I’ve been doing these three-act analyses for many months now, and it recently occurred to me that I hadn’t yet tried the model out on allegorical fiction. This is why today I thought I’d do an analysis of Animal Farm by George Orwell.
Not familiar with the three-act structure? No worries. Read this article for a detailed discussion on this topic.
Spoiler Alert! If you’re not familiar with Animal Farm, it’s a satire and allegory for totalitarianism. Even though it was published in 1945, many elements of that story may feel eerily familiar in this day and age. The book itself is a novella and quite short, so if you haven’t read it, grab a copy and dive in. It’s a quick read. And, of course, as with all our three-act analyses, there will be spoilers… so, there you go.
Okay, let’s dive into our analysis of Animal Farm.
ACT 1: The story begins with a vivid opening image: “Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the henhouses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the popholes. With the ring of light from his lantern dancing from side to side, he lurched across the yard, kicked off his boots at the back door, drew himself a last glass of beer from the barrel in the scullery, and made his way up to bed, where Mrs. Jones was already snoring.”
Right from the get-go, we get a sense for what the status quo looks like in this story. I often talk about Act 1 as being like a “before picture” in an infomercial: it shows us what things were like before the transformation so we have context and a basis of comparison. From this opening image, we get a sense of what life is like on the farm and we see that Mr. Jones is quite inadequate as a farmer and leader. This sets the scene for the animals to rebel against the humans and create Animal Farm.
Here’s how the five promises of Act One break down.
Character: Interestingly enough, there is no one character that we root for in this story. In fact, you could say that the true protagonist is not a single character at all, but the collective—every animal in Animal Farm, together as one. Still, there are a few characters who stand out and are worth noting:
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- Old Major, the aged pig who convinces the other animals to rebel against the farmer.
- Napoleon, the pig who eventually takes leadership of Animal Farm.
- Squealer, a pig who becomes the spokes-pig for Napoleon’s regime.
- The dogs, who become Napoleon’s private guard and secret police.
- Snowball, a pig who at first collaborates (and also competes) with Napoleon, but is later exiled and scapegoated.
- Boxer, the strong workhorse who is dedicated to the mission of Animal Farm.
- Clover, the mare who begins as a true believer, but later begins to question.
- Benjamin, the donkey philosopher who sees things for what they truly are.
- Muriel, the goat who is one of the few animals on the farm who can read (besides the pigs, or course).
- Mollie, the foolish mare who can’t let go of the old ways and eventually runs away.
- Moses, the raven who represents religion and spirituality.
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Note that we meet most of these animals right at the beginning of Chapter 1—with the exception of the pigs, who remain relatively anonymous until after the revolution. In fact, the spotlight at the beginning of the book is really on Old Major, and while Orwell name-drops many of the other characters (minus the pigs), it’s more to give us a sense for the vastness of the farm and the sheer number of animals represented in it. We don’t really get to know most of the animals until after the revolution. In this way, the collective (and not the individual) is the central character of the story.
Voice: Because this is satire, there’s a thread of irony—and sometimes even humor—throughout the story. There are certain things that are downright absurd (like when the pigs start walking on their hindlegs) and some things that are truly tragic (like when Boxer gets taken away).
World: The story centers on the farm—first called Manor Farm, then changed to Animal Farm (and then changed back). While we get hints of a world beyond the borders of the farm, we never see it on the page.
Problem: Mr. Jones is a terrible farmer and the animals are unhappy.
Event: That night, after Mr. Jones goes to bed drunk, Old Major calls all the animals together for a meeting. He teaches them a song called Beasts of England and gets them all riled up for revolution.
Overall, Act 1 of Animal Farm is relatively short (about a chapter), and soon thereafter we reach the first pivot point.
PIVOT POINT 1: Old Major dies three days later in his sleep. The animals decide to rise up, start a revolution, and take the farm for themselves. (The revolution is the external event.)
Once they have won and taken the farm, the animals come together and make a set of rules, or Seven Commandments. (This is the internal choice.)
The making of these commandments is a pivotal moment. We’ll be reminded of these commandments again and again throughout the story, and at times, when it seems the commandments have been broken, it will turn out they have only been “misremembered.”
ACT 2: At first, it seems like everything is going well. The animals are happy with their newfound freedom and the farm is productive and appearing to prosper. Slowly, the pigs begin to take on more and more power, with Snowball and Napoleon constantly at odds with each other and jockeying for leadership. As time passes, we start to see evidence of Napoleon’s power over the rest of the farm, as well as instances where the Seven Commandments are seemingly broken.
