- Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy
- Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.
- No animal shall wear clothes.
- No animal shall sleep in a bed (with sheets).
- No animal shall drink alcohol (in excess).
- No animal shall kill any other animal (without cause).
- All animals are equal.
Unfortunately only a few of the animals were able to read. Also, Snowball and Napoleon ordered the animals to work in the fields, because “the harvest is more important”. Then the problems between Snowball and Napoleon start, they have different opinions about the construction of the Windmill, and Snowball is forced to leave by the dogs that Napoleon breeds and no one sees him again. Then Napoleon tries to convince everybody that he is a good leader, he needs a great deal of propaganda carried out by Squealer (soviet newspaper named Pravda). All of the hypocrisy of Napoleon is shown in this part when he says: “Do not imagine, comrades, that leadership is a pleasure. On the contrary, it is a deep and heavy responsibility. No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?” If all animals are equal, why couldn’t he make a mistake? He was getting worse and worse all the time.
Later, Napoleon starts trading with the farmers, Foxwood and Pinchfield, because they need things made by humans and the animals get angry, because this was one of the things that they were not supposed to do. Soon the pigs and Napoleon start using beds and some animals notice that the 7 commandments have been changed and now it says “with sheets”, the animals start feeling betrayed, but Napoleon always has good excuses.
Boxer and Clover represent the proletariat or labor class in Russian society. Boxer and the other low animals have always been poor, they are not used to the good life so they can’t compare Napoleons leadership to the life they have with mister John’s. Since they always been poor and not educated it is quite easy to convince them it was a good idea. Boxer always had the difficulty to think by themselves, but when he accepted the pigs as their teachers the learned everything they were told and passed it to the other animals with simple arguments.
Later, were boxer is sent away; this is a perfect example of how the ideals of the revolution were betrayed.
Boxer and other animals, which represent the proletariat, depend on their backs to do work. They again fall in the bottom of society as they were before and represent the greatest betrayal that revolution inside the farm had.
Things get worse and worse in the farm, the crops are not very good and the pigs trade more and more with the outside world, he tells lies in the outside world (that there is plenty of food in the farm) and the tells lies in the farm, he said that all of the problems came because of Snowball’s ideas. To keep things in “peace”, Napoleon starts killing the animals that were angry or suspicious of all this things, and the animals remember that in the commandments before it said: No animal shall kill any other animal, and now they realize it also says “without cause”, so they have trouble at the farm because they are having battles with the outside world and many animals are being killed and also because the animals that no not support Napoleon are traitors and are being killed. The last part of the book is the most impressing, it shows in different metaphors all the situation in the Soviet Union, this part occurs in the future, when Napoleon is completely out of his mind and says things like:”The truest happiness lay in working hard and living frugally”, because that was all the soviets had, had work and no pleasures or “luxuries” like normal food. At the beginning the same Napoleon said they wanted “unlimited food for everybody”. The differences between the pigs and the animals are wider all the time.
At the end, Napoleon and the pigs change the 7 commandments again, now it says, “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others”. There is no more hypocrisy than that; nothing could be more away from the words of the old Major, the Soviet Revolution and the ideals of Socialism had been completely betrayed.
Pablo Hernández Chacón
Form 5W
