Animal Farm

by George Orwell

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Chapter VI

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Summary

Throughout the entire year following the rebellion, the animals labor with grueling intensity. The construction of the windmill dominates their existence. Napoleon announces that the animals will now work on Sunday afternoons as well, making the workweek sixty hours long. This labor is nominally voluntary, but any animal who refuses will have their rations cut by half. Despite the punishing schedule, the animals persist, driven by Boxer's unflagging example. The enormous cart-horse adopts a second personal motto—"I will work harder"—and begins rising nearly an hour before everyone else to put in extra time at the quarry before the day's work begins.

The windmill presents immense technical challenges. The animals must break limestone into usable pieces, but they have no tools designed for the task. At first, they can find no way to split the massive boulders that litter the quarry. The solution eventually devised is to drag stones to the top of the quarry and let them fall, smashing into fragments on impact. This backbreaking process consumes the entire summer. The animals haul the broken stone down to the windmill site, where it is gradually assembled into walls. The work is slow, exhausting, and seemingly endless, yet the animals take pride in knowing that every stone is laid for their own benefit rather than for a human master.

As the year progresses, the farm begins to run short of essential supplies it cannot produce: iron for horseshoes, nails, string, dog biscuits, paraffin oil, and above all, the machinery needed to complete the windmill. Napoleon announces a new policy: Animal Farm will engage in trade with the neighboring farms. The animals are deeply troubled. They recall—or believe they recall—that resolutions were passed in the early days of the rebellion forbidding all contact with humans, and particularly forbidding any engagement in trade or the use of money. Several of the animals begin to voice objections, but the dogs growl menacingly and the protest dies before it takes shape.

Napoleon arranges for a human solicitor from Willingdon named Mr. Whymper to act as intermediary between Animal Farm and the outside world. Whymper visits the farm every Monday to receive his instructions. Napoleon addresses the animals through Squealer, who explains that the resolution against trade and human contact was never actually passed—it was a lie, probably traceable to Snowball, who invented the story to cause trouble. The animals are uncertain. They think they remember the resolution, but since Squealer insists so confidently that it never existed, they accept his version of events.

The pigs, who have already been making all decisions and living in somewhat greater comfort, now move into the farmhouse. The other animals recall dimly that a resolution had been passed in the earliest days forbidding this, but Squealer persuades them that the pigs need a quiet place in which to work. He argues that it would hardly do for the brains of the farm to live in conditions unworthy of their intellectual labor. No one argues further, especially after Squealer invokes the ever-present threat: "Surely, comrades, you do not want Jones back?"

Even more troubling, it emerges that the pigs are sleeping in the farmhouse beds. Clover, the maternal mare who tries to be faithful to the original principles, asks Muriel to read her the Fourth Commandment from the barn wall. Muriel reads it aloud: "No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets." Clover does not remember the words "with sheets" being part of the original commandment, but since the words are plainly written on the wall, she accepts that her memory must be faulty. Squealer arrives shortly after to explain that a bed is simply a place to sleep—a pile of straw in a stall is a bed, after all—and that the commandment was always directed against sheets, which are a human invention. The pigs, he assures everyone, have removed the sheets and sleep between blankets. This, naturally, is perfectly acceptable.

In November, a violent storm strikes the farm. Tiles are blown from the barn roof, an elm tree is uprooted, and the flagstaff is knocked down. When the animals venture out the next morning, they discover that the windmill has been reduced to rubble. The walls they spent an entire year building lie in a heap of shattered stone. The animals stare in dismay. Napoleon, however, does not hesitate. He sniffs the ground near the ruins and announces that Snowball is responsible. The exiled pig, Napoleon declares, crept onto the farm during the night and deliberately destroyed the windmill out of pure malice. Napoleon pronounces a solemn death sentence on Snowball and offers a reward to any animal who captures him. He then rallies the devastated animals, declaring that they will begin rebuilding the windmill immediately. "Forward, comrades!" he cries. "Long live the windmill! Long live Animal Farm!"

