Name: __________________________________ Date: ___________________ Period: ______

Themes Sample Answers

Next, use the evidence you’ve collected to write a Theme Description that explains the
role of the theme in Animal Farm. Your Theme Description should be 1-2 paragraphs.
Here are some questions to consider as you write each Theme Description:

 How do the ideas or actions of the main characters reflect different aspects of the
theme?
 Does the theme develop or change over the course of Animal Farm? If so, how?
 If your evidence includes symbols, explain how the author uses those symbols to
explore the theme.
 If your evidence includes specific quotes from the text, explain how those quotes
provide examples of how the theme applies to Animal Farm?

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Name: __________________________________ Date: ___________________ Period: ______

Totalitarianism
Evidence
1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6.

Theme Description
George Orwell once wrote: “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has
been [...] against totalitarianism.” Animal Farm, Orwell’s tale of the titular farm animals’
takeover of a provincial English farm and their development of a totalitarian state there,
is no exception. Totalitarianism is a form of government in which the state seeks to
control every facet of life, from economics and politics to each individual’s ideas and
beliefs. Different totalitarian states have different justifications for their rule, but Animal
Farm suggests that all totalitarian regimes are fundamentally the same: those in power
care only about maintaining their power by any means necessary, and they do so by
oppressing the individual and the lower classes.
While Animal Farm is, most directly, a pointed critique of the USSR, the totalitarian
regime established by Joseph Stalin in the early 20th century. However, the book also
implies at various points that the USSR was not—and indeed, isn’t—the only totalitarian
regime worth critiquing. At the beginning of the novel, Mr. Jones’s running of Manor
Farm reads as similarly totalitarian and despotic to Stalin’s regime. Mr. Jones spends his
time drinking and hires corrupt, unfeeling cronies to run the farm while his animals toil
their lives away, only to be slaughtered or otherwise killed gruesomely when they’re no
longer useful to him. The animals’ lives are short and guaranteed to be lived in hunger,
while Mr. Jones lives in relative luxury and believes that the natural order of things is that
he, as a human, should be the one in charge of his animals. After the animals overthrow
Mr. Jones and Napoleon the pig takes over the farm, the animals themselves begin to
emulate this oppressive hierarchy despite basing their initial uprising on the notion that
all animals are equal. At the end of the novel, it’s possible to see that if the other
farmers who visit Napoleon’s Animal Farm aren’t yet running totalitarian farming
establishments already, the hunger to do so is definitely there—Mr. Pilkington notes
that it’s commendable that Napoleon manages to eke so much labor out of his animals
while providing so little in the way of food and other care. This makes it clear that the
tendency for a government or organization to lean toward totalitarianism is often

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present, even if it’s not always evident in practice at a given time. In other words,
Napoleon as a totalitarian dictator isn’t an anomaly—he’s part of a much larger tendency
of powerful leaders to consolidate and hoard as much power as possible.
The way that Napoleon, Stalin, and other leaders, fictional and real, achieve these
totalitarian states is by controlling every aspect of life in their state. Napoleon
demonstrates that this is particularly achievable through offering education and elite job
training to some, while denying those opportunities to many—while also assuring the
“many,” through propaganda and pro-state events, that things are as they should be.
While the pig Snowball takes it upon himself to attempt to educate everyone on Animal
Farm, Napoleon insists that it’s not worth it to educate the animals who are already
adults and instead, it’s better to focus on educating the youth. This does several things.
First, by having an uneducated adult population, Napoleon ensures that those adults
won’t be able to teach their offspring to think and potentially push back on him. Those
adults also won’t be able to push back themselves, both because of their own illiteracy
and because of how little power they have to begin with. Then, while Napoleon uses
“youth” to describe who he wants to educate, the youth are at first just the dogs’ nine
puppies and later, are just the 31 piglets he fathered. Educating the puppies turns them
into nine vicious adult dogs that mirror the Soviet secret police and go on to help
Napoleon maintain his rule, while the young pigs represent an educated and powerful
ruling class. Essentially, when Napoleon mentions educating youth, he very purposefully
doesn’t include the young chicks, ducklings, calves, or foals in the term, thereby
relegating them to a position in society where they’re unable to advocate for themselves
or for change—or indeed, even to understand that speaking up is something they can or
should do.
In addition to controlling education and advancement opportunities, the novel also
illustrates the role of propaganda in a totalitarian state. From Napoleon’s initial takeover
of Animal Farm to the very end of the novel, he skillfully deploys propaganda in the form
of the Seven Commandments themselves, as well as the skilled orator pig Squealer and
the pig Minimus, who composes songs and poems that praise Animal Farm and
Napoleon. Importantly, much of what the pigs write and say to the other farm animals
comes in the form of absolutes, as when Old Major says initially that animals should
never concede that they might have common interests with men, or when Squealer
insists that the pigs need all the food they can get—or else Mr. Jones will surely return.
Importantly, the exhausted and uneducated animals have complete trust that Napoleon
has their best interests at heart—something Squealer reminds them of constantly—in
addition to the inability to recognize the pigs’ propaganda efforts for what they are. In
this way, Napoleon creates a cult of personality around himself that is fueled by fear,
ignorance, and the deeply-held belief that Napoleon’s version of Animal Farm (while still
short on food and requiring hard work) is the best possible scenario.
Animal Farm offers no real remedies for overthrowing totalitarianism. Indeed, the end of
the novel, in which both pigs and humans are revealed to be equally corrupt and
interested in presiding over totalitarian states, is extremely grim. However, the very
existence of the novel itself allows readers to understand how a totalitarian state comes
into being, gains power, and holds onto it. Knowing how this process happens and has
happened historically, as well as recognizing one’s own power to not let this happen in
the first place, the novel suggests, are the best thing readers can do to guard against

