paragraphs 2 and 3

Napoleon’s act of banishing snowball showed he was changing. When napoleon banished one of his close friends and ally, snowball, it shows that he is turning even further away from who he was at the start of the novel. Snowball was one of the original pigs who took over when Old Major died, along with napoleon. Napoleon went from trusting snowball and starting animalism with him to banishing him from the farm and acting as though he was “the bad guy’. For example, in chapter when snowball gets banished, napoleon sent the dogs after snowball, ‘one but all of them closed its jaw on snowballs tail, but he managed to wiggle it free..” the author’s purpose for this was to show that napoleon wasn’t going to back down, and he wouldn’t have cared if the dogs had killed snowball. This goes to show that napoleon had gotten so caught up in ‘leading the farm’ he was starting to lose himself. The act of banishing snowball showed he was changing.

Napoleon trading with and acting like a human proved that he was completely changed. At the start of the novel, Napoleon despised humans and wants nothing to do with them. However, come the end, he was walking on 2 legs, drinking whiskey and trading with humans. These actions all went against his original beliefs and showed how far he had drifted from being a pig to a human. For example, the last few sentences of the novel say, ‘Clovers old dim eyes flitted from one face to another…the creatures outside looked from man to pig… and from man to pig again, but it was impossible to say which was which. George Orwell uses this to show how changed Napoleon and the pigs had become; they were almost man. Putting it as the last sentences of the novel leaves the reader with something to think about, as opposed to, for example, a happy ending on the farm. It leaves the reader reflecting on the prior events that led up to napoleon changing and becoming so different. This can also relate to the real world when people lose themselves, and end up looking back at how they started compared to where they currently are. For example, Michael Jackson during his career before his tragic death looked like a completely different person; his skin complexion changed completely (due to his condition vitiligo). By the end of the novel, Napoleon was unrecognisable and him trading with and acting as a human was the final stage of him changing.