Animal Farm Characters: Complete Analysis

Napoleon is introduced as a pig who is 'not much of a talker' but has 'a reputation for getting his own way.' This quiet description conceals the most dangerous character in the novel. While Snowball organizes committees, teaches animals to read, designs the windmill, and wins debates at Sunday meetings, Napoleon works behind the scenes. His single most important act in the early chapters is taking nine puppies from their mothers and raising them in secret. This seemingly minor detail is the foundation of his dictatorship—Napoleon understands that power comes not from ideas or persuasion but from the ability to inflict violence.

When the windmill debate reaches its climax and the animals are about to vote in Snowball's favor, Napoleon unleashes the dogs. The intellectual argument is rendered irrelevant by physical force. Snowball's brilliant plans, his eloquence, his contributions to the Battle of the Cowshed—none of it matters against nine dogs trained to kill on command. This moment encapsulates Orwell's observation about how totalitarian leaders seize power: not through the strength of their ideas but through a monopoly on violence. Napoleon never wins an argument. He eliminates the need for argument entirely.

After Snowball's expulsion, Napoleon moves quickly to dismantle every democratic institution. Sunday meetings are abolished, all decisions are made by a pig committee led by Napoleon, and dissent is met with growling dogs. He then reverses his opposition to the windmill, claiming the idea was his all along. This brazen lie—contradicting what every animal witnessed—tests the limits of propaganda and finds them nearly limitless. The animals are confused, but Squealer's explanations and the dogs' menacing presence combine to produce acquiescence. Napoleon discovers that if you control both the narrative and the threat of violence, truth becomes whatever you say it is.

Napoleon's parallels to Joseph Stalin are precise and deliberate. Like Stalin, Napoleon is not the most brilliant or charismatic revolutionary—that distinction belongs to Snowball (Trotsky). Like Stalin, Napoleon builds power through bureaucratic control and a secret police force (the dogs) rather than through intellectual leadership. Like Stalin, he eliminates his rival, erases him from official history, and then uses him as a perpetual scapegoat for every failure. The purge in Chapter 7, where animals are forced to confess to collaborating with Snowball before being executed, directly mirrors Stalin's show trials and the Great Purge of 1936-38.

Napoleon's cult of personality—the titles ('Father of All Animals,' 'Terror of Mankind'), the poem by Minimus, the portrait on the barn wall, the attribution of every success to his genius—mirrors Stalin's self-glorification. The commandments' systematic alteration parallels the way Soviet law was rewritten to legalize whatever the state wished to do. Napoleon's relationship with Frederick (Hitler) and Pilkington (the Western Allies) mirrors Soviet foreign policy. Even the final dinner party, where Napoleon and the humans cannot be distinguished, reflects Orwell's observation that Soviet communism had become functionally identical to the capitalist imperialism it claimed to oppose.

Yet Napoleon is more than a historical cipher. He represents a universal type: the leader who desires power not as a means to an end but as an end in itself. He has no vision for Animal Farm beyond his own supremacy. He does not want to build a better society; he wants to rule. Every decision he makes—trading with humans, moving into the farmhouse, drinking alcohol, walking on two legs—serves only to increase his comfort and authority. He is Orwell's argument that some leaders are not corrupted by power; they were always corrupt. Power simply gives them the means to express what was always there.

Snowball is everything Napoleon is not: articulate, imaginative, idealistic, and genuinely concerned with improving the lives of all animals. While Napoleon quietly builds his power base through the puppies, Snowball throws himself into the work of creating a new society. He organizes literacy classes, forms committees (the Egg Production Committee, the Clean Tails League, the Whiter Wool Movement), and studies military tactics from a book of Julius Caesar's campaigns. His windmill design represents the most ambitious attempt to fulfill the revolution's promises—electricity would mean heated stalls, reduced labor, and a higher quality of life for every animal on the farm.

At the Battle of the Cowshed, Snowball's leadership is decisive. He personally leads the charge against Jones, is wounded by gunshot pellets, and organizes the defensive strategy that routs the human attack. He is awarded 'Animal Hero, First Class.' This genuine heroism makes Napoleon's later rewriting of history—claiming Snowball was fighting on Jones's side—all the more outrageous and all the more effective as a demonstration of propaganda's power. When the leader with the guns says the hero was actually a villain, and no one can safely disagree, history becomes whatever the leader dictates.

Yet Orwell does not present Snowball as flawless. Like the other pigs, Snowball participates in the early seizure of milk and apples. He supports the reduction of the Seven Commandments to the simplistic 'Four legs good, two legs bad,' which Orwell implies makes the animals more susceptible to sloganistic thinking. Snowball is an idealist, but he is also an intellectual elitist who assumes the pigs' natural superiority. His vision for Animal Farm is better than Napoleon's, but it is still a pig-led vision. Orwell suggests that even well-intentioned revolutionary leaders can carry the seeds of inequality in their assumptions about who should lead.

