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George Orwell Use Of Control In Animal Farm

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The book Animal Farm by George Orwell is about an animal uprising, led by pigs, which ends in abolishing the cruel farmer Mr. Jones. The animals rule each other with the principle that all animals are created equal. However, as the book progresses, the clever pigs slowly take control over everyone in order to gain more power. The pigs are able to change the past and future to their advantage by altering history and manipulating the memories of the other animals on the farm.

The pigs change the memories of illiterate animals by rewriting historical documents. In the middle of the night, the animals find a pig named Squealer in the barn with “a lantern, a paint-brush, and an overturned pot of white paint.” (68) Later, they notice that one of their seven commandments reads differently than they remember, becoming oddly specific and giving more power to the pigs. Since the other animals have bad memories, they accept the change without question believe that the rule has always been there. The pigs have altered perceptions of the past by changing documents in the present. They hold such …show more content…
Squealer tries to convince the animals that their former leader, Snowball, was a traitor to the farm. He tells them that Snowball “was Jones's secret agent all the time. It has all been proved by documents which he left behind him and which we have only just discovered.” (49) Of course, there are no documents that say this, but the pigs pretend that they have just unearthed history. By writing about fake historical events in the present, the less intelligent animals begin to think that these events actually happened in the past. They begin to turn on Snowball and everything he accomplished, effectively helping the pigs bury his memory. Because none of the animals can read, they don’t know that the documents aren’t real, meaning that the pigs can carry on tricking them into hating the pigs’

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