Animal Farm Chapter 6

Chapter 6 Key Events

• The animals work a 60 hour week
• The windmill contunes to be built - a "slow labourious process"
• There are food shortages
• Animal Farm will start to trade with neighbouring farms
• The pigs move into the farmhouse and sleep in beds
• There is a strom at night and the windmill falls
• Snowball is blamed for the windmill's destuction
• Napoleon declares that they will start rebuilding the windmill immediately

Setting: Animal Farm

Structure of the chapter

The opening paragraph begins with the animals "worked like slaves" but they were "happy in their work". The chapter closes with a similar line, the first sentence of the final paragraph tells us "the animals were tired but happy". The chapter is "bookended" by the idea that the animals are happy - but were they really happy? The start of the chapter tells us that they worked like slaves; there's a juxtaposition eteen the description of what's happening an how the animals were feeling. Orweel is showing us that language can be manipulated to betray reality.

In Old Major's speech he describing how an animal working for humans he says "the life of an animal is misery and slavery". Snowball tells Mollie in chapter 2 that "those ribbons...are the badge of slavery" yet in chapter the 6 the animals are described as "working like slaves". Orwell uses this language and this repeated image that life on Animal Farm is no better than Manor Farm even if the animals are still convinced that they are happy.

Boxer

Orwell emphasises Boxer's strength, determination and loyalty (but later treatment of Boxer shows how cruel and tyrannical the pigs have been). In chapter 6 Orwell sets out Boxer as a tue and lyal comrade:

• "Nothing could have been achieved without Boxer"
• his "strength seemed equal to that of all the rest of the animals put together"
• "filled everyone with admiration"
• "to see him toiling up the slope inch by inch, his breath coming fast, the tips of his shoofs clawing at the gorund, and his great sides matte with sweat,  filled everyone with admirations"
• His two slogan, "I will work harder" and "Napoleon is always right" seemed to him a sufficient answer to all problems.

Orwell describes how "In his spare moments, of which there were not many nowadays, he would go alone to the quarry, collect a load of broken stone, and drag it down to the site of the windmill unassisted." Later in the chapter we are tols that Boxer would "work for an hour or two on his own by the light of the harvest moon"; this is highly emotive, Boxer is a striking image of an unbeatable force willing to go above and beyond the pig's expectation for the success of the farm. This make Boxer's fate later in the novel even more tragic. The later betrayal of BOxer…