After his expulsion, Snowball's most important role is as an absent enemy. Napoleon needs a permanent threat to justify his security measures, his purges, and his demands for sacrifice. Snowball fills this role perfectly. Every time the windmill is damaged, Snowball did it. Every time crops fail, Snowball sabotaged them. Every problem on the farm is attributed to Snowball's supposed nocturnal visits. This pattern mirrors exactly how Stalin used the exiled Trotsky as a scapegoat for every Soviet failure, eventually rewriting history to make Trotsky a traitor who had always worked against the revolution.

The escalation of claims about Snowball's villainy demonstrates how propaganda works through gradual intensification. First, Snowball merely stole Napoleon's windmill plans. Then he was secretly working against the farm. Then he was always Jones's agent. Then he was actually fighting on Jones's side at the Battle of the Cowshed. Each claim is more absurd than the last, but each builds on the credulity established by the previous one. By the time Squealer claims Snowball's wound at the Cowshed was actually inflicted by Napoleon himself, the animals have been so thoroughly gaslit that even Boxer—who saw Snowball fighting bravely—doubts his own memory. Snowball's transformation from hero to villain is the novel's most chilling illustration of how totalitarian regimes control the past to control the present.

Boxer is the physical engine of Animal Farm. Without his labor, the farm would fail and the pigs' regime would collapse. He wakes before dawn, works after everyone else has stopped, and volunteers for every difficult task. When the windmill needs stones hauled from the quarry, Boxer does the work of several animals combined, dragging enormous boulders up the hill through sheer willpower. His motto, 'I will work harder,' is simultaneously the most inspiring and the most tragic phrase in the novel. It represents genuine dedication, but it also represents a refusal to think critically about who benefits from his labor.

Orwell presents Boxer with deep sympathy. He is kind, gentle, and selfless. At the Battle of the Cowshed, he is horrified when he thinks he has killed the stable boy, saying 'I have no wish to take life, not even human life.' He is universally loved and respected by the other animals. His physical strength could make him a threat to Napoleon—he is the one animal powerful enough to resist the dogs—but it never occurs to Boxer to use his strength for anything but obedient labor. He embodies the working class at its most admirable and its most vulnerable: strong enough to change the system, loyal enough never to try.

Boxer's second motto, 'Napoleon is always right,' is the novel's most damning indictment of blind loyalty. When Boxer briefly questions Squealer's claim that Snowball was a traitor at the Cowshed—'I do not believe that Snowball was a traitor at the beginning'—it represents the one moment when critical thinking almost breaks through. But when the dogs growl at him and Squealer insists, Boxer retreats to his motto. He could challenge the regime. His strength is unmatched. The other animals would follow him. Instead, he surrenders his judgment to authority. Orwell shows that Boxer's loyalty is not a virtue but a vulnerability—the quality that makes him most useful to tyrants and most likely to be destroyed by them.

Boxer's fate is the emotional core of Animal Farm and the moment that most powerfully demonstrates the regime's true nature. After years of backbreaking labor, Boxer's lungs give out and he collapses beside the windmill. He can no longer stand. The animals are distressed, but Napoleon announces that Boxer will be sent to the veterinary hospital in Willingdon for treatment. The animals are reassured—until Benjamin reads the writing on the side of the van that comes to collect Boxer: 'Alfred Simmonds, Horse Slaughterer and Glue Boiler.'

The animals scream for Boxer to escape, but he is too weak to kick his way out of the van. It drives away with Boxer drumming feebly on the walls. Three days later, Squealer announces that Boxer died peacefully in hospital, that his last words were 'Long live Comrade Napoleon,' and that the van had previously belonged to the knacker but had been purchased by the veterinary surgeon who simply hadn't repainted the lettering yet. It is the most transparent lie in the novel, yet the animals accept it—partly because they want to believe it, and partly because the alternative is too horrifying to contemplate.

Napoleon uses the proceeds from selling Boxer to buy a case of whiskey for the pigs. This detail is Orwell's most savage touch. The regime literally converts its most loyal servant into alcohol for the ruling class. Boxer gave everything—his strength, his health, his unquestioning devotion—and received in return a death at the knacker's and a crate of whiskey that he paid for with his own body. It is the purest expression of exploitation in the novel, and it applies far beyond the allegory of Soviet Russia: every system that uses up workers and discards them when they are no longer productive is sending Boxer to the glue factory.