What Happened To Snowball In Animal Farm

Poor old Snowball got very thoroughly scapegoated. In this scene he’s arguing with the pigs about the best plans for the farm. The next you know he’s running for his life from the attack dogs of Napoleon. In fact Orwell doesn’t even go for a dramatic and haunting death for Snowball. No, he simply goes into exile under the most evil of accusations by the pigs who prior to that had been withdrawing from his contributions to the work of the farm and subsequently blaming him for the broken fence and the bad weather. This is particularly ironic and tragic as the ideas of Snowball had been so very good. They had been destroyed by fear and propaganda, the classic means by which any power seeks to increase its hold on others – create an enemy of a convinced idea, destroy it and then trade off the new found power thus created.

This is one of the most horrific examples of political purges in literature, and it is very unpleasant to read. At the beginning of the novel, Snowball is a very brilliant, passionate leader of the animals who are trying to make revolution. He is the one who has come up with the brilliant plan for the animals to work in the farm to build a windmill. Napoleon is afraid that Snowball is a threat to him because of his brilliant plans. He uses the dogs to chase Snowball off from the farm, and then the pigs start to remake history in order to present Napoleon in the most favorable light. In the end, Snowball is presented as a demon who is responsible for all failures of the farm, while the animals are cheering the pigs who are denying Snowball even exist. The most chilling scenes of all are when a group of sheep are chanting “Four legs good, two legs bad” in order to stifle any dissent.

What really gets me is the correlation with real life revolutions. Clearly, in Animal Farm, the structure of the revolution was excellent; its subsequent corruption, not so much. What’s most true to life is how Snowball functions as the Trotsky to Napoleon’s Stalin, an icy, pragmatic leader bound and determined to destroy any opposition to his rule. A windmill’s promise of hope is turned to propaganda; at first, it is treacherously insisted that Snowball came up with the idea to increase his own farm’s production by working the other animals harder; later, the same windmill serves as the symbol of the great farm’s increased production under Napoleon’s wise leadership. How the animals can get that so wrong is a strong analogy to the methods of authoritarian regimes to confuse and sway the minds of their citizens. The ways in which loyalty is turning against itself is the most heart wrenching in the entire novel. “Napoleon is always right” is Boxer’s great litany of blindly faithful devotion. And yet, the biggest knife twist of all is yet to come: long after the fact, the pigs will all admit that there was no treason on the part of Snowball, but no one will really care. The system has already won.

First, there is his physical disappearance. The animals watch in horror as he is torn to pieces by the dogs. But that is not the end of his disappearance from the farm. He is also ‘disappeared’ from history, his image removed from the farm’s version of events and substituted with that of a saboteur, a spy, a counter-revolutionary. The reason for this, as with so much else on the farm, is simple: it provides an adequate reason for continuing hard work in the face of adversity, and an explanation for the windmill’s collapse – the work of Snowball. But, above all, it prevents the animals from noticing the failures of the pigs, and Snowball is far more valuable as a villain than he ever was as a leader.