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Deep StudyAQA / Edexcel / OCR

Chapter-by-Chapter Analysis

Animal Farm by George Orwell

All 10 chapters analysed with key events, character development, allegorical parallels and short quotations. Use this as a detailed revision companion alongside your own annotated copy.

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Key moments

A linocut print of the big barn at night. On the left, on a raised wooden platform, Old Major, a big white boar with a curled tail, lies on a heap of straw with his mouth open, speaking, under a lantern that hangs from a beam; its flame is printed in red and its light is cut in rays across the plank wall. Three dogs lie at the foot of the platform, and three young black pigs lie in the straw just beyond it, facing him. Behind them a cow and two sheep lie chewing the cud. Near the front stands Mollie, a white mare, with a lump of sugar in her mouth and red ribbons tied in her plaited mane. On the right the two cart-horses lie facing Major: Clover, cut in fine lines, with one foreleg laid out in front of three ducklings, and Boxer, black with a white stripe down his nose, with the cat sitting between them. Muriel the white goat and Benjamin the donkey stand at the back. Hens roost on the sill of a window, through which the dark farmhouse can be seen, and pigeons perch on the beam.

Moment 1 of 33 · Chapter 1

Old Major's speech

The big barn at night, Manor Farm

Once Mr Jones has gone to bed drunk, the animals gather in the big barn to hear Old Major, the prize boar. He tells them that their lives are miserable and short because Man takes almost everything they produce, and he calls for Rebellion.

“Man is the only real enemy we have.”

Who

Old Major
Mr Jones
Boxer
Clover
Benjamin
Mollie

Why it matters

A single enemy makes rebellion easy to grasp, but it leaves the animals with no warning that a tyrant could come from among themselves.

