Overanalyzing Animal Farm by George Orwell: Part 3

 

Yeah, I’m doing it again; after all you didn’t really think I would overanalyze half of Animal Farm and then call it quits did you? Anyways, as always heavy spoilers for this because I am going into great detail. Also, side note: Macbeth dies in Macbeth by Shakespeare. So, if you have not read Animal Farm, I would recommend you do so before reading further. Citations are from Animal Farm unless otherwise stated.

            That out of the way I will be discussing chapters 6 and 7. This time we left off after Snowball was removed from the picture and the windmill approved by Napoleon. Now the animals are working on a 60 hour work week, 6 days a week with voluntary work on Sunday. You would have your rations cut in half if you didn’t though, so it wasn’t truly voluntary in my opinion. This and the windmill represent the 5 year plan. The animals worked hard that year but were proud of it. The windmill project is also continuing with technical difficulties because while the materials were all there, they still needed to break the stone from the quarry to useable pieces. Which, “There seemed no way of doing this except with picks and crowbars, which no animal could use, because no animal could stand on his hind legs.” (60). The solution; gravity. If you bring the boulder to the top of the quarry, you can then send it back down and the impact will cause the boulder to break. “But it was a slow, laborious process. Frequently it would take a whole day of exhausting effort to drag a single boulder to the top of the quarry, and sometimes when it was pushed over the edge it failed to break.” (61). Of course, Boxer helped make this possible with his immense strength.

            Napoleon also decided that they would trade with humans for things that could not me made on the farm, like machinery for say, a windmill. A certain man named Mr. Whymper was to be the middleman between Animal Farm and the outside world which still did hate them, but now acknowledge its correct name. Also, Jones has just given up at this point and just moved to somewhere else. This represents the outside world coming to terms with the Soviet Union’s existence. Also, the pigs start sleeping in the house which was a against the commandments. So, Clover and Muriel went to check. It read, “No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets,” thus beginning a long tradition of adding 2 words to one of the commandments and acting like they were always there.

            Later, the partial windmill was destroyed by a storm. This was clearly the evil machinations of Snowball. This represents the paranoia of the Soviet Union. The Snowball paranoia continues and everything bad is mostly blamed on Snowball. This paranoia leads to 4 pigs being executed by Napoleon’s dogs in what represents the purge Stalin enacted. This is followed by 3 hens, a goose, and 3 sheep also being executed. Beasts of England was now forbidden too. This concludes my over analyzation of Animal Farm by George Orwell.