The Pigs Never Actually Left the Farm

A farm, a revolution, and a pig named Napoleon

Here’s the setup, and I promise I won’t wreck the ending for the three people on earth who haven’t read it. Old Major, an aging boar, gathers the animals of Manor Farm one night and tells them about a dream: a world where animals aren’t slaves to Mr. Jones, the drunk, neglectful farmer who runs the place into the ground. He dies days later, but the idea doesn’t. The animals rise up, kick Jones off the property, and start running the farm themselves under a set of principles they call Animalism, boiled down to seven commandments painted on the barn wall. No animal shall wear clothes. No animal shall sleep in a bed. All animals are equal.

You already know where this goes, or you think you do, but Orwell doesn’t rush it, and that’s what makes it land. Two pigs, Snowball and Napoleon, emerge as leaders, and the split between them (one an idealist and builder, one a schemer who prefers to work in shadows) is the hinge the whole book swings on. Once Napoleon gets the dogs on his side, quite literally raised from puppies to be his private enforcers, the story stops being about revolution and starts being about what revolutions become once somebody figures out how to run them for themselves.

What actually works, and the one thing that bugs me

The thing people always praise, and rightly, is the economy of it. Orwell doesn’t waste a sentence. Every animal is doing at least two jobs: being a character you can picture and being a piece on a chessboard representing Stalin, Trotsky, the clergy, the working class, the useful idiots of the press. Boxer the cart horse, who responds to every setback by deciding he must simply work harder, is maybe the most quietly devastating character in twentieth century fiction. I mean that. His personal motto (I will work harder) sits right next to his other one (Napoleon is always right) and by the time you get to what happens to him near the end, if you don’t feel something in your chest, I don’t know what to tell you. That’s the scene I remember from being eleven, actually, the one that made me put the book down for a minute even though I didn’t understand yet what I was reacting to.

The satire of language is the part that hits hardest as an adult. Squealer, the propaganda pig, doesn’t lie so much as he redefines words until the lie isn’t a lie anymore. Watching the seven commandments get quietly edited over the course of the book, a word added here, a phrase softened there, until the ideals of the revolution have been rewritten into their exact opposite, is genuinely one of the best depictions of how authoritarian doublespeak functions that anyone has ever put on paper. It’s not subtle. It was never trying to be subtle. But it’s precise, and precision is its own kind of power.

Now here’s my actual criticism, and I’ll admit I go back and forth on whether it’s fair. As a novel, on the level of character and interiority, Animal Farm is thin. Deliberately thin, sure, that’s the fable format, but I’ve had moments rereading it as an adult where I wanted to live inside these animals instead of just watching them illustrate a thesis. Nobody except maybe Boxer gets an inner life that isn’t in service of the allegory. Clover worries, Benjamin the donkey is cynical and mostly right and does nothing about it, and that’s basically the whole roster. If you go in wanting a novel, you might feel a little cheated. If you go in wanting a fable, which is what it actually is, it’s close to perfect. I think my eleven-year-old self wanted a novel and was confused, and my twenty-six-year-old self wanted a fable and got exactly what she needed. Maybe that says more about me than the book. I’m genuinely not sure.

The tangent I can’t help going on: I’ve watched this book get claimed by basically every political faction that exists, each insisting it’s really about the other side, and I think that says something true about it. It’s not really a book about communism specifically, whatever Orwell’s original target was. It’s a book about the mechanics of power, full stop, and mechanics don’t care what flag is flying over them.

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

About George Orwell

Eric Arthur Blair, who wrote under the name George Orwell, spent time as a colonial policeman in Burma, went broke on purpose in Paris and London to see what poverty actually felt like, and fought in the Spanish Civil War, where he got shot through the throat and watched infighting among leftist factions up close enough to distrust tidy political narratives for the rest of his life. He wrote Animal Farm during World War II, when Stalin was a wartime ally of Britain and criticizing him was practically treasonous in polite publishing circles, which is part of why the manuscript got rejected by multiple publishers before it found a home. He was, by most accounts, a difficult, principled, somewhat dour man who cared more about being accurate than being liked. It shows.

If this wrecked you, read these next

Grab a copy of Animal Farm here if you need one, then chase it with these.

• 1984 by George Orwell, for the version of this argument with no animal costumes on, and a much bleaker ending.
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, for the argument that we won’t be conquered, we’ll be entertained into compliance instead.
• Lord of the Flies by William Golding, for the same question (what happens to power without oversight) asked with children instead of livestock.
• The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, if you want satire of Soviet life with actual magic and chaos thrown in.

For your book club

1. Which character do you think you’d have been on the farm: Boxer, Benjamin, Squealer, or one of the sheep? Be honest.
2. Is Snowball actually better than Napoleon, or just better at PR? What in the text supports either answer?
3. The commandments get edited slowly, one word at a time. Why does Orwell make the corruption gradual instead of sudden?
4. Does Boxer’s fate make him a tragic hero or a cautionary tale about blind loyalty, or both at once?
5. The ending shows the pigs and the humans becoming indistinguishable. What do you think Orwell wants us to feel in that final image, and did it work on you?