Chapters 3 and 4 — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Chapters 3 and 4
The plot, part by part
What you need to know
The first harvest, Boxer's motto, Snowball's committees and the reading classes, Napoleon and the puppies,
the milk and apples kept for the pigs, and the Battle of the Cowshed.
Key quotations: 'How they toiled and sweated to get the hay in!', 'The pigs did not actually work, but directed and supervised the others.', 'The animals were happy as they had never conceived it possible to be.', 'It was always the pigs who put forward the resolutions.', 'Four legs good, two legs bad', 'Napoleon took them away from their mothers', 'The mystery of where the milk went to was soon cleared up.', 'this has been proved by Science, comrades', 'Jones would come back!', 'surely there is no one among you who wants to see Jones come back?', 'a wave of rebelliousness ran through the countryside', 'The pellets scored bloody streaks along Snowball's back', 'rearing up on his hind legs and striking out with his great iron-shod hoofs like a stallion', 'Animal Hero, First Class'.
Narrative voice: the flat, accepting way the narrator reports the pigs' first privileges, so that the reader sees what the animals do not.
Context: the milk and apples, which Orwell called the turning point of the story, and the Battle of the Cowshed as the foreign invasion and civil war that followed 1917.
For Edexcel's essay on this text, link each point to its context and the writer's purpose, which earn as many marks as knowledge of the text (16 of 40); language analysis earns no marks there.
