Snowball

Snowball is expelled from Animal Farm in Chapter Five when Napoleon unleashes his secretly trained attack dogs during a public debate, forcing Snowball to flee and never return. Orwell gives him no farewell speech — he simply runs and disappears. His physical absence then becomes a propaganda tool, as Squealer transforms him into the regime's permanent scapegoat for every failure on the farm.

Snowball's most quoted line is "No animal shall kill any other animal" (Chapter 2), one of the Seven Commandments he helps inscribe on the barn wall. The commandment captures his genuine idealism and commitment to Animalism's founding principles — and its later violation by Napoleon's regime measures exactly how far the revolution has fallen from Snowball's original vision.

Snowball and Napoleon begin as co-leaders after the Rebellion but clash repeatedly over policy, with the windmill debate becoming their decisive flashpoint. Rather than defeating Snowball in open argument — which he clearly cannot do — Napoleon responds by setting nine attack dogs on him, revealing that their rivalry was never between equals but between intellectual merit and organised brute force.

Snowball designs the windmill because he believes technology can free the animals from drudgery, envisioning electric light, heated stalls, and reduced working hours for all. His blueprints, copied from a book of agricultural machinery in the farmhouse, represent his faith in progress and collective welfare — making the windmill the clearest symbol of his sincere idealism and his contrast with Napoleon's hunger for control.

Snowball personally leads the charge against Mr. Jones and his men in Chapter Four, having studied Julius Caesar's military campaigns to plan the ambush. He sustains a buckshot wound to his back and is awarded the title "Animal Hero, First Class." This battle represents the high point of his heroism — which makes Squealer's later rewriting of his Cowshed role into treachery all the more striking.

After Snowball flees, Squealer becomes his most dangerous enemy precisely because he operates in Snowball's absence. He first downplays Snowball's Cowshed bravery, then strips it from the record entirely, and finally inverts it — branding Snowball a spy who fought alongside Jones. Because Snowball cannot return to defend himself, Squealer can reshape his legacy without challenge, illustrating how authoritarian propaganda exploits the silence of the expelled.

Snowball is not a villain — he is the character most faithful to Old Major's founding vision of Animalism. His committees, literacy programs, and windmill blueprints are consistently outward-facing, aimed at collective welfare rather than personal power. Napoleon and Squealer construct a villainous version of Snowball after his expulsion, but the novella makes clear this portrait is fabricated propaganda, not a reflection of who Snowball actually was.

Snowball becomes paradoxically more useful to Napoleon as an absent enemy than he ever was as a present rival. Every crop failure, every collapsed structure, every act of dissent is blamed on "Snowball's sabotage," giving the regime a permanent scapegoat that deflects accountability and silences questioning. Orwell uses this dynamic to show how authoritarian systems depend on named enemies to sustain their grip on power.