ANIMAL FARM Plot Overview

Old Major, a prize-winning boar, gathers the animals of the Manor Farm for a meeting in the big
barn. He tells them of a dream he has had in which all animals live together with no human beings
to oppress or control them. He tells the animals that they must work toward such a paradise and
teaches them a song called “Beasts of England,” in which his dream vision is lyrically described.
The animals greet Major’s vision with great enthusiasm. When he dies only three nights after the
meeting, three younger pigs—Snowball, Napoleon, and Squealer—formulate his main principles
into a philosophy called Animalism. Late one night, the animals manage to defeat the farmer Mr.
Jones in a battle, running him off the land. They rename the property Animal Farm and dedicate
themselves to achieving Major’s dream. The cart-horse Boxer devotes himself to the cause with
particular zeal, committing his great strength to the prosperity of the farm and adopting as a
personal maxim the affirmation “I will work harder.”
At first, Animal Farm prospers. Snowball works at teaching the animals to read, and Napoleon takes
a group of young puppies to educate them in the principles of Animalism. When Mr. Jones
reappears to take back his farm, the animals defeat him again, in what comes to be known as the
Battle of the Cowshed, and take the farmer’s abandoned gun as a token of their victory. As time
passes, however, Napoleon and Snowball increasingly quibble over the future of the farm, and they
begin to struggle with each other for power and influence among the other animals. Snowball
concocts a scheme to build an electricity-generating windmill, but Napoleon solidly opposes the
plan. At the meeting to vote on whether to take up the project, Snowball gives a passionate speech.
Although Napoleon gives only a brief retort, he then makes a strange noise, and nine attack dogs—
the puppies that Napoleon had confiscated in order to “educate”—burst into the barn and chase
Snowball from the farm. Napoleon assumes leadership of Animal Farm and declares that there will
be no more meetings. From that point on, he asserts, the pigs alone will make all of the decisions—
for the good of every animal.

Object 1

Napoleon now quickly changes his mind about the windmill, and the animals, especially Boxer,
devote their efforts to completing it. One day, after a storm, the animals find the windmill toppled.
The human farmers in the area declare smugly that the animals made the walls too thin, but
Napoleon claims that Snowball returned to the farm to sabotage the windmill. He stages a great
purge, during which various animals who have allegedly participated in Snowball’s great
conspiracy—meaning any animal who opposes Napoleon’s uncontested leadership—meet instant
death at the teeth of the attack dogs. With his leadership unquestioned (Boxer has taken up a second
maxim, “Napoleon is always right”), Napoleon begins expanding his powers, rewriting history to
make Snowball a villain. Napoleon also begins to act more and more like a human being—sleeping
in a bed, drinking whisky, and engaging in trade with neighboring farmers. The original Animalist
principles strictly forbade such activities, but Squealer, Napoleon’s propagandist, justifies every
action to the other animals, convincing them that Napoleon is a great leader and is making things
better for everyone—despite the fact that the common animals are cold, hungry, and overworked.
Mr. Frederick, a neighboring farmer, cheats Napoleon in the purchase of some timber and then
attacks the farm and dynamites the windmill, which had been rebuilt at great expense. After the
demolition of the windmill, a pitched battle ensues, during which Boxer receives major wounds.
The animals rout the farmers, but Boxer’s injuries weaken him. When he later falls while working
on the windmill, he senses that his time has nearly come. One day, Boxer is nowhere to be found.
According to Squealer, Boxer has died in peace after having been taken to the hospital, praising the
Rebellion with his last breath. In actuality, Napoleon has sold his most loyal and long-suffering
worker to a glue maker in order to get money for whisky.
Years pass on Animal Farm, and the pigs become more and more like human beings—walking
upright, carrying whips, and wearing clothes. Eventually, the seven principles of Animalism, known
as the Seven Commandments and inscribed on the side of the barn, become reduced to a single
principle reading “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Napoleon
entertains a human farmer named Mr. Pilkington at a dinner and declares his intent to ally himself
with the human farmers against the laboring classes of both the human and animal communities. He
also changes the name of Animal Farm back to the Manor Farm, claiming that this title is the
“correct” one. Looking in at the party of elites through the farmhouse window, the common animals
can no longer tell which are the pigs and which are the human beings.