Revolution and BetrayalClass and Labour

Chapter 1: Old Major's speech. Once Mr Jones has gone to bed drunk, the animals gather in the big barn to hear Old Major, the prize boar. He tells them that their lives are miserable and short because Man takes almost everything they produce, and he calls for Rebellion. "Man is the only real enemy we have." A single enemy makes rebellion easy to grasp, but it leaves the animals with no warning that a tyrant could come from among themselves.
Chapter 1: Major's warnings. Major reminds the cows, the hens and Clover what has been taken from them. Admitting that he himself is “one of the lucky ones”, he warns the young pigs of the knife and Boxer of the knacker, then lays down rules: never live, dress, drink or trade like Man, and never tyrannise over one another. "we must not come to resemble him" By Chapter 10 the pigs have taken up every habit of Man that Major lists, and his warning to Boxer comes true in Chapter 9, with the pigs, not Jones, sending him away.
Chapter 1: Beasts of England. Major sings the song that came back to him in his dream, and within minutes the whole farm is singing it. They sing it five times through, until the noise wakes Mr Jones, who fires his gun into the dark and the meeting breaks up. "The singing of this song threw the animals into the wildest excitement." The song carries the hopes of the Rebellion, which is why banning it in Chapter 7 marks the moment those hopes are officially declared finished.
Chapter 2: Animalism. Old Major dies, and for three months the pigs, the cleverest animals, teach in secret. Snowball, Napoleon and the persuasive Squealer turn Major's ideas into a system they call Animalism, while Mollie worries about sugar and ribbons and Moses the raven tells tales of Sugarcandy Mountain. "The others said of Squealer that he could turn black into white." The pigs lead because they are clever and the others follow because they are not: the division that shapes the whole novella exists before the Rebellion begins.
Chapter 2: The Rebellion. On Midsummer’s Eve Mr Jones gets drunk in Willingdon and the animals are left unfed. When a cow breaks into the store-shed and Jones and his men arrive with whips, the animals turn on them together and chase them off the farm. "Jones was expelled, and the Manor Farm was theirs." The Rebellion is unplanned and driven by hunger rather than ideas, and it comes “much earlier and more easily” than anyone had expected.
Chapter 2: The Seven Commandments and the milk. Next morning the animals tour their farm, keep the farmhouse as a museum and paint a new name on the gate. Snowball writes the Seven Commandments on the barn wall. When the cows need milking, Napoleon sends the others off to the harvest, and by evening the milk has gone. "it was noticed that the milk had disappeared." The Commandments are meant to be “an unalterable law”, and the missing milk is the first sign of who will benefit from the Rebellion.
Chapter 3: The first harvest. The animals bring in the biggest harvest the farm has ever seen, in two days less than it usually took Jones and his men. The pigs direct rather than work. Boxer seems to do the work of three horses and takes a personal motto, and Benjamin says only that donkeys live a long time. "The pigs did not actually work, but directed and supervised the others." The happiest time on the farm already has two classes in it: the pigs who direct, and everyone else who works.
Chapter 3: Reading and the maxim. At the Sunday Meetings Snowball and Napoleon always disagree. Snowball’s committees fail, but his reading classes succeed after a fashion: by autumn almost every animal is “literate in some degree”, though most get no further than the letter A. Because the stupider animals cannot learn the Seven Commandments, Snowball reduces them to a single maxim, and the sheep bleat it for hours. "Boxer could not get beyond the letter D." Animals who cannot read must trust those who can, which is what later lets the Commandments be changed without anyone being able to prove it.
Chapter 3: The milk and the apples. As soon as nine puppies are weaned, Napoleon takes them from their mothers to educate them himself, and the farm soon forgets them. The milk and the windfall apples are kept for the pigs, and Squealer explains that brainworkers need them and that otherwise Jones would come back. "We pigs are brainworkers." In a letter to Dwight Macdonald, Orwell called the pigs' taking of the milk and apples the turning point of the story, and the puppies taken away here return in Chapter 5 as Napoleon's dogs.
Chapter 4: The news spreads. Pigeons carry the story of the Rebellion and the tune of Beasts of England to other farms. The neighbouring farmers, Pilkington of Foxwood and Frederick of Pinchfield, dislike each other but both spread stories of horrors on the farm, while animals across the county grow rebellious. "And yet the song was irrepressible." Writers have linked this wave of rebelliousness to the failed revolutions in Hungary and Germany, and the rivalry between Pilkington and Frederick shapes the rest of the book.
Chapter 4: The Battle of the Cowshed. In October Jones and his men, with others from the neighbouring farms of Foxwood and Pinchfield, try to retake the farm. Snowball's ambush wins the battle, and he and Boxer are decorated as Animal Heroes. Boxer grieves, believing he has killed a stable-lad, who was in fact only stunned. "I have no wish to take life, not even human life" Snowball's courage here is the history Squealer later rewrites, so it matters exactly what this chapter shows.
Chapter 5: Mollie leaves. Clover believes she saw one of Mr Pilkington's men stroking Mollie's nose, and finds sugar and ribbons hidden in Mollie's stall. Three days later Mollie disappears, and the pigeons report seeing her between the shafts of a smart dogcart outside a public-house, wearing a scarlet ribbon. "None of the animals ever mentioned Mollie again." Mollie chooses comfort over freedom, and the silence that follows is the first time an animal is simply dropped from the farm’s story.
