“No animal shall kill any other animal WITHOUT CAUSE ... No animal shall drink alcohol TO EXCESS”
Technique: Typographical emphasis and a framing structure
In this edition the added words stand out in capitals, so the reader sees them glaring from a familiar rule. Each addition is only two words and sounds reasonable, yet it turns an absolute ban into a rule with an exception, and the pigs decide what the exception covers. One amendment is found in the first paragraph and the other in the last sentence, so they frame the whole chapter: the killings and the whisky are both made lawful after the event.
“they would sooner have had less figures and more food”
Technique: Antithesis and understatement
The balanced opposites set Squealer's statistics against the animals' hunger, and the plain word food wins. The phrasing is mild, “would sooner”, as if the animals hardly dare complain even in thought, and its homely wording sounds like their own thoughts rather than the pigs' official language. Propaganda can prove anything on paper while the body knows otherwise; the animals feel the gap but cannot argue with numbers they have no way of checking.
“Under the guidance of our Leader, Comrade Napoleon, I have laid five eggs in six days”
Technique: Satire through bathos, in direct speech
The official phrase of praise is attached to the most ordinary farmyard event, and the sudden drop from grand to trivial is bathos. It is darker because the speaker is a hen: in Chapter 7 the hens' eggs were taken for sale, and their protest ended only after their rations were stopped and nine of them had died. Praise has become a reflex, spoken in the regime's own vocabulary, so that animals Napoleon has wronged thank him for work they do themselves.
“Lord of the swill-bucket ... Like the sun in the sky”
Technique: Bathos and hyperbolic simile in a mock hymn
Minimus's poem borrows the language of worship: exclamations, the old-fashioned “thou” and a simile that compares Napoleon's eye to the sun in the sky. Orwell punctures it from inside, because the title Lord, fit for a king or a god, is given to the master of a pig's food bucket. The comedy is the satire of the personality cult: praise so extravagant that it becomes absurd. Inscribed at the opposite end of the barn from the Seven Commandments, the poem is set up as if it stood level with the principles of the Rebellion.
“Throughout the whole period of his seeming friendship with Pilkington, Napoleon had really been in secret agreement with Frederick.”
Technique: Reversal, and the contrast between appearance and reality
The sentence turns on two words, “seeming” and “really”, which divide what the animals were shown from what was true. The narrator delivers the reversal flatly and after the event, as the animals receive it: they are struck dumb with surprise, and nobody is asked for a view. Everything they were told about the two farmers, from Frederick's cruelty to Snowball's hiding place, is reversed with it. Read as allegory, it recalls the Soviet pact with Nazi Germany in 1939, prepared in secret while Soviet talks with Britain and France were still going on.
“a piece of paper with a promise to pay written upon it”
Technique: Naive definition and dramatic irony
The narrator explains a cheque in the innocent terms the animals would understand, and the description fits the banknotes just as well: they too are only paper, worth nothing if the promise behind them is false. Napoleon, praised by Squealer for trusting nobody, refuses the cheque, takes the notes and displays them on a china dish like a trophy. The reader can sense the trick coming before the animals do, and the leader who outwits every animal on the farm is outwitted by a human.
“Even Napoleon, who was directing operations from the rear, had the tip of his tail chipped by a pellet.”
Technique: Bathos and ironic juxtaposition
The sentence begins like praise for a leader sharing his soldiers' danger, “Even Napoleon”, then undercuts itself twice: he was at the back, and his wound is the tip of a tail. It comes straight after the deaths of a cow, three sheep and two geese, so a scratch is set against lives. Napoleon later creates the Order of the Green Banner and confers it on himself. The contrast with Snowball, whose back was streaked with blood as he led the charge in Chapter 4, is left for the reader to draw.
“Then we have won back what we had before ... That is our victory”
Technique: Dialogue and redefinition
Boxer's short, literal sentence states the plain truth: after all their losses the animals have only regained the ground they held before, and the windmill is gone. Squealer does not deny it; he simply renames it, and four words close the argument. This is the regime's method in miniature, changing the meaning of a word rather than the facts, as the Commandments are changed. Boxer is strong enough to ask the question, but a moment later he is bracing himself for the work of rebuilding, and wondering for the first time whether his strength is failing.