Setting
The Manor Farm—later called Animal Farm—is a small, independent farm somewhere in the
English countryside. The name “Manor Farm” tells us that it was once owned by a local aristocrat,
the lord of the manor. However, the farm has since come into the hands of Mr. Jones, an
unsuccessful, lazy, drunken farmer. Within the novella’s allegory, the Manor Farm represents Russia
and also the countries of Europe more generally: places once ruled by aristocrats, now ruled by
capitalists, and ripe for a Communist revolution. However, the Englishness of the Manor Farm is
also important. Small, independent farms are a treasured part of the British national self-image,
emblems of the coziness and tranquility of English political life. By imagining such a farm
undergoing a revolution, Animal Farm suggests that the corruption and bloodshed of Stalinism is
much closer to home than British readers may realize.
Themes
Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.

The Corruption of Socialist Ideals in the Soviet Union

Animal Farm is most famous in the West as a stinging critique of the history and rhetoric of the
Russian Revolution. Retelling the story of the emergence and development of Soviet communism in
the form of an animal fable, Animal Farm allegorizes the rise to power of the dictator Joseph Stalin.
In the novella, the overthrow of the human oppressor Mr. Jones by a democratic coalition of
animals quickly gives way to the consolidation of power among the pigs. Much like the Soviet
intelligentsia, the pigs establish themselves as the ruling class in the new society.
The struggle for preeminence between Leon Trotsky and Stalin emerges in the rivalry between the
pigs Snowball and Napoleon. In both the historical and fictional cases, the idealistic but politically
less powerful figure (Trotsky and Snowball) is expelled from the revolutionary state by the
malicious and violent usurper of power (Stalin and Napoleon). The purges and show trials with
which Stalin eliminated his enemies and solidified his political base find expression in Animal
Farm as the false confessions and executions of animals whom Napoleon distrusts following the
collapse of the windmill. Stalin’s tyrannical rule and eventual abandonment of the founding
principles of the Russian Revolution are represented by the pigs’ turn to violent government and the
adoption of human traits and behaviors, the trappings of their original oppressors.
Although Orwell believed strongly in socialist ideals, he felt that the Soviet Union realized these
ideals in a terribly perverse form. His novella creates its most powerful ironies in the moments in
which Orwell depicts the corruption of Animalist ideals by those in power. For Animal Farm serves
not so much to condemn tyranny or despotism as to indict the horrifying hypocrisy of tyrannies that
base themselves on, and owe their initial power to, ideologies of liberation and equality. The
gradual disintegration and perversion of the Seven Commandments illustrates this hypocrisy with
vivid force, as do Squealer’s elaborate philosophical justifications for the pigs’ blatantly
unprincipled actions. Thus, the novella critiques the violence of the Stalinist regime against the
human beings it ruled, and also points to Soviet communism’s violence against human logic,
language, and ideals.

The Societal Tendency Toward Class Stratification

Animal Farm offers commentary on the development of class tyranny and the human tendency to
maintain and reestablish class structures even in societies that allegedly stand for total equality. The
novella illustrates how classes that are initially unified in the face of a common enemy, as the
animals are against the humans, may become internally divided when that enemy is eliminated. The
expulsion of Mr. Jones creates a power vacuum, and it is only so long before the next oppressor
assumes totalitarian control. The natural division between intellectual and physical labor quickly
comes to express itself as a new set of class divisions, with the “brainworkers” (as the pigs claim to
be) using their superior intelligence to manipulate society to their own benefit. Orwell never
clarifies in Animal Farm whether this negative state of affairs constitutes an inherent aspect of
society or merely an outcome contingent on the integrity of a society’s intelligentsia. In either case,
the novella points to the force of this tendency toward class stratification in many communities and
the threat that it poses to democracy and freedom.
The Danger of a Naïve Working Class
One of the novella’s most impressive accomplishments is its portrayal not just of the figures in
power but also of the oppressed people themselves. Animal Farm is not told from the perspective of
any particular character, though occasionally it does slip into Clover’s consciousness. Rather, the
story is told from the perspective of the common animals as a whole. Gullible, loyal, and
hardworking, these animals give Orwell a chance to sketch how situations of oppression arise not
only from the motives and tactics of the oppressors but also from the naïveté of the oppressed, who
are not necessarily in a position to be better educated or informed. When presented with a dilemma,
Boxer prefers not to puzzle out the implications of various possible actions but instead to repeat to
himself, “Napoleon is always right.” Animal Farm demonstrates how the inability or unwillingness
to question authority condemns the working class to suffer the full extent of the ruling class’s
oppression.