Chapter 5: The windmill plans. Snowball and Napoleon disagree about everything, and most of all about Snowball’s plan for a windmill to make electricity. Snowball covers the floor of the incubator shed with drawings, Napoleon urinates on them, and the farm splits into two factions with rival slogans. "Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on" The windmill becomes the farm’s great project and its great burden, and Napoleon’s contempt for the plans is worth remembering when Squealer claims them for him later in the same chapter.
Chapter 5: Snowball is driven out. At the Sunday Meeting Snowball's speech for the windmill wins the animals over. As the vote is about to go his way, Napoleon gives a signal, and nine huge dogs, the puppies he took away, chase Snowball off the farm. Napoleon then abolishes the Sunday debates. "uttered a high-pitched whimper of a kind no one had ever heard him utter before" Argument loses to force in a single scene: Napoleon speaks for “barely thirty seconds” because he has the dogs waiting outside, and the farm’s short-lived democracy is over.
Chapter 5: Napoleon is always right. Squealer tells the animals that Napoleon has taken on leadership as a sacrifice and warns that one false step could bring Jones back. Boxer accepts it and adopts a second maxim. On the third Sunday after the expulsion Napoleon announces that the windmill will be built after all, and Squealer calls his earlier opposition tactics. "If Comrade Napoleon says it, it must be right." Propaganda finishes what the dogs began: the animals now silence their own doubts.
Chapter 6: Working like slaves. The animals work a sixty-hour week, then Sunday afternoons as well, which are voluntary but cost any absentee half his rations. They break stone by dragging boulders up the quarry and toppling them over the edge, and Boxer does more than anyone, rising earlier still. "All that year the animals worked like slaves." The next sentence says “they were happy in their work”, and the gap between the two sentences is the chapter’s irony.
Chapter 6: Trade and the farmhouse beds. Napoleon announces that the farm will trade with its neighbours through a solicitor, Mr Whymper, though the animals think they remember resolving never to use money. The pigs move into the farmhouse and sleep in beds, and when Muriel reads the Fourth Commandment to Clover it forbids beds only with sheets. "A bed merely means a place to sleep in." Squealer asks whether the resolution against trade was ever written down, and since it was not, the animals decide they imagined it: memory loses to the written record, and the pigs hold the paintbrush.
Chapter 6: The windmill falls. By autumn the half-built windmill is the animals’ pride. In a violent November gale it falls, and Napoleon, after pacing among the ruins, blames Snowball, pronounces a death sentence on him and orders the rebuilding to begin that same morning. "Snowball has done this thing!" Snowball becomes the enemy who explains every failure, which is how the regime avoids ever being wrong.
Chapter 7: The hens' revolt. In a bitter winter the animals go hungry, and Napoleon fools the visiting Mr Whymper by filling the empty bins with sand. He sells the hens’ eggs; when they resist by laying from the rafters so the eggs smash, he stops their rations, and nine hens die before the rest give in. "Nine hens had died in the meantime." The first resistance to Napoleon is starved into surrender and its dead are explained away as disease; some readers link the hens to the victims of the famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1932 and 1933.
Chapter 7: Snowball the traitor. Snowball is blamed for every mishap on the farm. Squealer announces that documents prove Snowball was Jones's agent from the start, and retells the Battle of the Cowshed with Napoleon as its hero. Boxer objects until Squealer says that Napoleon has stated it categorically. "Snowball was in league with Jones from the very start!" History is rewritten in front of the animals who lived it. Boxer’s one doubt earns him “a very ugly look” from Squealer, and four days later three of the dogs go for him.
Chapter 7: The confessions. Napoleon summons the animals to the yard. The dogs drag forward the four pigs who protested in Chapter 5; they confess to plotting with Snowball and are killed. Hens, a goose and sheep confess in turn and are killed too, until the corpses lie in a pile at Napoleon’s feet. "the air was heavy with the smell of blood" The regime now kills its own members, in a scene usually read as Stalin’s purges and the show trials of the late 1930s.
Chapter 7: Clover's vision. The survivors huddle on the knoll by the half-finished windmill. Clover looks down at the farm and knows, though she cannot find the words, that this is not what they worked for, yet resolves to stay loyal. The animals sing Beasts of England, and Squealer announces that the song is abolished. "These scenes of terror and slaughter" Squealer says the song is no longer needed because “the Rebellion is now completed”: the dream is declared achieved at the moment it has most clearly failed.
Chapter 8: Without cause. Some of the animals remember that the Sixth Commandment forbade killing. Benjamin will not read it, so Muriel reads it to Clover, with two extra words. Squealer reads out figures proving that production has soared, and Napoleon is given grand titles, credited with every success and praised in a poem by Minimus painted on the barn wall. "No animal shall kill any other animal WITHOUT CAUSE." The killings are made lawful after the event by rewriting the law, and the animals blame their own memories rather than the wall.
