summary of animal farm essay

A Summary and Analysis of George Orwell’s Animal Farm

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Animal Farm is, after Nineteen Eighty-Four , George Orwell’s most famous book. Published in 1945, the novella (at under 100 pages, it’s too short to be called a full-blown ‘novel’) tells the story of how a group of animals on a farm overthrow the farmer who puts them to work, and set up an equal society where all animals work and share the fruits of their labours.

However, as time goes on, it becomes clear that the society the animals have constructed is not equal at all. It’s well-known that the novella is an allegory for Communist Russia under Josef Stalin, who was leader of the Soviet Union when Orwell wrote the book. Before we dig deeper into the context and meaning of Animal Farm with some words of analysis, it might be worth refreshing our memories with a brief summary of the novella’s plot.

Animal Farm: plot summary

The novella opens with an old pig, named Major, addressing his fellow animals on Manor Farm. Major criticises Mr Jones, the farmer who owns Manor Farm, because he controls the animals, takes their produce (the hens’ eggs, the cows’ milk), but gives them little in return. Major tells the other animals that man, who walks on two feet unlike the animals who walk on four, is their enemy.

They sing a rousing song in favour of animals, ‘Beasts of England’. Old Major dies a few days later, but the other animals have been inspired by his message.

Two pigs in particular, Snowball and Napoleon, rouse the other animals to take action against Mr Jones and seize the farm for themselves. They draw up seven commandments which all animals should abide by: among other things, these commandments forbid an animal to kill another animal, and include the mantra ‘four legs good, two legs bad’, because animals (who walk on four legs) are their friends while their two-legged human overlords are evil. (We have analysed this famous slogan here .)

The animals lead a rebellion against Mr Jones, whom they drive from the farm. They rename Manor Farm ‘Animal Farm’, and set about running things themselves, along the lines laid out in their seven commandments, where every animal is equal. But before long, it becomes clear that the pigs – especially Napoleon and Snowball – consider themselves special, requiring special treatment, as the leaders of the animals.

Nevertheless, when Mr Jones and some of the other farmers lead a raid to try to reclaim the farm, the animals work together to defend the farm and see off the men. A young farmhand is knocked unconscious, and initially feared dead.

Things begin to fall apart: Napoleon’s windmill, which he has instructed the animals to build, is vandalised and he accuses Snowball of sabotaging it. Snowball is banished from the farm. During winter, many of the animals are on the brink of starvation.

Napoleon engineers it so that when Mr Whymper, a man from a neighbouring farm with whom the pigs have started to trade (so the animals can acquire the materials they need to build the windmill), visits the farm, he overhears the animals giving a positive account of life on Animal Farm.

Without consulting the hens first, Napoleon organises a deal with Mr Whymper which involves giving him many of the hens’ eggs. They rebel against him, but he starves them into submission, although not before nine hens have died. Napoleon then announces that Snowball has been visiting the farm at night and destroying things.

Napoleon also claims that Snowball has been in league with Mr Jones all the time, and that even at the Battle of the Cowshed (as the animals are now referring to the farmers’ unsuccessful raid on the farm) Snowball was trying to sabotage the fight so that Jones won.

The animals are sceptical about this, because they all saw Snowball bravely fighting alongside them. Napoleon declares he has discovered ‘secret documents’ which prove Snowball was in league with their enemy.

Life on Animal Farm becomes harder for the animals, and Boxer, while labouring hard to complete the windmill, falls and injures his lung. The pigs arrange for him to be taken away and treated, but when the van arrives and takes him away, they realise too late that the van belongs to a man who slaughters horses, and that Napoleon has arranged for Boxer to be taken away to the knacker’s yard and killed.

Squealer lies to the animals, though, and when he announces Boxer’s death two days later, he pretends that the van had been bought by a veterinary surgeon who hadn’t yet painted over the old sign on the side of the van. The pigs take to wearing green ribbons and order in another crate of whisky for them to drink; they don’t share this with the other animals.

A few years pass, and some of the animals die, Napoleon and Squealer get fatter, and none of the animals is allowed to retire, as previously promised. The farm gets bigger and richer, but the luxuries the animals had been promised never materialised: they are told that the real pleasure is derived from hard work and frugal living.

