Chapter Three: Summary and Analysis

It is time for the harvest season. The rebellion occurred in the spring, and life for the animals on the farm has since been more or less been relaxed. We now see a slow transition from the sort of democratic system envisioned by Old Major to a dictatorship. The changes do not occur at once, but are slow and subtle. The reader realizes that the pigs have the most political power; they enjoy monopoly over ideas pertaining to what is to be done. Snowball designs a flag to represent Animal Farm. The flag contains pictures of animals, and it serves as a propaganda tool. Most of the suggestions for implementing changes in the farm come from the pigs, and most animals vote for these proposed changes. Readers can see that this only looks like democracy; in reality, however, the situation represents the pigs’ intellectual monopoly.

Interestingly enough, Orwell does not suggest that this intellectual hierarchy is intentional. In fact, the situation seems like a natural outcome based on the natural abilities of the farm animals.

Napoleon also starts his own private army. This, of course, is not noticed by other animals until much later. Napoleon takes away Jessie and Bluebell’s puppies to train them. He keeps them secluded from all the other animals in the farm. One would expect some commotion about the missing puppies, but the animals seem unconcerned. Whether Orwell wants this incident to evoke parallels with the pogroms conducted by Stalin and Hiter is unclear, but it does make the reader wonder.

We also see how the Seven Commandments begin to be reduced to a mere line: “Four legs good, two legs bad.” This does seem unintentional at first, but this oversimplification allows the new leaders of the farm to interpret the Seven Commandments as they see fit. The single phrase clearly fails to capture the nuances of the ideas originally proposed, and this works in the new leaders’ favor.