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totalitarianism in their own lifetimes.

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Revolution and Corruption

4. 5. 6.

Theme Description
Animal Farm depicts a revolution in progress. Like all popular revolutions, the uprising in
Animal Farm develops out of a hope for a better future, in which farm animals can enjoy
the fruits of their own labor without the overbearing rule of humans. At the time of the
revolution, all of the animals on Mr. Jones’s farm, even the pigs, are committed to the
idea of universal equality—but these high ideals that fueled the revolution in the first
place gradually give way to individual and class-based self-interest. Animal Farm thus
illustrates how a revolution can be corrupted into a totalitarian regime through slow,
gradual changes.
At first, the revolution creates the sense that there could be a bright future in store for
Animal Farm. Old Major makes a number of objectively true points in his speech to the
animals, such as that Mr. Jones is a cruel and unfeeling master who cares little or not at
all for their wellbeing, and that humans themselves don’t produce anything (like eggs or
milk). The Seven Commandments that Snowball and Napoleon come up with in the
months after are similarly idealistic, and, in theory, lay the groundwork for a revolution
that truly will elevate individual workers above horrible, totalitarian leaders like Mr.
Jones. Indeed, when the rebellion surprisingly happens, things initially seem as if they’re
going to go in a positive direction for everyone: there are debates among the animals,
animals have the ability to propose items for discussion, and every animal participates in
the working of the farm. Best of all, the animals pull in the best and fastest hay harvest
that the farm has ever seen, suggesting that their revolution has benefits in addition to
freeing them from a cruel situation under Mr. Jones. It seems possible that they’ll truly be
able to make self-government work.
However, the novel also offers early clues that corruption begins to take hold on Animal
Farm long before Napoleon takes drastic steps to turn it into a totalitarian state, even
when by most metrics, things seem to be going smoothly and fairly. For instance, it’s not
an accident that only the pigs and the dogs are the ones who become fully literate.
While to a degree, this becomes a chicken and egg question (in terms of which came

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first: literacy or corrupt power), the fact remains that the only literate creatures are the
ones who ultimately seize control. Further, even idealistic Snowball insists to the other
animals that because the literate pigs are “mindworkers” engaged in figuring out how
exactly to run the farm, they need the entire crop of apples and all the cows’ milk. This
power shift takes place during that first exceptional hay harvest, making it clear that
things aren’t as rosy as the hay yield, and the increased productivity it suggests, might
lead one to believe.
The corruption doesn’t end with the theft of milk and apples; by the end of the novel, the
pigs sleep in the farmhouse, have a school for their pig children, drink alcohol, and
consume sugar off of the Jones’s set of fine china—all things initially forbidden in some
form in the original Seven Commandments. However, one of the most corrupt things
that the pigs do is to modify the Seven Commandments to effectively legalize whatever
it is they decide they want to do, from drinking alcohol to sleeping in beds. This
corruption is something that most animals don’t notice, while those that do are either
cowed into pretending that they don’t notice or executed for expressing concern. This
combination of fear and unthinking trust in leaders, the novel suggests, is one of the
most important elements that allows corruption to flourish.
Though the animals’ rebellion began as one against humans and everything they stand
for in the animals’ eyes—greed, alcoholism, decadence, and cruelty, among other vices
—it’s telling that the novel ends when animals, led by Clover, cannot tell Napoleon and
his pig cronies apart from the human farmers who came for a tour and dinner. With this,
the novel proposes that revolution is something cyclical that repeats throughout time.
Because of corruption, those individuals who are powerful to begin with or who
overthrow cruel and heartless leaders will inevitably come to resemble those former
leaders, once they understand what it’s like to occupy such a position of power. In this
sense, Orwell paints a grim view of revolution as a whole, as Animal Farm demonstrates
clearly that even when the ideals of a revolution may be good, it’s all too easy to twist
those ideals, fall prey to corruption, and poison the movement, harming countless
powerless individuals in the process.