Then, one day, the animals see Squealer up on his hind legs, walking on two legs like a human instead of on four like an animal.

The other pigs follow; and Clover and Benjamin discover that the seven commandments written on the barn wall have been rubbed off, to be replace by one single commandment: ‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.’ The pigs start installing radio and a telephone in the farmhouse, and subscribe to newspapers.

Finally, the pigs invite humans into the farm to drink with them, and announce a new partnership between the pigs and humans. Napoleon announces to his human guests that the name of the farm is reverting from Animal Farm to the original name, Manor Farm.

The other animals from the farm, observing this through the window, can no longer tell which are the pigs and which are the men, because Napoleon and the other pigs are behaving so much like men now.

Things have gone full circle: the pigs are no different from Mr Jones (indeed, are worse).

Animal Farm: analysis

First, a very brief history lesson, by way of context for Animal Farm . In 1917, the Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, was overthrown by Communist revolutionaries.

These revolutionaries replaced the aristocratic rule which had been a feature of Russian society for centuries with a new political system: Communism, whereby everyone was equal. Everyone works, but everyone benefits equally from the results of that work. Josef Stalin became leader of Communist Russia, or the Soviet Union, in the early 1920s.

However, it soon became apparent that Stalin’s Communist regime wasn’t working: huge swathes of the population were working hard, but didn’t have enough food to survive. They were starving to death.

But Stalin and his politicians, who themselves were well-off, did nothing to combat this problem, and indeed actively contributed to it. But they told the people that things were much better since the Russian Revolution and the overthrow of the Tsar, than things had been before, under Nicholas II. The parallels with Orwell’s Animal Farm are crystal-clear.

Animal Farm is an allegory for the Russian Revolution and the formation of a Communist regime in Russia (as the Soviet Union). We offer a fuller definition of allegory in a separate post, but the key thing is that, although it was subtitled A Fairy Story , Orwell’s novella is far from being a straightforward tale for children. It’s also political allegory, and even satire.

The cleverness of Orwell’s approach is that he manages to infuse his story with this political meaning while also telling an engaging tale about greed, corruption, and ‘society’ in a more general sense.

One of the commonest techniques used in both Stalinist Russia and in Animal Farm is what’s known as ‘gaslighting’ (meaning to manipulate someone by psychological means so they begin to doubt their own sanity; the term is derived from the film adaptation of Gaslight , a play by Patrick Hamilton).

For instance, when Napoleon and the other pigs take to eating their meals and sleeping in the beds in the house at Animal Farm, Clover is convinced this goes against one of the seven commandments the animals drew up at the beginning of their revolution.

But one of the pigs has altered the commandment (‘No animal shall sleep in a bed’), adding the words ‘ with sheets ’ to the end of it. Napoleon and the other pigs have rewritten history, but they then convince Clover that she is the one who is mistaken, and that she’s misremembered what the wording of the commandment was.

Another example of this technique – which is a prominent feature of many totalitarian regimes, namely keep the masses ignorant as they’re easier to manipulate that way – is when Napoleon claims that Snowball has been in league with Mr Jones all along. When the animals question this, based on all of the evidence to the contrary, Napoleon and Squealer declare they have ‘secret documents’ which prove it.

But the other animals can’t read them, so they have to take his word for it. Squealer’s lie about the van that comes to take Boxer away (he claims it’s going to the vet, but it’s clear that Boxer is really being taken away to be slaughtered) is another such example.

Communist propaganda

Much as Stalin did in Communist Russia, Napoleon actively rewrites history , and manages to convince the animals that certain things never happened or that they are mistaken about something. This is a feature that has become more and more prominent in political society, even in non-totalitarian ones: witness our modern era of ‘fake news’ and media spin where it becomes difficult to ascertain what is true any more.

The pigs also convince the other animals that they deserve to eat the apples themselves because they work so hard to keep things running, and that they will have an extra hour in bed in the mornings. In other words, they begin to become the very thing they sought to overthrow: they become like man.