Character Development

Napoleon consolidates power with increasing sophistication in this chapter. His decision to trade with humans represents a decisive break from the revolution's founding principles, yet he manages the transition smoothly by combining Squealer's rhetorical skill with the silent menace of his personal guard dogs. He never addresses the animals' objections directly; instead, he ensures that dissent is smothered before it can organize. His response to the windmill's destruction reveals a leader who instinctively understands the political utility of an external enemy—blaming Snowball redirects the animals' frustration away from their own exhaustion and toward a convenient scapegoat.

Squealer reaches new heights of manipulative eloquence. His technique is no longer limited to persuasion; he now actively rewrites history, flatly denying that certain resolutions were ever passed. His rhetorical formula—confident assertion, appeal to the animals' self-doubt, and the closing threat of Jones's return—proves devastatingly effective.

Boxer continues to embody selfless, uncritical devotion. His willingness to work himself to the point of collapse is both admirable and deeply troubling, as it makes him the ideal subject for exploitation by those clever enough to harness his loyalty.

Themes and Motifs

The rewriting of history emerges as a central instrument of control. The altered commandment—"No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets"—is the chapter's most chilling moment, demonstrating that those who control the written record control reality itself. The animals' inability to trust their own memories leaves them defenseless against Squealer's revisions. This motif parallels the Soviet regime's systematic falsification of historical documents and photographs.

The scapegoat mechanism is fully activated with Napoleon's accusation against Snowball. By attributing the windmill's destruction to sabotage rather than structural failure or natural forces, Napoleon transforms a demoralizing setback into a rallying point. The absent Snowball becomes an all-purpose explanation for anything that goes wrong—a device that mirrors Stalin's use of Trotsky as a perpetual enemy of the state.

The theme of labor exploitation intensifies. The animals work harder than they ever did under Jones, yet the surplus of their labor flows upward to the pigs, who enjoy the farmhouse, the beds, and the privileges of the managerial class they have become.

Notable Passages

When the animals question whether a resolution against trade was passed in the early days, Squealer deploys his most brazen technique:

"He assured them that the resolution against engaging in trade and using money had never been passed, or even suggested. It was pure imagination, probably traceable in the beginning to lies circulated by Snowball."

This passage captures the essence of totalitarian gaslighting—the outright denial of documented fact, delivered with such authority that the victims question their own recollections rather than the speaker's honesty.

The discovery of the altered commandment is reported with devastating understatement:

"No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets."

The two added words represent an entire philosophy of corruption. By appending a qualifier, the pigs preserve the appearance of law while hollowing out its substance. Orwell demonstrates that tyranny does not always abolish rules—it reinterprets them.

Napoleon's reaction to the ruined windmill reveals his instinct for political theater:

"Comrades, do you know who is responsible for this? Do you know the enemy who has come in the night and overthrown our windmill? SNOWBALL!"

The rhetorical question, the dramatic pause, and the thundering accusation are calculated to channel collective grief into collective rage. Napoleon offers not evidence but certainty, and the animals, desperate for an explanation, accept it.

Analysis

Orwell structures Chapter VI around a series of escalating betrayals, each cushioned by a layer of justification that makes resistance psychologically difficult. The progression is deliberate: voluntary Sunday labor becomes mandatory through economic coercion, trade with humans is introduced as practical necessity, the farmhouse becomes a workspace for the pigs, and the beds become acceptable once the commandment is discovered to have always permitted them. Each step is small enough to seem reasonable in isolation, yet the cumulative effect is a wholesale reversal of the revolution's principles.

The literary technique of the altered commandment is Orwell's most potent satirical device. It operates on multiple levels: as a plot mechanism, it shows how the pigs maintain the illusion of legality; as allegory, it mirrors the Soviet constitution's guarantees of freedoms that existed only on paper; as commentary on language itself, it demonstrates that meaning can be destroyed not by removing words but by adding them. The phrase "with sheets" is simultaneously absurd and terrifying in its implications.

Orwell also uses the windmill as a multivalent symbol. It represents industrialization, collective aspiration, and the regime's legitimacy. Its destruction—whether by storm or structural inadequacy—threatens all three. Napoleon's immediate pivot to blaming Snowball reveals a leader who understands that narrative control matters more than material reality. The windmill can be rebuilt; what cannot be permitted is any interpretation of its collapse that reflects poorly on the leadership. This dynamic—failure reframed as sabotage—is one of Orwell's sharpest observations about authoritarian governance.