Characters
The aging boar whose speech inspires the animals to rebel.
Old Major
The name of Mr. Jones’s farm before the rebellion.
Manor farm
What is the final straw of mistreatment from the humans that finally starts the rebellion?
The animals are starving.
The literary device in which animals represent people, institutions, or political ideas.
Allegory
The 1917 political upheaval in Russia that the animals’ rebellion broadly represents.
The Russian Revolution
The eloquent pig who serves as Napoleon’s spokesman and explains the pigs’ decisions.
Squealer
The name the animals give the farm after taking control.
Animal Farm
The pigs’ growing privileges show how this can corrupt those who hold it.
Power
The animal who represents a loyal, hardworking laborer whose devotion is exploited.
Boxer
The Soviet leader most closely represented by Napoleon.
Stalin
The hardworking cart-horse whose repeated motto expresses his loyalty and perseverance.
Boxer
The _______ becomes a symbol of the privileges the pigs claim, despite the animals’ original rules against this kind of human behavior.
What is the farmhouse?
Squealer’s explanations and changing claims show how controlling this can help a regime maintain power.
Propaganda/ Historical events
The commandment changes to “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Identify the literary device created by this contradiction.
Irony
The revolutionary leader most closely represented by Snowball, who was later forced into exile.
Leon Trotsky
The pig driven from the farm after losing a power struggle with Napoleon.
Snowball
The _____ project repeatedly consumes the animals’ labor and resources, revealing how the farm’s promises can be used to control them.
What is windmill?
The animals’ limited education makes them more vulnerable to exploitation, developing the theme that WHAT can create oppression and make people easier to manipulate.
Ignorance/ Lack of education.
Orwell’s use of humor and ridicule to expose the pigs’ hypocrisy and abuses of power is this literary device (connected to irony/ a type of irony)
Satire
What do the dogs represent?
Stalin's police force during the Russian Revolution.
The skeptical donkey whose awareness of the pigs’ corruption contrasts with his refusal to act.
Benjamin
What does snowball promise the Windmill will bring to Animal Farm?
Electricity, hot and cold water, and a four day work week.
The final scene suggests that a revolution can reproduce the injustice it opposed when leaders are not held accountable. What broader theme could this connect to?
The cycle of tyranny
The animals’ rebellion promises equality, but ends with pigs resembling humans. Explain the central irony of this ending.
The irony that the animals overthrew human oppressors only to be ruled by pigs who become just like the humans—the revolution recreates the tyranny it opposed.
Orwell’s allegory critiques the Soviet Union under Stalin by showing how a revolution against oppression can lead to this outcome.
authoritarianism and tyranny