George Orwell’s Animal FarmGeorge Orwell wrote ‘Animal Farm’ as an allegory, which is a simplestory, with a more complicated idea running alongside it. In thiscase, it is a story about a group of pigs taking over a farm, and thestory of the Russian Revolution is told underneath it. The maincharacters of the revolution are portrayed in the book as follows: MrJones is Czar Nicholas II, the last Russian leader before therevolution; Old Major is Karl Marx, the person who influenced thepeople into revolting and the idea of communism; Snowball is Trotsky,one of the early leaders of the revolution; Napoleon is Stalin, acruel, selfish, and corrupt leader; and Boxer and Clover represent theproletariat, or the ‘common’ working class people.
At the beginning of the book, Boxer is introduced as ‘an enormousbeast’, who is ‘not of first rate intelligence’, and we are also toldthat he is universally respected. He has a kind, gentle, caringcharacter that others feel safe around ‘Last of all came the cat, wholooked around, as usual, for the warmest place, and finally squeezedherself in between Boxer and Clover.’
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Boxer and Clover are used by Orwell to represent the proletariat, orthe working class, in Russian society. This lower class is naturallydrawn to Stalin (represented by Napoleon) because it seems as thoughthey will benefit most from his new system. Since Boxer and the otherlow animals are not accustomed to the “good life,” they can’t reallycompare Napoleon’s government to the life they had before under Jones.The proletariat are also quite good at convincing each other thatcommunism is a good idea, ‘they absorbed everything that they weretold, and passed it on to the others’.
Boxer…
…nd of the book shows how the leaders of the RussianRevolution turned out to be just as bad, if not worse than the czars,‘The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig,and from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to say whichwas which.’ George Orwell put Boxer in the story and killed him toshow that all his hard work, like the proletariats in the RussianRevolution, was for nothing and that, in the end, it would always goback to the way it was at the beginning. This is something thatBenjamin knew all the way through, and after the animals haveforgotten Jones and their past lives, ‘Only old Benjamin professed toremember every detail of his long life and to know that things neverhad been, nor ever could be much better or much worse; hunger,hardship, and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law oflife.’