They also undo the mantra that ‘all animals are equal’, since the pigs clearly think they’re not like the other animals and deserve special treatment. Whenever the other animals question them, one question always succeeds in putting an end to further questioning: do they want to see Jones back running the farm? As the obvious answer is ‘no’, the pigs continue to get away with doing what they want.

Squealer is Napoleon’s propagandist, ensuring that the decisions Napoleon makes are ‘spun’ so that the other animals will accept them and carry on working hard.

And we can draw a pretty clear line between many of the major characters in Animal Farm and key figures of the Russian Revolution and Stalinist Russia. Napoleon, the leader of the animals, is Joseph Stalin; Old Major , whose speech rouses the animals to revolution, partly represents Vladimir Lenin, who spearheaded the Russian Revolution of 1917 (although he is also a representative of Karl Marx , whose ideas inspired the Revolution); Snowball, who falls out with Napoleon and is banished from the farm, represents Leon Trotsky, who was involved in the Revolution but later went to live in exile in Mexico.

Squealer, meanwhile, is based on Molotov (after whom the Molotov cocktail was named); Molotov was Stalin’s protégé, much as Squealer is encouraged by Napoleon to serve as Napoleon’s right-hand (or right-hoof?) man (pig).

Publication

Animal Farm very nearly didn’t make it into print at all. First, not long after Orwell completed the first draft in February 1944, his flat on Mortimer Crescent in London was bombed in June, and he feared the typescript had been destroyed. Orwell later found it in the rubble.

Then, Orwell had difficulty finding a publisher. T. S. Eliot, at Faber and Faber, rejected it because he feared that it was the wrong sort of political message for the time.

The novella was eventually published the following year, in 1945, and its relevance – as political satire, as animal fable, and as one of Orwell’s two great works of fiction – shows no signs of abating.

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Animal Farm

George orwell.

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Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on George Orwell's Animal Farm . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Animal Farm: Introduction

Animal farm: plot summary, animal farm: detailed summary & analysis, animal farm: themes, animal farm: quotes, animal farm: characters, animal farm: symbols, animal farm: literary devices, animal farm: theme wheel, brief biography of george orwell.

Historical Context of Animal Farm

Other books related to animal farm.

• Full Title: Animal Farm
• When Written: 1944-45
• Where Written: England
• When Published: 1945
• Literary Period: Modernism
• Genre: Allegorical Novel
• Setting: A farm somewhere in England in the first half of the 20th century
• Climax: The pigs appear standing upright and the sheep bleat, “Four legs good, two legs better!”
• Antagonist: Napoleon specifically, but the pigs and the dogs as groups are all antagonists.
• Point of View: Third Person

Extra Credit for Animal Farm

Tough Crowd. Though Animal Farm eventually made Orwell famous, three publishers in England and several American publishing houses rejected the novel at first. One of the English editors to reject the novel was the famous poet T.S. Eliot, who was an editor at the Faber & Faber publishing house. One American editor, meanwhile, told Orwell that it was “impossible to sell animal stories in the U.S.A.”

Red Scare. Orwell didn’t just write literature that condemned the Communist state of the USSR. He did everything he could, from writing editorials to compiling lists of men he knew were Soviet spies, to combat the willful blindness of many intellectuals in the West to USSR atrocities.

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Animal Farm

Background of the novella.

George Orwell wrote this novel to warn the people against the impacts and perils of Stalinism and totalitarian government.  This novel got published at the end of World War II. The book is an allegory and all the characters symbolize different historical characters. The original title of this allegorical novella was Animal Farm: A Fairy Tale. But when it was published in the United States, the subtitle A Fairy Tale was dropped.

When they are liberated from the dictator Jones, life on the homestead is useful for some time and there is a promise for a more joyful eventual fate of less work, better training and more nourishment. However, conflict arises as Napoleon and Snowball battle for the leadership of animals on the homestead. Napoleon holds onto power forcibly and winds up abusing the animals similarly as Farmer Jones does. The story closes with the pigs acting and dressing like the people which the animals expel from the farm.

Setting of the Novella

Historical background, animal farm summary, chapter 1 summary.

