Foreowrd "The Habit of Point-for-Point Analogy"

[Dave Monroe]

   "In a way, this novel has been a victim of the
success of Animal Farm, which most people were content
to read as a straightforward allegory about the
melancholy fate of the Russian revolution.  From the
minute Big Brother's mustache makes its appearance in
the second paragraph of 1984, many readers, thinking
right away of Stalin, have tended to carry over the
habit of point-for-point analogy from the earlier
work.  Although Big Brother's face certainly is
Stalin's,just as the despised Party heretic Emmanuel
Goldstein's face is Trotsky's, the two do not quite
line up with their models as neatly as Napoleon and
Snowball did in Animal Farm.  This did not keep the
book from being marketed in the United States as a
sort of anticommunist tract.  It arrived in the thick
of the McCarthy era, when 'Communism' was damned
officially as a monolithic, worldwide menace, and
there was no point in even distinguishing between
Stalin and Trotsky, any more than for shepherds to be
instructing sheep in the nuances of wolf recognition."
(p. viii)

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