Snowball

Snowball is a young boar distinguished from the first by his quickness of thought and his gift for translating abstract principle into concrete action. Orwell introduces him alongside Napoleon almost as a deliberate contrast: where Napoleon is "not much of a talker but with a reputation for getting his own way," Snowball is vivid, persuasive, and visibly energised by ideas. He is instrumental in converting Old Major's dying speech into the practical doctrine of Animalism, and it is largely his pen that inscribes the Seven Commandments on the barn wall — the founding constitutional act of the new republic. His intelligence is never merely decorative; it is always in the service of the collective, which is precisely what makes his eventual fate a pointed comment on revolutionary politics.

Snowball's arc moves from revolutionary architect to exiled scapegoat, and the gap between those two states serves as the moral centre of the novella. His motivation throughout is genuine improvement of animal welfare: literacy classes so every creature can read the Commandments, the Animal Committees (however unsuccessful the hens' egg-production committee and the Wild Comrades' Re-education Committee turn out to be), and above all the windmill. The windmill blueprints — painstakingly copied from a book of agricultural machinery in the farmhouse — represent his deepest conviction that technology and collective labour together can redeem the animals from drudgery. He does not appear to seek personal power; his rhetoric is consistently outward-facing, concerned with kilowatts and reduced working hours rather than his own prestige.

His arc breaks sharply in Chapter Five. When the dogs chase him off the farm, the text offers no dramatic last stand, no farewell speech. He simply runs and is gone. The abruptness is deliberate: Orwell shows how quickly and silently a genuine idealist can be erased when power has prepared its instruments in secret.

• The Battle of the Cowshed (Chapter Four): Snowball personally leads the charge against Jones and his men, having studied Julius Caesar's campaigns to plan the ambush. He receives a buckshot wound to his back and is awarded "Animal Hero, First Class." This marks the high-water mark of his heroism and credibility.
• The windmill debate (Chapter Five): Snowball delivers what even his opponents concede is a brilliant speech in favour of the windmill, drawing maps in the dust and envisioning electric light and heated stalls. Napoleon responds not with argument but with nine attack dogs — an admission that he cannot defeat Snowball intellectually.
• The expulsion itself: Snowball's flight under the dogs pivots the entire novella. Everything corrupt that follows — the show trials, the rewritten history, the purges — flows from this single act of political violence.
• His posthumous appearances: From Chapter Six onward Snowball exists only as a name invoked by Squealer. He "ruins" the windmill when the wind knocks it over; he is retroactively made a spy present at Jones's side in the Cowshed. The living Snowball is replaced by a propaganda construct, and this ghost proves more useful to Napoleon than the real pig ever could have been.

Snowball and Napoleon form what appears initially to be productive dual leadership, but Orwell seeds their incompatibility early: they disagree on almost every question of policy. The windmill serves as the final flashpoint. Napoleon's secret training of the puppies while debate continues openly reveals that he never intended to compete on intellectual terms. Snowball is not defeated in argument; he is physically removed, which reframes their entire rivalry as a contest between ideas and brute force.

Squealer becomes Snowball's most insidious enemy precisely because he works in Snowball's absence. He first diminishes Snowball's Cowshed heroism — "Loyalty and obedience are more important than bravery" — then erases it altogether, then inverts it into treachery. The relationship illustrates how propaganda requires a named enemy and how the absent cannot defend themselves.

Old Major is Snowball's ideological father. Of all the pigs, Snowball most faithfully attempts to honour the vision of the Midsummer Night's Dream barn speech: a farm run for animals, by animals, freed from human exploitation. His committees and his windmill are direct extensions of Old Major's utopian promise. Napoleon's destruction of Snowball symbolizes the destruction of the revolution's founding ideals.

Boxer represents the tragedy of Snowball's legacy among the working animals. Boxer fights alongside him at the Cowshed, admires him, and benefits from his literacy programme. Yet when Squealer revises history, Boxer's famous motto — "Napoleon is always right" — overrides his own memory. The relationship shows that even the most honourable working-class loyalty can be weaponised against its original object.