Mr. Jones is the owner of the animal farm. Mr. Jones is heavily drunk and he hardly makes it to bed. As he goes towards the bed, the animals start to make noise and bustle because they are to hold a grand meeting on the farm. The agenda of the meeting is to have a discussion about the strange dream of the Old Major. The animals are slowly showing up in the barn.

Chapter 2 Summary

Chapter 3 summary.

The pigs help in making a room for study where trade is studied. Some Committees are made including The Clean Tails League, Re-Education Committee, and Egg Production Committee. But the committees are unable to produce the results. The animals do not have good intelligence and are unable to remember the seven features of Animalism so one basic commandment is made for them and it is “four legs good and two legs bad.”

Chapter 4 Summary

Chapter 5 summary.

In the winter, the animals feel that Mollie is not performing the assigned duties. Mollie is also sympathetic towards humans and usually talks to humans at the borders of Animal Farm. It is also noted that Mollies has sugar and ribbon stash. After some time, Mollies disappears from the farm.

Snowball suggests that animals will be able to complete the windmill in a year but Napoleon thinks that all the animals might die in one year if they do not focus on the production of food.  Some of the animals start chanting for the windmill, while the other chant for food production. Benjamin is the only animal who thinks that both plans are beneficial for animals.

In the meeting, the animals are not allowed and the pigs decide the schedule for the next week. Napoleon starts dictating all the other animals and decides that he will not only complete the windmill but will also carry out other welfare plans for the animals too.

Chapter 6 Summary

Chapter 7 summary.

After a few days Napoleon orders for the assembly. He is wearing the awards of the battles. Some of the pigs have opposed the ideas of Napoleon and the dogs of Napoleon drag them out from the crowd. The pigs are forced to tell the animals of their activities and they confess that they are plotting with Snowball to take over the farm. They also confess that they have destroyed the windmill with the help of Snowball. Napoleon orders to kill the pigs and similarly some other animals are killed too. After the assembly, the animals are terrified and the Squealer comes to announce that the anthem of the Animal Farm is replaced with the new anthem by Napoleon.

Chapter 8 Summary

Chapter 9 summary, chapter 10 summary, animal farm characters analysis.

He is the leader who is corrupt and feeds on the production of his subjects providing them nothing of benefit. For Orwell, Napoleon represents Napoleon Bonaparte. In the novel, the pig Napoleon represents Stalin because he also changed his policies and orders frequently.

Benjamin also stands for Orwell himself because Orwell too remained pessimistic due to the political scenario and the totalitarian governments.

Boxer is the male horse that lives on the farm. He is the tallest and strongest of the animals on the farm. His appearance is not very good and his intelligence, too, is of the second class but he is respected for his strength and valor.

After the rebellion, he works more than the other animals. He becomes a supporter of Napoleon because he thinks that he needs to serve fellow animals. For the sake of the betterment of Animal Farm, he works hard and tirelessly.

Boxer is an allegorical representation of the working class or the proletariats in human society. Although they have the strength and power to serve the bourgeoisie yet they lack the mental capabilities which make them understand that they can stand for their own rights.

This class of people does not understand the actual tactics of the propagandist governments and they suffer throughout their lives.

Frederick is the owner of Pinchfield. Pinchfield is a small farm in the surroundings of the Manor Farm. He has a good business and is usually busy with legal issues. He makes a deal with Napoleon for the purchasing of timber but he cheats the animals by giving them unreal notes of banks.

He is also a leader in the pigs. He is a young pig. He is an intelligent character but the only shortcoming in his character is that he does not have political depth which Napoleon possesses.

He is a solicitor and works as an agent for the animals to make deals with the surrounding farms and human beings. He takes his commission from Napoleon. He makes visits to the animal farm on every Monday. He does not bother himself with injustices of the animal farm rather he is interested in his commission.

Themes in Animal Farm

Education used for oppression.

This shows that they are also opportunists. The education and the intelligence of pigs permit them to subdue the rest of the animals of the farm. At the end of the book, the readers witness Napoleon’s arrangements for the education of a new generation of pigs so that they could continue to subdue the animals of the farm.

Violence as a tool of Suppression

The executions represent the Great Purge and the Red Terror, yet they stand for the maltreatment of intensity. For instance, they are like the open executions of Taliban in Kabul, Afghanistan.