Chapter 8: The Battle of the Windmill. Napoleon sells the farm's timber to Mr Frederick, who pays in forged banknotes. Frederick's men then attack, blow up the finished windmill with blasting powder and are driven off only after a savage fight. Squealer calls it a victory, and the gun is fired to celebrate. "Then we have won back what we had before" Frederick’s forged banknotes are often linked to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, and the Battle of the Windmill to the Second World War, which reached the Soviet Union with the German invasion of June 1941. Orwell had one detail changed so that every animal takes cover “except Napoleon”, recognising that Stalin stayed in Moscow during the German advance.
Chapter 8: The whisky. The pigs find a case of whisky in the farmhouse cellar. Napoleon is seen in Mr Jones's old bowler hat, and next morning Squealer announces that he is dying, but he recovers and soon orders the paddock meant for retired animals to be sown with barley. One night Squealer is found beside a broken ladder and a pot of white paint. "No animal shall drink alcohol TO EXCESS." Only Benjamin understands what the ladder and the paint mean, and he says nothing: the one animal who can read the truth chooses not to share it.
Chapter 9: Rations and the Republic. In another hard winter every ration is cut except the pigs' and the dogs', which Squealer calls a readjustment. The pigs are given beer, weekly Spontaneous Demonstrations celebrate the farm, and Napoleon is elected President. Moses returns with his stories of Sugarcandy Mountain. "There was only one candidate, Napoleon, who was elected unanimously." Ceremony replaces food: the songs and processions let the animals forget, as the narrator puts it, “that their bellies were empty”, at least part of the time.
Chapter 9: Boxer falls. Boxer works on, older and thinner, hoping to see a good store of stone laid up before he retires. One summer evening he collapses dragging stone to the windmill. Squealer promises that he will be treated in the hospital at Willingdon, and Boxer looks forward to learning the rest of the alphabet. "Boxer has fallen! He is lying on his side and can't get up!" Boxer was a month from retiring on a pension that no animal has yet received, and his hopes for his retirement make what follows crueller.
Chapter 9: Boxer is taken away. While the animals are weeding turnips, a van comes for Boxer. Benjamin reads its lettering: it belongs to a horse slaughterer. Clover runs after it shouting a warning, and Boxer tries to kick his way out, but he is too weak, and the van disappears down the road. "Boxer was never seen again." The regime disposes of its most loyal worker, and his end is the one Major foretold in Chapter 1, carried out by the pigs rather than by Jones.
Chapter 9: Squealer's story. Squealer announces that Boxer died in the hospital, praising Napoleon with his last breath, and explains that the vet had bought the knacker's old van. Napoleon promises a memorial banquet. On the day of the banquet a grocer's van delivers a crate to the farmhouse, and that night the pigs are heard singing and quarrelling. "Those were his very last words, comrades." The narrator says only that the pigs had found the money for “another case of whisky” and draws no conclusion; the reader is left to work out where it came from.
Chapter 10: Years pass. Years pass, and few animals remember the Rebellion. Jones has died, Boxer is forgotten except by a few, and no animal has ever retired. The windmill is built at last, but it mills corn for profit instead of making electricity, and the other animals are as hungry and hard-worked as ever. "A time came when there was no one who remembered the old days before the Rebellion" With no memory of the past, the animals cannot tell whether life is better or worse, and have only Squealer’s figures to go on.
Chapter 10: Walking on two legs. After a week away with Squealer, the sheep return. One evening Clover's neigh brings the animals running to the yard, where Squealer, then a line of pigs, then Napoleon carrying a whip walk upright on their hind legs, while the sheep bleat a new slogan that drowns any protest. "Four legs good, two legs BETTER!" Major's rule that whatever walks on two legs is an enemy is overturned, and nobody is left to argue.
Chapter 10: The single Commandment. Clover leads Benjamin to the end of the barn and asks him to read the wall, and for once he agrees. Only one Commandment is left. The next day the pigs carry whips, and soon Napoleon smokes a pipe and the pigs wear Mr Jones’s clothes. "ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS" Benjamin breaks his silence only when there is nothing left to save, and the paradox on the wall keeps the word equal while emptying it of meaning.
Chapter 10: From pig to man. The pigs entertain neighbouring farmers in the farmhouse. Mr Pilkington praises how hard the animals are worked and how little they are fed, and Napoleon restores the name The Manor Farm. Watching through the window, the animals see a quarrel break out over the cards and can no longer tell pigs from men. "it was impossible to say which was which" The story comes full circle, and the quarrel is deliberate: in his 1947 preface to the Ukrainian edition, which survives only in translation, Orwell said he meant the book to end on a “loud note of discord”, not with pigs and men reconciled.

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Chapter-by-Chapter Analysis

See it unfold

Key moments

Old Major's speech

Chapter 1: Old Major's Speech

Chapter 2: The Rebellion

Chapter 3: Organising the Farm

Chapter 4: The Battle of the Cowshed

Chapter 5: Snowball's Expulsion

Chapter 6: The Windmill and Trade

Chapter 7: The Purges

Chapter 8: Napoleon the Leader

Chapter 9: Boxer's Fate

Chapter 10: Pigs and Men

Chapter-by-Chapter Analysis

See it unfold

Key moments

Old Major's speech

Chapter 1: Old Major's Speech

Chapter 2: The Rebellion

Chapter 3: Organising the Farm

Chapter 4: The Battle of the Cowshed

Chapter 5: Snowball's Expulsion

Chapter 6: The Windmill and Trade

Chapter 7: The Purges

Chapter 8: Napoleon the Leader

Chapter 9: Boxer's Fate

Chapter 10: Pigs and Men