Animal Farm 851is the responsibility of members of a community
to that community. In the novel’s opening sequence,
Jones symbolically fails the farm community when,
in his drunkenness, he inadequately secures the
chicken coop. The ramifications of this failure and
the signal that it is symptomatic of Jones’s lack of
value to the community are further spelled out by
the fact that his sloppy security enables the chickens
to escape that evening and thereby attend the meet-
ing at which Old Major urges them to rebel against
Jones. Similarly, the reasons why the farm animals
as a whole admire community members like Boxer
and hate ones like Moses are born of this principle.
Mutual commitment between the community and
its members is also one of the principles by which
the animals’ rebellion can be judged a failure, for
their governing council, the pigs, increasingly shirk
responsibilities while enjoying ever more exclusive
access to what luxuries the farm has to offer: milk,
apples, beds, and alcohol.
In the end, it is clear the animals are not living
in any more of a genuine community than before
Jones left; their exploitation by fellow animals, the
lack of care for the workers shown by the pigs, and
the imbalance in how “in common” the property of
the farm is actually held all reveal that their project
to institute a genuine community has failed. The
Rebellion’s exclusion of humans from “all animals”
is yet another betrayal of the concept of community,
and by excluding some animals from their com-
munity, they doom it. Napoleon and his underlings
are able to stoke fear of the exiles, as well as fear
of exile itself, in order to manipulate and subjugate
those remaining in the community. The animals’
unwillingness to treat humans civilly—lying to and
manipulating Pilkington and Frederick regarding
the wood, for example—further contribute to the
downfall of Animal Farm. If they had been willing
to interact honestly and with a sense of commu-
nity, Pilkington might have helped repel Frederick;
similarly, Frederick might never have attacked in the
first place.
Major asks that there be perfect unity among
all the animals, yet if we apply such criteria to the
farm post-Rebellion, it is clearly a failure. The theme
of community is therefore one of the novel’s most
complex, as it is the foundation and motivation of
the central event—the Rebellion—as well as the
principle by which that rebellion is ultimately found
wanting.
Michael AikencrueLty in Animal Farm
Acts of cruelty are not only a regular event in the
lives of Animal Farm’s characters; the forms of
cruelty they experience help to shape, guide, and
punctuate their lives.
Early in the novel, Old Major gives a speech in
which he lists the cruelties to which the animals are
subjected on a regular basis, including whippings,
being worked to exhaustion, and minimal food
and shelter. Many of these brutalities characterize
their day-to-day lives, while some particularly awful
events mark their birth (or not, as is the case of the
many hens’ eggs removed by the farmer before they
can grow to chicks) and death, as Old Major attests
with his statement that their lives are brought to an
early end when they are slaughtered with “hideous”
cruelty. In Major’s speech, as in later speeches of the
other pigs as well, the physical torture they suffer in
order to produce the farm’s goods is implicitly linked
to psychological and social (some might say “moral”)
cruelties, specifically the fact that, at the end of their
laborious days, the animals do not benefit from
the abuses they endure—their suffering produces
wealth they themselves are denied, thus perpetrating
a further moral cruelty upon them.
As noted, acts of cruelty not only punctuate
the animals’ lives, serving as epoch-marking occa-
sions (such as their slaughter), they also shape and
at times precipitate the plot of the novel: While
Major’s speech in large part insists things must
change because of the injustice of the animals’ suf-
fering and their exclusion from the fruits of that suf-
fering, life goes on as cruelly as ever after his speech.
It is not until the animals’ unnecessary starvation for
an entire day—an act of cruelty exceptional even by
the farm’s standards—that the animals finally bring
themselves to rebel. This cruelty beyond endurance
drives the animals to free themselves and break into
the feed store. When the humans respond with
more cruelty, whipping the animals to drive them
off the food, the combination of abuses further
galvanizes the animals to revolt, leading to their