![]() Of course, the phrase "more equal" is paradoxical, but this illustrates the paradoxical notion of animals oppressing their own kind in the name of liberty and unity. ![]() The sheep's new slogan, as before, destroys any chance for thought or debate on the animals' part, and the new Commandment painted on the wall perfectly (and ironically) expresses Napoleon's philosophy. Napoleon's carrying a whip in his trotter - formerly a symbol of human torture - and dressing in Jones' clothes only cements in readers minds what they have long suspected. While Clover is shocked at the sight of Squealer walking on two legs, the reader is not, since this moment is the logical result of all the pigs' previous machinations. Only Benjamin - a means by which Orwell again voices his own opinion of the matter - is able to conclude that "hunger, hardship, and disappointment" are the "unalterable law of life." Although "Beasts of England" is hummed in secret by some would-be rebels, "no one dared to sing it aloud." The pigs have won their ideological battle, as the Party wins its war with Winston's mind at the end of Nineteen-Eight-Four. ![]() Orwell has years pass between Chapters 9 and 10 to stress the ways in which the animals' lack of any sense of history has rendered them incapable of judging their present situation: The animals cannot complain about their awful lives, since "they had nothing to go upon except Squealer's lists of figures, which invariably demonstrated that everything was getting better and better." As Winston Smith, the protagonist of Orwell's Nineteen-Eight-Four understands, the government "could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event it never happened." This same phenomena occurs now on Animal Farm, where the animals cannot recall there ever having been a way of life different from their present one and, therefore, no way of life to which they can compare their own.
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