How Orwell presents Squealer, and how the character develops across the text: Napoleon's persuasive spokesman, who twists language and rewrites the past.
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 small fat pig named Squealer, with very round cheeks, twinkling eyes, nimble movements, and a shrill voice', 'He was a brilliant talker', 'he could turn black into white', 'skipping from side to side and whisking his tail', 'Bravery is not enough', 'Loyalty and obedience are more important.', 'Tactics, comrades, tactics!', 'Are you certain that this is not something that you have dreamed, comrades?', 'Is it written down anywhere?', 'A bed merely means a place to sleep in.', 'categorically—categorically, comrade', 'he cast a very ugly look at Boxer with his little twinkling eyes', 'It was the most affecting sight I have ever seen!', 'Squealer was so fat that he could with difficulty see out of his eyes.'.
Squealer's methods: rhetorical questions, invented figures, threats that Jones will return, the dogs at his side, and the past rewritten.
Context: Squealer as Soviet propaganda and as Molotov, Stalin's loyal supporter, who edited the newspaper Pravda.
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.
