“hearing in it a prophecy of their future doom”
Technique: Portentous language and irony
The words prophecy and doom are solemn, almost religious, and the humans “secretly trembled”, so the song sounds like a sentence passed on their power. For a while it seems to come true, since Jones is beaten off within the chapter. A reader who knows the whole novella sees the larger irony: no lasting doom arrives for the humans. By Chapter 7 Napoleon has abolished the song, and by Chapter 10 pigs and farmers share a table. The line can be read as a warning that a revolution is more likely to be betrayed from within than defeated from outside.
“This was what came of rebelling against the laws of Nature”
Technique: Appeal to nature, in reported speech
The farmers defend their rule by calling it natural, so that rebellion looks like a crime against the order of the world rather than against them. The capital N makes Nature sound like a lawgiver. Because the narrator reports the claim from a distance, with the tag that Frederick and Pilkington said it, the reader hears how hollow it is. It is human propaganda working as Squealer's will: a moral drawn from frightening stories that need no evidence, placed straight after a list of lies.
“Snowball, who had studied an old book of Julius Caesar's campaigns”
Technique: Allusion
Snowball's victory comes from reading. The battle unfolds like a lesson from his book, in the language of a military report: a first attack, a “second line of attack”, a pretended retreat, an ambush and a charge. The allusion can also be read as a warning. Julius Caesar was a Roman general who became dictator of the Roman Republic and helped bring about its collapse. Read this way, it links military glory with seizing power, a danger the farm meets in the very next chapter, though from Napoleon rather than Snowball, when dogs chase Snowball out before the windmill vote can be taken.
“The pellets scored bloody streaks along Snowball's back”
Technique: Concrete visual imagery
The verb scored makes the wounds sharp and visible, lines cut into the body that anyone could see. The detail is stated plainly, and it will become evidence. In Chapter 7 Squealer claims Jones's shot only grazed Snowball, and in Chapter 9 the wounds are said to have been made by Napoleon's teeth. The reader, who saw the wound as it happened, can test each later version against this sentence. The animals have only their memories to go on, and they are talked out of them.
“No sentimentality, comrade! ... War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.”
Technique: Tautology and a ruthless maxim
Still bleeding, Snowball answers Boxer's grief with slogans. “War is war” is a tautology: it explains nothing and simply closes the argument. The maxim that follows turns Old Major's teaching that all men are enemies into permission to kill. Orwell will not let the reader treat the hero of the battle as simply good. Snowball's hardness can be read as a small version of the ruthlessness that later rules the farm, and the chapter sets it directly against Boxer's tears.
“I have no wish to take life, not even human life”
Technique: Repetition and an intensifying afterthought
Boxer “repeated” his point, so he will not let Snowball's slogan settle the matter, and the word life comes twice in the sentence itself. The afterthought, not even human life, stretches his sympathy to the enemy who has just attacked him, which goes further than Old Major's teaching ever did. The strongest animal on the farm is also the gentlest, and his tears show that he understands what violence costs. Yet the argument is simply dropped when somebody asks after Mollie, and the same horse later accepts whatever Napoleon says.
“they were really some old horse-brasses which had been found in the harness-room”
Technique: Parenthetical aside and bathos
The grand title of the new medal is deflated in brackets: it is an old harness ornament. Horse brasses decorated the harness of working horses in England, so the animals honour their heroes with a relic of their own servitude, found in the room the pigs already use as their headquarters. The quiet aside hints that the new order borrows the trappings of the old. It also prepares for later chapters, where Napoleon awards medals to himself and decoration becomes vanity rather than reward.
“It was decided to set the gun up at the foot of the Flagstaff, like a piece of artillery”
Technique: Impersonal passive, simile and symbol
Jones's gun, the old master's weapon, becomes a monument of the new farm. The simile makes the farm sound like a nation with an army, and the impersonal “It was decided” does not say who decided, although after “much discussion” the choice here seems to be shared. Firing the gun on anniversaries turns victory into ritual, and whoever controls the rituals can later control the memory. In Chapter 5 Major's skull is placed beside this gun, and in Chapter 8 it is also fired on Napoleon's birthday.
