The Role Of Power In George Orwell's Animal Farm

What is power? Power is control. Throughout reading the novel Animal Farm by George Orwell, power has fluctuated immensely. In the beginning, Mr. Jones had overlooked Manor Farm (the original name of Animal Farm) and took care of it, along with the animals. Old Major was still alive and had a majority of the opinion of the animals and showed them how things should be. When Old Major had died though, the animals began to rebel against Mr. Jones reign of terror with their smarts. The pigs had now rallied the animals together to take down Mr. Jones. They saw that knowledge was power because if they could read, write and speak then what would be the use of human masters. The problem was that most of the animals were imbeciles and could …show more content…
The animals are supposed to be treated fairly and equally based the seven commandments created by Napoleon and Snowball. This was never the instance because the pigs and dogs never truly worked in the field, pulling the plow, or helping Boxer to lift rocks to the windmill. The three pigs would stay in the farmhouse and plan to make the farm better. Distribution of goods was also a large problem among the animals. The pigs had taken the milk for themselves, along with the apples because the more intelligent pigs “need to live longer in order to keep the farm in working order.” The pigs would always tell the animals if they did not listen to them “Jones would come back.” This was a never ending cycle that instilled fear in the farm. The pigs used the fear of losing the farm to persuade the other animals into doing their bidding. This is not how the animals originally thought the farm was going to be ran. The pigs are the higher class, and get the extra amenities while the other animals work and get less food, of lesser quality, than the pigs get every day for doing …show more content…
Napoleon is the main problem amongst all of the animals. The entire goal of taking the farm from Mr. Jones was to have equality for all animals and to each animal gets the same treatment as another, no matter what type of animal they are. Napoleon saw the opportunity to be the head of all animals by taking over who is being educated. If he can control the learning, he can choose who is allowed to argue against him and converse ideas with him. The animals say that they never want Jones to come back, but he technically did. He came back as Napoleon, as a dictator that was worse than he was before. Towards the end of the novel this really shows when Napoleon begins to converse with the humans in order to keep the farm running. Whenever he began to converse with the humans, he began to become one of them. He first forced the hens to give up their eggs to be sold to other farms because the harvest was down for another year. If the hens did not comply they would be starved or killed on the spot. Then he took away animals arguing with what Napoleon orders the animals to do because the dogs would intimidate them with the fear of dying. Eventually they had lost everything and were forced to work sixty hours a week and were starved because the pigs could not go without being full.