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Name: __________________________________ Date: ___________________ Period: ______

Class Warfare
Evidence
1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6.

Theme Description
One of the main tenets of Animalism, the ideology that Napoleon and Snowball
develop, is that all animals are equal. However, it doesn’t take long for the pigs to begin
to refer to themselves as “mindworkers” to distinguish themselves from the other
animals, who work as physical laborers. Through this, Animal Farm shows how
differences in education and occupation lead to the development of a class hierarchy,
which leads inevitably to class warfare, in which one class seeks to dominate the other.
Though Animal Farm suggests that the “mindworking” or intellectual class will almost
always prevail in this struggle, it also goes to great lengths to suggest that whether
because of ignorance, inaction, or fear, this is something that the working class allows to
happen.
Even as early as Old Major’s speech, it’s possible to detect that there are class divisions
at play on Manor Farm. It’s telling, for one, that it’s a pig who’s giving the speech, and
that the other pigs sit closest to the platform while the other animals fill in behind them.
The respect that all animals have for Old Major, and the seating arrangements, suggest
that pigs as a species already occupy a special and revered place on the farm. Following
the rebellion, the pigs prey on this structure by using their literacy to catapult
themselves to positions of power as “mindworkers,” or those in charge of figuring out
how to run the farm (rather than doing the manual work of running the farm). Because of
the pigs’ literacy, they’re able to effectively take control over every aspect of the farm
and subjugate those they believe to be less intelligent or less powerful than they are.
They do so in part by making it extremely scary and dangerous to stand up to them,
which Napoleon does by training nine attack dogs and sending them out with the pigs
when they spread news. With the dogs— known killers—around, no one dares ask too
many questions that might betray their dissatisfaction with their lives.
As objectively successful as the pigs may be in this endeavor, Animal Farm goes to great
lengths to show that especially at the beginning, the pigs are only able to achieve
superior status by tricking others into thinking they’re less powerful. This is especially

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apparent in the case of Boxer, a good-hearted but unintelligent carthorse. Boxer throws
himself into the work of cultivating the farm—his personal motto becomes, “I will work
harder”—and he fully supports Napoleon and Napoleon’s rule, even when at times, Boxer
recognizes that Napoleon isn’t actually acting in Boxer and the other workers’ best
interests. The fact that he’s not a mindworker, however, means that Boxer never pushes
back on this much. This all comes to a head during Napoleon’s trials and executions of
“traitorous” farm animals, when Napoleon sets his dogs on four young pigs, and three of
the dogs attack Boxer. Boxer sends two dogs flying and pins the third under his massive
hoof—it’s clear, through the dog’s terrified reaction, that if Boxer were so inclined, he
could do away with Napoleon and Napoleon’s brutal dogs with a couple of kicks.
Napoleon’s power as a mindworker, however, means that he’s created an environment
in which Boxer isn’t aware of his own physical strength. Part of being part of the lower
class, Animal Farm suggests, is not being aware of one’s power to effectively fight back
against rulers like Napoleon, even if just physically. This state of not recognizing even
one’s physical power to fight back, furthermore, isn’t unique to Boxer; if the non-pig farm
animals were somehow able to band together, it’s possible they could’ve ousted
Napoleon through force.
On the other end of the spectrum, the novel offers Benjamin, the jaded donkey who
believes that no matter what, life will be difficult, and everyone will work against him.
Notably, Benjamin, unlike Boxer, becomes completely literate within a few months and
seems to alone in his awareness of the pigs’ corruption and attempts to manipulate the
animals. Benjamin, however, stubbornly refuses to read the ever-changing
Commandments to others and never sees a reason to enlighten his fellow working
animals as to what’s going on. As a result, when Benjamin finally does speak up about
Napoleon’s betrayal of Boxer and reads that Boxer is headed for the glue factory rather
than the vet, it’s too late to do anything: the animals don’t have enough time to trap the
van containing Boxer on farm property, and Boxer is too ill and weak to break out of the
van. Through this, the novel illustrates how willful inaction and ignorance of all sorts
work together to keep the lower classes oppressed: those who know what’s going on
never alert those who might be able to fight, while those capable of fighting never figure
out who their true enemy is, and therefore are never able to do anything but support the
state that oppresses them.
Through this, Animal Farm paints a picture of class struggle in which once class divisions
are established, it’s very difficult to change them or break them down, even in light of
guiding principles like the Seven Commandments that would theoretically suggest that
class shouldn’t exist in the first place. However, even more damning is the novel’s
assertion that this is something that the repressed lower classes allow to happen to
them when they’re unable to identify their oppressors or refuse to speak out when they
do see what’s going on. The novel ultimately suggests that silence—especially when
combined with fear and a lack of education—is the primary reason for oppression and
the reason why the upper classes are able to maintain their power so effectively.

