Bw5gHMcTp0bLmpeQyT_5FHcgMM4rXSDwwA/edit

As for the sources, I learned a lot about Orwell’s life, political views, and actual love for animals. For example, Orwell actually owned some animals himself. Muriel the goat, a minor character on the farm, actually is based on his goat named Muriel. He said during an interview, simply, “I like animals.” I liked seeing this emotional, animal-lover side of Orwell, and that definitely changed my perspective of him as an author. I related to his love for animals and sympathy for the creatures, and I connected with the novel a lot more after knowing this about his personality. Another important aspect of Orwell’s outlook was his political orientation. I learned that Orwell was a democratic Socialist, but had no intention of pushing his views on others or “recruiting others” to join his political orientation. In some of the Animal Farm sources, the authors of the sources analyzed his novel as more a projection of his pessimism. V.C. Letemendia sees Animal Farm as less of political commentary but more of a pessimistic approach of the future. In other words, to Letemendia, Animal Farm is Orwell’s fear and he conveys this through the use of animal abuse. Many sources in my selection have taken this approach to analyzing his work, mainly because, I hypothesize, so many articles have covered the political aspect of the novel. I find this extremely interesting, and I will definitely write about it in the Animal Farm research essay.

I also drafted the structure of my essay (see beginning questions in the sources document) based on the questions I hope to answer through my source hunt. Most of these questions are based on the concept of misinterpretation and how that contributes to book banning. There already are multiple occasions where Animal Farm was misinterpreted by the public, but what about governments? I hope to also answer the question of how hard it was for some authors to get published. I predict that Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, for example, was definitely a challenge to publish due to its… well… questionable content. Same with The Catcher in the Rye. 

The 1984 essay I hope to complete by tomorrow, and with that, I’ve got only one more read to go, Dr. Zhivago. I unfortunately will not have time to read In the First Circle, but I will definitely mention Solzhenitsyn, as all of his works were banned in Russia. This actually works out quite well, considering with In the First Circle I would have an odd number of books. With the exile of this novel, I’ll have a balance of US banned, USSR banned and both– 2 of each. 

After that, all the reader responses will be complete, and all the research essays will have their sources in two weeks– that is my goal. These past two weeks have been completely successful in the research aspect, and 5/6 of the reader responses will be complete! Thank you for reading, and my apologies for waiting this long to make a blog, but I’ve done some exciting research over these two weeks, so I decided to combine them. I will see you next Friday with some sources about Nabokov, Salinger, and a first draft of the Animal Farm research essay. Bye-bye banned bookites!