Question:3 Describe at least one way that a character or individual changed in the text.
Explain how this change was important to the text as a whole.
Thesis statement
You can not trust anyone no matter how honest or believable they seem, as we can all lie. George Orwell’s animal farm shows this through the character Napoleon as he develops throughout the novel, and this has really changed my perspective on how you can trust people as a whole.
Napoleon
At the Start of the Novel, Animal Farm, Napoleon is one of the young boars who Mr Jones, the original farmer, had bred up to sell. Along with all of the other animals, Napoleon was heavily involved with all the secret meetings as they hoped to overthrow Mr Jones, so they could run the farm themselves as Mr Jones underfed and overworked them. However Napoleon evolved throughout this novel, and ended up becoming the dictator over the animal farm as Mr Jones once was. But on top of this, Napoleon let the pigs eat more food, live in the big farmhouse and even allowed them to drink alcohol. And when Napoleon made the other animals work, he was cruel and would half their rations if they didnt do the work they were supposed to do.
An example of this would be when all the animals returned from work one night towards the end of the novel, and Napoleon was walking around with all the other pigs, the only exception was that he had a whip in his trotter. The quote “he carried a whip in his trotter” that George Orwell used in the novel was intended to make the readers think that Napoleon had turned from being a comrade in part of the rebellion to being a harsh dictator, who wanted everything his way.
Orwell uses many techniques throughout his novel, and a lot of these techniques are used to make Napoleon look deceitful and repulsive. One of these techniques is persuading questions. Napoleon at first could not get the animals to believe him as he was not the smartest animal on the farm, but after exiling Snowball, he used Squealer to get his point across. And when the animals were in doubt Squealer was specifically good at getting them to change their minds and listen to everything Napoleon had to say.
One of these persuading and rhetorical questions that Squealer used was “You surely don’t want mr Jones back do you” which implies that he is trying to get them to think about how bad it was with mr Jones and how good it is with Napoleon when really Napoleon was just as bad as mr Jones at this point in the novel. The effect this had on the other animals was massive as they remembered the time before the rebellion as always being hungry and miserable but after Napoleon came to power, everything returned to how it was with Jones running the place. With Squealer implying that everything that Napoleon said was right, This made the animals think that with Napoleon leading the farm, everything was better than what it was like years earlier while Napoleon had just brainwashed them into thinking that.
Another technique used in animal farm is flashbacks. This technique corresponds to persuading questions because when Napoleon got squealer to convince the animals that what he was doing was right it gave them flashbacks of what the old days were like. Such as when Squealer taught the sheep to chant “four legs good, two legs better”. This gave the animals flashbacks to the old chant they used to sing which was “four legs good,two legs bad”. The chant that squealer taught the sheep also gave many members of the animal farm flashbacks of when they defeated mr jones in the battle of the cowshed, where they chanted “four legs good, two legs bad” after they forced mr Jones to flee from the farm once again.
