How Orwell presents Old Major, and how the character develops across the text: the old boar whose speech and dream inspire the Rebellion.
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: 'so highly regarded on the farm that everyone was quite ready to lose an hour's sleep', 'a majestic-looking pig, with a wise and benevolent appearance', 'I feel it my duty to pass on to you such wisdom as I have acquired', 'Only get rid of Man, and the produce of our labour would be our own.', 'Rebellion! I do not know when that Rebellion will come', 'Man serves the interests of no creature except himself.', 'in fighting against Man, we must not come to resemble him', 'Weak or strong, clever or simple, we are all brothers.', 'It was a dream of the earth as it will be when Man has vanished.', 'The skull of old Major, now clean of flesh, had been disinterred from the orchard', 'a boar's skull which was nailed to a post in the garden'.
Old Major's speech as persuasion: direct address, rhetorical questions, lists, and a vision of the future.
Context: Old Major as Marx and Lenin, and his skull put on show, as Lenin's embalmed body was in its mausoleum.
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.