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Name: __________________________________ Date: ___________________ Period: ______

Language as Power
Evidence
1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6.

Theme Description
From the beginning of the popular revolution on Manor Farm, language—both spoken
and written—is instrumental to the animals’ collective success, and later to the pigs’
consolidation of power. Through Animal Farm, Orwell illustrates how language is an
influential tool that individuals can use to seize power and manipulate others via
propaganda, while also showing that education and one’s corresponding grasp of
language is what can turn someone into either a manipulative authority figure or an
unthinking, uneducated member of the working class.
At the novel’s beginning, the animals are on equal footing in terms of education, more or
less—though Old Major has had time in his retirement to think about the state of the
world and develop his theory that man is the root of all the animals’ problems, none of
the animals, at this point, are literate or can do much more than expound on their ideas.
Right after the rebellion, however, the pigs reveal that Old Major’s speech was the start
of what will become their rise to power in two distinct ways. First, the pigs Napoleon
and Snowball spent the three months between Old Major’s speech and the rebellion
distilling Old Major’s ideas into a theory they call Animalism; second, the pigs taught
themselves to read. Taken together, these efforts turn the pigs into an intellectual class
and provide them the basis for going on to refer to themselves as “mindworkers,” or
individuals whose contributions to society are intellectual in nature, and therefore don’t
have to contribute by doing manual labor or something of the sort. In this sense, the
pigs’ grasp of language is what propels them to power in the first place.
It doesn’t take long, however, before the pigs begin to abuse their power. Though
Snowball takes it upon himself to try to teach every farm animal to read, his efforts are
overwhelmingly unsuccessful—only Muriel and Benjamin ever become fully literate.
Most other animals only learn some of the alphabet, and in the case of the sheep, never
get past the letter A. While the novel is consistent in its assertion that this is because
animals like the sheep and Boxer are unintelligent, it’s also important to note that, in
terms of the working of the farm, Boxer and the sheep are more valuable for the physical

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labor they can perform than for anything they might be able to do intellectually. Further,
because of the hard labor required of the animals, it’s implied that there’s little time for
someone like Boxer to work at learning to read, and indeed, when Boxer begins to think
about his retirement, he suggests he’d like to take the time—which he’s never had
before—to learn the rest of the alphabet. By contrast, education and achieving literacy
for pig and dog youth soon becomes a center point of the pigs’ rule, especially once
Napoleon declares they need a school for pig children—a project that, conveniently for
the powerful pigs, also leaves the animals tasked with building the school no time to
learn anything themselves.
The consequences of the other animals’ illiteracy and lack of education, the novel shows,
is that it makes them susceptible to blindly believing misinformation and propaganda
that the pigs spread through Squealer and Minimus. Not only can animals like Clover
not recognize when the pigs tamper with the Seven Commandments and alter them to
meet their needs; Clover also cannot remember correctly what the Commandments
used to be. Further, Animal Farm also shows how the extremely uneducated, such as the
sheep (and, it’s implied, Boxer) can be manipulated into becoming important tools for
spreading propaganda. Though Boxer is unable to read, he nevertheless trusts his
leaders completely and so adopts the maxim “I will work harder,” which the other
animals find more compelling and noble than any of the flowery speeches that Napoleon
or Squealer give. The sheep, on the other hand, are unable to memorize the Seven
Commandments and so learn a maxim that Snowball develops: “Four legs good, two legs
bad.” This maxim in particular is so simplistic as to be almost meaningless, in addition to
containing no nuance. The fowl, for instance, have two legs and take issue with this
maxim until Snowball is able to explain to them why they’re actually wrong—and
because of their lack of intelligence and Snowball’s grasp of language, he’s able to
effectively convince them that the maxim functions as it should.
By the end of the novel, the pigs are so powerful that their language and intellectualism
doesn’t have to make sense—or be true—in any way; rather, it simply has to look like
they’re smart and in charge. Squealer’s constant recitation of figures “proving” that
Animal Farm is producing more than ever function to make him look powerful and
intelligent, but the animals are unable to fully reconcile that in reality, they have little
food no matter what Squealer says. Similarly, the final change to the Seven
Commandments, in which the Commandments change from seven (albeit altered)
guiding principles to the phrase “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal
than others” encapsulates this idea. The phrase mocks the meaning of the word “equal,”
for one—if all animals are equal, there shouldn’t be a hierarchy among them, when
clearly, there is one—while also being ambiguous enough for the pigs to essentially
make the phrase mean whatever they want it to. In this sense, it allows them to
maintain their power, since they can insist the phrase means they should have more
power, while also still employing words like “equal” that make the other animals feel as
though, per the phrase, everything is still fine. In this way, Animal Farm shows clearly
how those in power and with a firm grasp of language can easily use it to manipulate
those who don’t have the education or memory to stand up to them—and in doing so,
keep those individuals down, deny them any possibility of advancement, and create the
illusion that things are just as they should be.