The death penalty for crooks is a fervently discussed issue. Executing lawbreakers like Napoleon is another issue. The executions symbolize the Trails of Moscow which Stalin arranged to make the people afraid. The traitors were forced to confess so that they could be executed.

The return of Mr. Jones is a serious risk because it kills the interests of animals in questioning. The other significant case of dread strategies in the novel is the danger of Snowball and his colleagues. Napoleon uses Snowball`s return as the cause of fear because he makes them believe that his return is dangerous. Snowball is a more awful danger than Jones since Jones is at any rate securely out of Animal Farm. Snowball is demonstrated to be sneaking along the boundaries of Animal Farm.

Class Stratification

The novel sheds light on the fact the various animals representing various classes are one against the enemy but once the peril of elimination and enemy is eliminated, the unity of the classes goes away and they start dividing themselves into different groups.

Once Mr. Jones is removed from the leadership of the farm, a run for leadership is shown among the animals of the farm and Napoleon being the main manipulator becomes the leader to exploit all the animals. The animals divide themselves as the working class and the other class who control the working class. The pigs are classified into the class that holds all the privileges and the rest of the animals on the farm constitute the working class and they work tirelessly. This class is given no proper food and shelter while the pigs enjoy every luxury of the farm.

Naive Working Class and its dangers

Boxer states that Napoleon is always right and this is a clear indication which gives Napoleon more strength and power to subdue this class of animal. This novel manifests that the inability of the oppressed increases the suffering of this class because they are unable to make progress in order to free themselves from the tyrant and cruel masters.

The Failure of Intellect

Animal Farm is profoundly doubtful about the estimation of scholarly movement. The pigs are distinguished as the canniest creatures. However, their insight rarely delivers anything of significant worth.

Animal Exploitation by Humans

The novella proposes that there is a genuine association between the abuse of creatures and the misuse of human specialists. Mr. Pilkington jokes to Napoleon that on the off chance that you have your lower creatures to fight with we have our lower classes. From the perspective of the decision class, creatures and laborers are the equivalents.

Animal Farm Analysis

Stalinism satirized.

This novel is a satire of extremist governments of totalitarian governments in their numerous pretenses. Orwell formed this book for an explicit reason: to stand as a cautionary tale of warning against Stalinism.

Therefore, he was unable to publish this book because the Allies were helping out the Soviet Union. Although the book got ready for publishing yet Orwell could not get any publisher for the book to publish it. The characters of this novel portray some authentic figures and various groups of Imperial Russian and Soviet society. The Major stands for Karl Marx, the Boxer for the workers, Napoleon stands for Joseph Stalin, Frederick for Adolf Hitler, and Snowball stands for Leon Trotsky.

Regardless of this fantasy story composed for satirizing some of the events Soviet history Orwell is less concerned about other events of history. For instance, the killing in Chapter VII associates the Great Purge and the Red Terror. The executions are the representation of these events. Squealer’s declarations that the executions have finished the Rebellion associate them to the time of the Red Terror.

Napoleon Analyzed

From the initial points in the novella, Napoleon rises as a person who is always in search of opportunities for corruption.  Napoleon never makes a solitary commitment by participating actively in the Revolution, not to the definition of its belief system, not to the grisly battle that it requires, not to the new society’s underlying endeavors to build up itself. He never shows enthusiasm for the quality of Animal Farm itself, just in the quality of his control over it.

One by one, he changes all the seven commandments of Animalism for his own benefits. It is a demonstration of Orwell’s intense political insight that Napoleon can without much of a stretch represent any of the extraordinary despots and political rascals in world history, even the individuals who emerged after Animal Farm was composed. In the conduct of Napoleon and his partners in crime, one can identify the lying and tormenting strategies of authoritarian pioneers, for example, Mao, Josip Tito, Augusto Pinochet, Pol Pot and Milosevic are treated in a very corrosive manner.

Some Animals are more equal than others

Animal Farm demonstrates that the intelligence of the pigs is not the main tool through which they control the other animals of the farm because pigs do not produce anything that is beneficial for the animals of the farms.

Power Corrupts

Failure of the farm.