Napoleon’s Rise to Power
Early on after the Revolution, the dogs have nine puppies who mysteriously disappear into Napoleon’s care. (He claims to be taking charge of their education.) None of the animals give it a second thought until Snowball and Napoleon begin to argue over the windmill (Snowball in favor, Napoleon against).
In the midst of this argument, “there was a terrible baying sound outside, and nine enormous dogs wearing brass-studded collars came bounding into the barn. They dashed straight for Snowball, who only sprang from his place just in time to escape their snapping jaws.” These dogs are the puppies—now all grown up and acting as Napoleon’s secret police.
The dogs chase off Snowball, who runs away, never to be seen again. However, Napoleon continually blames anything that goes wrong on the farm as part of Snowball’s evildoing, claiming that Snowball is trying to infiltrate the farm from the outside.
A second, more dramatic instance of Napoleon showing his power is when he holds a series of public executions. Several animals are executed for admitting to treason and being in league with Snowball. These executions leave the surviving animals shaken and questioning. Yet, Napoleon’s power over the other animals has now been sealed. He has shown his ruthlessness by even executing a few pigs who had spoken out against him. (Not even fellow pigs are safe!)
The animals also fight two battles with the humans, one called the Battle of the Cowshed, in which the animals clearly win, and later a battle surrounding the windmill, where the animals are barely able to hold onto the farm. Napoleon (along with the rest of the pigs and the dogs) uses both battles as a way to maintain his power over the other animals. He claims the battles are examples of humans’ evildoings and creates an “us against them” mentality that distracts the animals from the truth: that Napoleon is slowly but surely making himself a totalitarian dictator.
RULE OF 3: The Seven Commandments are a fundamental part of the story, and with them we have an interesting Rule of 3 (with a twist). Throughout Act 2, we have three instances where the Seven Commandments are clearly broken by the pigs, yet when the other animals check, they find that the written Commandments have been edited. While some animals begin to entertain doubts, most of them chalk it up to misremembering the original Commandments.
Here are the Seven Commandments as originally stated:
- Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.
- Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.
- No animal shall wear clothes,
- No animal shall sleep in a bed.
- No animal shall drink alcohol.
- No animal shall kill any other animal.
- All animals are equal.
The first instance of breaking the Seven Commandments is when the pigs move into the Farmhouse and start sleeping in the beds. Clover and Muriel go to read the original Commandments and find that Commandment #4 says: “No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets.” Squealer, always the smooth-talker, manages to convince them that the objection was never to beds per se, but to the sheets.
The second example of breaking the Seven Commandments comes with the executions. The surviving animals are horrified and even Boxer (whose catchphrase is “Napoleon is always right”) begins to question how something so terrible could happen on their farm. When Clover asks Muriel to read her the Sixth Commandment, she discovers that it says: “No animal shall kill any other animal without cause.” They admit that they must have misremembered the Commandment and recognize that clearly Napoleon did have cause to execute those traitors since they were in league with Snowball.
The third example of breaking the Commandments is when the pigs get drunk. The pigs find some whiskey and drink to the point where they are so hungover, they think Napoleon might die. After a few days, Napoleon and the rest of the pigs recover, and when Muriel goes to read the Commandments, she finds that the Fifth Commandment says: “No animal shall drink alcohol to excess.”
What makes this third instance stand out from the other two is that it is the first time the pigs are breaking a Commandment not just to claim power, but without much good reason at all. The first two times they break the Commandments (and then edit them thereafter) it is clearly a strategic move from Napoleon to elevate his power. The third instance with the whiskey, however, is purely frivolous. He’s not breaking the Commandments as part of a strategy, he’s just doing it because he can and that is enough. This frivolity shows just how deeply entrenched his power is by this point in the story.
The twist with this Rule of 3 is that we actually have a fourth instance (which occurs in Act 3), and in this case the entire Seven Commandments get overwritten altogether. In other words, the Seven Commandments are not simply edited but completely replaced with one single Commandment: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
MIDPOINT: At around the midway point of the novella, we get a temporary triumph. The animals are working hard, but they are happy because they are free and not working for a “pack of idle, thieving human beings.” While they are working hard, things seem to be going reasonably well.
