How Orwell presents Boxer, and how the character develops across the text: the strong, loyal and trusting horse whose hard work ends in betrayal.
The key quotations for this character and how to analyse them, with the context that shapes them.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'as strong as any two ordinary horses put together', 'he was not of first-rate intelligence', 'universally respected for his steadiness of character and tremendous powers of work', 'I will work harder!', 'he seemed more like three horses than one', 'Boxer could not get beyond the letter D.', 'I have no wish to take life, not even human life', 'If Comrade Napoleon says it, it must be right.', 'Napoleon is always right', 'It must be due to some fault in ourselves.', 'for the first time it occurred to him that he was eleven years old', 'It is my lung', 'his strength had left him', 'Boxer's face, with the white stripe down his nose, appeared at the small window at the back of the van'.
Boxer's loyalty and strength, the one time he questions Squealer, and how his trust is used against him.
Context: Boxer as Russia's peasant workers, exploited under the Tsar and facing still more hardship under Stalin.
OCR's question on this text has two parts on the same text. Part (a), 20 marks, compares a printed extract from it with an unseen extract of the same genre, and weights your response (AO1) and context (AO3) twice as heavily as language analysis (AO2), where context means the social and cultural situations you can infer from the two extracts and their introductions; an answer on only one of the two extracts cannot go above Level 3. Part (b), 20 marks, explores another moment in the same text from memory, with response and analysis of language, form and structure (AO1 and AO2) equally weighted and no marks for context. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the part it is for.
