How Orwell presents Snowball, and how the character develops across the text: the clever, energetic planner who is driven out and then blamed for everything.
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: 'a more vivacious pig than Napoleon, quicker in speech and more inventive', 'was not considered to have the same depth of character', 'liberty is worth more than ribbons', 'what he called Animal Committees', 'No sentimentality, comrade!', 'War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.', 'uttering little whimpers of excitement', 'sordid labour was lifted from the animals' backs', 'He was running as only a pig can run', 'slipped through a hole in the hedge and was seen no more', 'Snowball, who, as we now know, was no better than a criminal', 'the whole farm was convinced that Snowball had thrown it down the well', 'Long live Humanity!'.
Snowball's ideas and his limits: the windmill, the committees and the three-day week, his part in taking the milk and apples, and whether he would have ruled better than Napoleon.
Context: Snowball as Trotsky, the revolutionary leader who built the Red Army, lost the struggle for power with Stalin and was driven into exile.
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.