While the pigs are blessed with the food, drinks and luxury, the rest of the animals are hand to mouth on the farm.  When the animals come to a stage of life where they are of no use, the pigs sell them and enjoy the whiskeys over the money received.

After the publicly killing of four pigs, three sheep, three hens, and a goose, the residents of the animal farm realize that something is going wrong with the sixth commandments.  They come to know that the sixth commandment of Animalism is changed from No Animal shall kill any other animal to no animal shall kill any other animals without a cause. 

Propaganda as a tool for exploitation

Thus, in Orwell’s Animal Farm where animals take control of the far and set their own state in function. Napoleon, a pig, and his main propagandist, Squealer, subdue the animals completely. The use of propaganda by various characters reflects Russia in the reign of Stalin’s imperious guideline.

Generally, he turns into Squealer`s pawn. Since Squealer can’t reach everywhere anytime, he abuses Boxer’s numbness and reliability to certify Napoleon’s concern for animals of the farm. Fighter does this subliminally; he controls the animals for Napoleon without being aware of it. Through this Orwell suggests that the use of slogans by characters without any resistance spread the ideas very quickly.

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Animal Farm

By george orwell, animal farm study guide.

Animal Farm was published on the heels of World War II, in England in 1945 and in the United States in 1946. George Orwell wrote the book during the war as a cautionary fable in order to expose the seriousness of the dangers posed by Stalinism and totalitarian government. Orwell faced several obstacles in getting the novel published. First, he was putting forward an anti-Stalin book during a time when Western support for the Soviet Union was still high due to its support in Allied victories against Germany. Second, Orwell was not yet the literary star he would quickly become. For those reasons, Animal Farm appeared only at the war’s end, during the same month that the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The tragically violent events of the war set the stage well for Orwell’s fictional manifesto against totalitarianism.

Animal Farm was Orwell’s first highly successful novel (the second being 1984 ), and it helped launch him out of the minor fame of an essayist into the stratosphere of acclaimed fiction. Despite publishers’ initial hesitance toward the book, the public in both Britain and the United States met it with enthusiasm. In the United States alone, it sold 600,000 copies in four years. Animal Farm was translated into many languages, proving its universal reach.

Animal Farm is an allegory or fable, a fairy tale for adults. Orwell uses animal characters in order to draw the reader away from the world of current events into a fantasy space where the reader can grasp ideas and principles more crisply. At the same time, Orwell personifies the animals in the tradition of allegory so that they symbolize real historical figures. In their own universe, people can become desensitized even to terrible things like deception, mistreatment, and violence. By demonstrating how these things occur in an allegorical world, Orwell makes them more clearly understood in the real world. For instance, in Animal Farm’s public execution, Orwell lays bare the matter of execution by having the dogs rip out the supposed traitors’ throats. In this scene, the reader is led to focus not as much on the means of execution as on the animalistic, atrocious reality of execution itself.

Animal Farm is also a powerful satire. Orwell uses irony to undermine the tenets of totalitarianism, specifically that of Stalinism.

Almost instantly after the novel’s publication, it became the subject of revisionism. In one instance, the CIA made an animated film version of the book in which they eliminated the final scene and replaced it with a new revolution in which the animals overthrow the pigs (see the 1999 Hallmark film version for another change in ending). They distributed the film as anti-communist propaganda, which is ironic when one considers the novel’s own censure of the propagandist rewriting of history. This revision and others over the years (whether in changing the story or interpreting it) contributed to the public’s general misunderstanding of Orwell. Though he was staunchly anti-Stalinist, he was certainly not a capitalist. In fact, he was a revolutionary socialist. During his lifetime, Orwell did little to detract from his skewed public image. He was a man of contradictions--Louis Menand calls him “a middle-class intellectual who despised the middle class and was contemptuous of intellectuals, a Socialist whose abuse of Socialists ... was as vicious as any Tory’s.”

Animal Farm is universally appealing for both the obvious and the subtle messages of the fable. While the allegory’s characters and events are deeply or specifically symbolic, Orwell’s narrator softens some of the punches by including a gentle and un-opinionated narrator. The third-person narrator is outside the animals’ world, so he does not relate any of the lies, hardships, or atrocities firsthand. Rather, he is a quiet observer.