The Abuse of Language as Instrumental to the Abuse of Power

One of Orwell’s central concerns, both in Animal Farm and in 1984, is the way in which language
can be manipulated as an instrument of control. In Animal Farm, the pigs gradually twist and distort
a rhetoric of socialist revolution to justify their behavior and to keep the other animals in the dark.
The animals heartily embrace Major’s visionary ideal of socialism, but after Major dies, the pigs
gradually twist the meaning of his words. As a result, the other animals seem unable to oppose the
pigs without also opposing the ideals of the Rebellion. By the end of the novella, after Squealer’s
repeated reconfigurations of the Seven Commandments in order to decriminalize the pigs’
treacheries, the main principle of the farm can be openly stated as “all animals are equal, but some
animals are more equal than others.” This outrageous abuse of the word “equal” and of the ideal of
equality in general typifies the pigs’ method, which becomes increasingly audacious as the novel
progresses. Orwell’s sophisticated exposure of this abuse of language remains one of the most
compelling and enduring features of Animal Farm, worthy of close study even after we have
decoded its allegorical characters and events.

Corruption
Animal Farm demonstrates the idea that power always corrupts. The novella’s heavy use of
foreshadowing, especially in the opening chapter, creates the sense that the events of the story are
unavoidable. Not only is Napoleon’s rise to power inevitable, the novella strongly suggests that any
other possible ruler would have been just as bad as Napoleon. Although Napoleon is more power-
hungry than Snowball, plenty of evidence exists to suggest that Snowball would have been just as
corrupt a ruler. Before his expulsion, Snowball goes along with the pigs’ theft of milk and apples,
and the disastrous windmill is his idea. Even Old Major is not incorruptible. Despite his belief that
“all animals are equal,” (Chapter 1) he lectures the other animals from a raised platform, suggesting
he may actually view himself as above the other animals on the farm. In the novel’s final image the
pigs become indistinguishable from human farmers, which hammers home the idea that power
inevitably has the same effect on anyone who wields it.

The Failure of Intellect

Animal Farm is deeply skeptical about the value of intellectual activity. The pigs are identified as
the most intelligent animals, but their intelligence rarely produces anything of value. Instead, the
pigs use their intelligence to manipulate and abuse the other animals. The novella identifies several
other ways in which intelligence fails to be useful or good. Benjamin is literate, but he refuses to
read, suggesting that intelligence is worthless without the moral sense to engage in politics and the
courage to act. The dogs are nearly as literate as the pigs, but they are “not interested in reading
anything except the Seven Commandments” (Chapter 3). The dogs’ use of their intelligence
suggests that intellect is useless—even harmful—when it is combined with a personality that
prefers to obey orders rather than question them.

The Exploitation of Animals by Humans

As well as being an allegory of the ways human exploit and oppress one another, Animal Farm also
makes a more literal argument: humans exploit and oppress animals. While the animals’ rebellion is
mostly comic in tone, it ends on a serious and touching note, when the animals “wipe out the last
traces of Jones’s hated reign. The harness-room at the end of the stables was broken open; the bits,
the nose-rings, the dog-chains, the cruel knives with which Mr. Jones had been used to castrate the
pigs and lambs, were all flung down the well” (Chapter 2). The novella also suggests that there is a
real connection, as well as an allegorical one, between the exploitation of animals and the
exploitation of human workers. Mr. Pilkington jokes to Napoleon: “If you have your lower animals
to contend with […] we have our lower classes!” (Chapter 10). From the point of view of the ruling
class, animals and workers are the same.