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Just about everything that has been implied in Animal Farm so far is made explicit in this last chapter.
Like Chapter IX, it begins with a general portrait of the \"new\" society. The same themes are there, sad or ironic, made all the more poignant by the passage of time. Memory of the old days is fading; history as we know it has disappeared. Times are hard, but it is said they were harder still under Jones. Above all, the animals still have their revolutionary faith: the farm is theirs, they believe--the world will one day be theirs--they work for themselves--all animals are equal.
In a series of dramatic demonstrations, their faith is utterly stripped away from them. Orwell pushes his allegorical narrative from past history (the Russian Revolution) to future prophecy: the pigs will openly reveal themselves to be absolutely identical to men.
After the high drama of Boxer\'s death and the bitter irony of its aftermath, Orwell seems to be winding things down. The opening portrait of the Farm is sketched simply, as usual, but with a philosophical distance and tone:
Years passed. The seasons came and went, the short animal lives fled by.
Clover is old and stout, two years past the age to retire, \"but in fact no animal had ever actually retired,\" says the narrator matter-of-factly. The farm has prospered and all kinds of machinery are in use, which helps to bring in money (but not increased comforts or leisure for the animals). And then we have an explicit statement of something that was suggested before, but never actually said: \"Somehow it seemed as though the farm had grown richer without making the animals themselves any richer--except, of course, for the pigs and the dogs.\"
It\'s almost as if the animals themselves are becoming more aware. But in the rest of the passage, this consciousness is removed and the narrator\'s poker-faced irony increases. We are told that there are many pigs, many dogs (the bureaucracy and the police have multiplied); they do work, but it\'s work that the \"other animals were too ignorant to understand\":
the pigs had to expend enormous labors every day upon mysterious things called \"files,\" \"reports,\" \"minutes,\" and \"memoranda.\" These were large sheets of paper which had to be closely covered with writing, and as soon as they were so covered, they were burnt in the furnace.
When Orwell reduces managerial office-work to a pure physical description (\"sheets of paper closely covered with writing\") he reduces it to absurdity. It\'s an effective satiric technique.
The ironic satire takes on a special bite when we are told that \"still, neither pigs nor dogs produced any food by their own labor.\" This is just about what Major said of Man (and what Marx said of the bourgeoisie) at the very beginning of the book. Have we come full circle?
Apparently we have, because the next paragraph tells us that \"for the others, their life, so far as they knew, was as it had always been.\" And after giving a stark picture of basic animal life (hungry, sleeping on straw, laboring outside, cold in winter, bothered by flies in summer), Orwell returns to the function of history: since the animals can no longer remember life before the Rebellion, they can\'t be sure if things are better or worse, whether the Revolution was worth it or not. They have no standard of comparison. All they have to go on is Squealer\'s figures, \"which invariably demonstrated that everything was getting better and better.\" Only old Benjamin is sure that things are never better or worse, \"hunger, hardship, and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law of life.\" (Does Animal Farm bear him out?)
But there is one difference. The animals believe in the Revolution. \"They were still the only farm in the whole county--in all England!--owned and operated by animals.\" They are proud of their flag. They have no two-legged masters. They are all equal.
One day Squealer takes the sheep out to a private piece of land to teach them something new. At this point Orwell shifts from an allegory of the past and present into a vision of the future.
We are prepared for something dramatic, just after the sheep return, by \"the terrified neighing of a horse,\" then the startled animals watching, until finally they see--with one sentence making an entire paragraph, to increase the effect--a pig walking on his hind legs. Then out come all the pigs, walking. Napoleon is the last:
there was a tremendous baying of dogs and a shrill crowing from the black cockerel, and out came Napoleon himself, majestically upright, casting haughty glances from side to side, and with his dogs gambolling round him.
He carried a whip in his trotter.
After the shock caused by this vision wears off a little, the animals, despite their years of never complaining, never criticizing, are just about to say something, perhaps, when...
all the sheep burst out into a tremendous bleating of--\"Four legs good, two legs better! Four legs good, two legs better! Four legs good, two legs better!\"
This is the final transformation of Major\'s dream. It has gone from vision to doctrine to slogan; now it is the absolute opposite of what he had said. The form of the dream remains (the slogan, something the animals have invented), but the content is just as it was under their human masters. What about the Commandments themselves?
Clover and Benjamin provide the answer:
Benjamin felt a nose nuzzling his shoulder. He looked round. It was Clover. Her old eyes looked dimmer than ever. Without saying anything, she tugged gently at his mane and led him round to the end of the big barn, where the Seven Commandments were written.
And when she asks him to read what is on the wall, Benjamin for once agrees. There is only one Commandment left:
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