If they had no more food than they had in Jones’s day, at least they did not have less. The advantage of only having to feed themselves, and not having to support five extravagant human beings as well, was so great that it would have taken a lot of failures to outweigh it. And in many ways the animal method of doing things was more efficient and saved labor.
But then things start to change. Napoleon decides on a new policy: that Animal Farm will trade with neighboring farms. After all, if they are to build a windmill, they need materials and supplies that they can’t produce themselves on the farm. The other animals start having doubts. While nobody does anything about it, this is the first moment where the animals start to doubt and question Napoleon’s leadership.
PIVOT POINT 2: Boxer, the horse (and perhaps the most loyal of Napoleon’s followers) gets injured while building the windmill. He is close to the age of retirement and is looking forward to his days out in the peaceful pasture. Yet, one afternoon, a cart comes to take him away. It turns out that he is being taken to the horse slaughterer. This is the external event that marks the second pivot point.
The internal choice is how the animals choose to believe Squealer’s excuse that Boxer was not being taken to a horse slaughterer and was, in fact, being taken to the veterinary hospital. The animals choose to believe that Boxer died peacefully after receiving the best of care and all manner of expensive treatments (which, of course, Napoleon supposedly paid for without a second thought). This choice to believe the lie opens the door for Act 3, in which the pigs become so similar to humans that they are almost unrecognizable.
ACT 3: Like Act 1, Act 3 is also a single chapter in length. The beginning of Chapter 10 uses exposition to skip time, making the chapter seem longer than it is.
Years passed. The seasons came and went, the short animal lives fled by. A time came when there was no one who remembered the old days before the Rebellion, except Clover, Benjamin, Moses the raven, and a number of the pigs.
Regardless of how things are going, though, the animals of the farm never give up hope. They find it a point of honor that they are part of Animal Farm, the only animal-run farm in the country. This pride and belief in what they are doing seems to sustain them and keep them optimistic.
CRISIS: Squealer orders the sheep to follow him to a deserted part of the farm, supposedly to learn a new song. Up until that point, the sheep had a habit of breaking out into chants of “Four legs good, two legs bad!” whenever the animals started getting antsy or possibly questioning Napoleon’s leadership. This chant was a sort of shorthand for the Seven Commandments. For a whole week, Squealer stays sequestered with the sheep, teaching them that new song “for which privacy was needed.”
Then one evening Clover sees something terrifying. “It was a pig walking on his hind legs.” Up until that point, animals were forbidden to walk on hind legs like humans. This fact was included in two of the Seven Commandments.
CLIMAX: Then Napoleon appears.
And finally there was a tremendous baying of dogs and a shrill crowing from the black cockerel, and out came Napoleon himself, majestically upright, casting haughty glances from side to side, and with his dogs gambolling round him.
He carried a whip in his trotter.
At this moment, all the sheep break out into a new chant: “Four legs good, two legs better!” We have seen throughout the story how Napoleon has slowly imposed his power over the other animals, but it is this moment where we see that he is no better than the human farmer before him. Shortly thereafter, the Seven Commandments are replaced by the one: “some animals are more equal than others.” After that, the pigs start wearing clothes signaling the last of the Seven Commandments has now officially been broken. It’s as though the Commandments never even existed.
At this point in the story, we have come full circle, with a new oppressor standing over the oppressed. From here on out, Napoleon (along with the pigs) only continues to become more and more similar to his human predecessor.
Ending Type: Our protagonist is the collective of animals on Animal Farm and the thing that they want is freedom. They want to be free of oppression and live happily together on the farm. The animals still want that at the end of the book (at least, the ones like Clover and Benjamin, who remember what it was like before the rebellion).
But they do not have freedom at the end of the story. In fact, they are no better off (and are perhaps even worse off) at the end than they were at the beginning. Since they do not get what they want and they still want it, this would be a tragic ending.
DENOUEMENT: After Napoleon (and other pigs) start walking on their hind legs, things devolve quickly. The pigs hold a meeting in the farmhouse with the humans—the very same ones who they had previously been in conflict with. During this meeting Napoleon announces that they are changing the name of Animal Farm back to “Manor Farm.”
The animals outside the farmhouse look in the window and are confused because they can’t tell the pigs apart from the humans. The story ends with this closing image: “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
Until next time, keep writing and keep being awesome!
P.S. For more info on Gabriela Pereira, the founder and instigator of DIY MFA, check out her profile page.