Moreover, the narrator relates the tale from the perspective of the animals other than the dogs and pigs. In this way, the narrator’s approach to the story resembles Orwell’s approach to life. That is, just as Orwell developed empathy for the working class by experiencing working-class life firsthand, the narrator’s tale is based on the experience of someone who is not quite an insider but no longer just an outsider. The narrator’s animal perspective, as well as his reluctance to opine, fits well with the naivete of the animal characters.

One example of the narrator’s indifferent approach to the tale is evident when the pigs use the money from Boxer ’s slaughter to buy a case of whisky. Rather than relating this event in stark terms, the narrator states impartially that on the day appointed for Boxer’s memorial banquet, a carton arrives at the farmhouse followed by loud singing and “the word went round that from somewhere or other the pigs had acquired the money to buy themselves another case of whisky” (126). The scene also exemplifies how the narrator’s naïve perspective produces an drily ironic effect.

Here are two other examples of ironic humor in the novel. In Chapter I, the narrator describes “Beasts of England” as “a stirring tune, something between ‘Clementine’ and ‘La Cucaracha’” (32). Anyone familiar with those two songs knows that they are childish ditties. In Chapter IX, the narrator reports that the pigs find “a large bottle of pink medicine” in the farmhouse’s medicine cabinet. They send it out to Boxer, who is deathly ill. We can assume that the medicine, being pink, is the antacid Pepto-Bismol, hardly useful to someone on his deathbed. By lightening his allegory with ironic humor, Orwell makes the story more palatable without taking away from his message.

Animal Farm Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Animal Farm is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

The skin I’m in

Maleeka is teased because her skin is too dark. Miss Saunder's gets made fun of because she has a rare skin disease. Maleeka is ashamed of her skin, and Miss Saunders is proud of her own.

Animal Farm contains mainly extremely effective scenes. Some are humorous or witty, others bitterly ironic or pessimistic . Which scene did you find most effective and memorable? why?

A seen that sticks with me is a terrifying one: I suppose that is why it has stayed with me for so long. The scene is when Boxer the horse. One afternoon, a van comes to take Boxer away. It has “lettering on its side and a sly-looking man in...

What is the relationship between Snowball and Napoleon?

Both Snowball and Napoleon are leaders. They see leadership in each other. Napoleon sees Snowball's loyalty to the animals as a threat to his dictatorship. While Snowball works for the good of the farm, Napoleon works only for his own interests.

Study Guide for Animal Farm

Animal Farm study guide contains a biography of George Orwell, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Animal Farm
• Animal Farm Summary
• Animal Farm Video
• Character List

Essays for Animal Farm

Animal Farm essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Animal Farm by George Orwell.

• Bit and Spur Shall Rust Forever: Hollow Symbols in George Orwell's Animal Farm
• Consent to Destruction: the Phases of Fraternity and Separation in Animal Farm
• Character Textual Response - Benjamin
• Non vi, sed verbo (Not by force, but by the word)
• Comparison of Values: Animal Farm and V for Vendetta

Lesson Plan for Animal Farm

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to Animal Farm
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• Animal Farm Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for Animal Farm

• Introduction

Animal Farm

73 pages • 2 hours read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-4

Chapters 5-7

Chapters 8-10

Character Analysis

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Discussion Questions

Why might Orwell have chosen the format of an animal fable for his satire of the Soviet Union? Does this format make for more effective satire? Why or why not?

Could the message of Animal Farm be appreciated by readers who did not know about the history of the Soviet Union and the real-life prototypes of the characters? Why or why not?

Who is the real hero of Animal Farm ? Is there one? Why or why not?

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OCR GCSE Animal Farm (Part B) Practice

Subject: English

Age range: 14-16

Resource type: Lesson (complete)

Last updated

5 September 2024

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Two Part B exam practice lessons in line with Assessment Objectives. Includes:

• 2023 Grade boundaries (22-24 on document)
• June 2017 and 2019 practice question (Part B)
• Form, Language, and Structure
• Context and subject terminology
• Exam technique
• Mark scheme, indicative content, candidate responses, examiner’s comments

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