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Name: __________________________________ Date: ___________________ Period: ______

The Soviet Union

4. 5. 6.

Theme Description
While Animal Farm condemns all forms of totalitarianism, it’s most explicitly a bitter
attack on the Soviet Union. Though Orwell supported the ideals of socialism, he strongly
opposed the Soviet Union’s descent into totalitarianism under Stalin in the decades
before and during World War II. Animal Farm satirically attacks the Soviet Union by
mirroring many events from Soviet history, and though Animal Farm is subtitled “A Fairy
Story,” almost nothing that happens in it is at all fantastical; nearly every event, and
indeed every character, correlates to a historical event, person, or group of people.
The first portion of the novel has parallels to the final years of the 19th century and the
first few decades of the 20th century. Mr. Jones is a parallel to Tsar Nicholas, the final
monarch of Russia, whose family was widely seen as decadent and unconcerned with the
fact that many Russians at that point were starving and wildly dissatisfied with their
rulers. Old Major represents Vladimir Lenin, a Marxist revolutionary who led the
Bolshevik Party that ultimately ousted Nicholas during the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
Like Old Major, Lenin didn’t survive to see his ideals come to fruition; rather, his
associate Leon Trotsky, represented by Snowball in the novel, took over and advocated
for spreading revolutions all over the world (as when Snowball proposes sending out
more pigeons to spread word of the rebellion to neighboring farms) and planned to
modernize what, by this time, had become the USSR. Joseph Stalin exiled Trotsky,
however, and ultimately assassinated him in Mexico. Stalin, like his literary counterpart
Napoleon, didn’t care much for debate, and instead amassed power, developed a
totalitarian state, and relied heavily on propaganda to control the population. Events on
Animal Farm after Napoleon’s takeover mirror many that happened in the USSR during
his rule, including Stalin’s Five Year Plans (the first and second windmills), rebellions on
the part of farmers and sailors (the hens’ rebellion), and Stalin’s show trials and
executions (the confessions and executions of the four young pigs and other animals).
The novel ends with a parallel to the Tehran Conference in 1943, during which Winston
Churchill of Great Britain, Franklin D. Roosevelt of the US, and Stalin met to discuss how

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to achieve peace after World War II, an event that Orwell mocks when both Mr.
Pilkington (the Allies) and Napoleon cheat at cards, presciently predicting what would
ultimately develop into the Cold War between the US and the USSR.
Notably, Animal Farm focuses intently on the inner monologues and experiences of
those who don’t have much or any power, such as Clover and Boxer (who symbolize
female and male peasant workers, respectively). Through Clover’s experience in
particular, Orwell paints a picture of 40 years’ worth of history that was alternately, and
at times simultaneously, hopeful and horrific—and often hungry and scary for those
without power, education, or the means to escape—as Mollie, the cat, and the real-life
middle class do and did. Further, Orwell doesn’t stop at vilifying the USSR alone. Instead,
he suggests that capitalists who got rich doing business with the USSR, as represented
by Mr. Whymper, and ultimately, the allies who gave Stalin a legitimate place on the
world stage, as represented by the farmers’ visit to Animal Farm at the end of the novel,
are also to blame for what happened. Through this, Orwell cautions against
romanticizing any aspect of Russian or USSR history, as even though he may have
sympathized with the ideals that drove the revolution to begin with, he makes it very
clear that the fruits of the revolution are nothing anyone should aspire to. Rather than
helping anyone, the revolutions actually led to starvation, fear, death, and trauma of all
sorts.

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