His other motto is , ”Napoleon is always right.” This also is greatly taken advantage of by the pigs because it shows how trustworthy Boxer is. The word, “always,” suggests that whatever Napoleon says, Boxer will agree with it because he trusts that Napoleon would not trick him. Orwell makes us feel sympathetic, because he lets us see that Napoleon and the pigs are really corrupt and are using Boxer for their own means, but Boxer doesn’t realise because he trusts them too much and is not clever to work anything out for himself.
The author makes the readers empathise with Boxer by the way the pigs arrange for Boxers death when he is too old to work and is of little use to them. The quotes, “ Three days later the pigs announced that he had died in the hospital at Willingdon,” and, “It had not been possible, to bring back their lamented comrade’s remains for interment…” show that the pigs took advantage of his trusting nature right to the end. It also shows that although Boxer had always worked harder than he could, and had followed everything Napoleon had said, as soon as there was no danger of him overthrowing them, he was got rid of. Not only that but he was even sold, so the pigs could buy another case of whiskey. This spreads a feeling of sympathy because it again lets us see how Boxer and the other animals were manipulated into believing that Napoleon and the pigs were helping them towards animalism and a better life. This has connotations of all the animals being trusting because they believed in their leaders and couldn’t physically think they were behind any of the stuff that went wrong and that they were really corrupt. This shows that communism was truly corrupted and the leaders didn’t care about the workers at all, and only did what benefited them.
Orwell gets the readers to sympathise with Boxer because of his lack of self-knowledge.
“Even Boxer was vaguely troubled, he set his ears back, shook his forelocks several times and tried to marshal his thoughts; but in the end couldn’t think of anything to say.”
The phrase, ”Even Boxer was vaguely troubled,” indicates that he knows something is wrong, yet believed in Napoleon so much, that he thought Napoleon wasn’t mentally capable of doing any thing bad so didn’t come to a conclusion. If he was cleverer and not as believing in his leader he could have worked out what Napoleon was doing, and he could have stopped it and overthrown Napoleon and the pigs. This is an allegory of the Zealous people being able to overthrow Stalin and the royal guards if they realised communism had been corrupted.
I think Orwell created sympathy for Boxer to get across to the readers how he felt about the way the Zealous people of Russia were treated by the Stalin and the guards. I think George Orwell thought Communism was good as an ideal for running a country, but that it would always struggle to work, as within egalitarian principles, leaders emerge, assuming ever-greater powers. This leads to corruption, and little better or worse that the previous system, only ‘dressed differently.’
He also tries to get across the sympathy for the death of Boxer, equals the Sympathy for the last chance of Communism, which is when the Zealous people were killed.
