Squealer

Squealer is introduced as a small, fat pig with "very round cheeks, twinkling eyes, nimble movements, and a shrill voice." Crucially, Orwell describes him as "a brilliant talker" who, when arguing a difficult point, tends to "skip from side to side and whisk his tail" in a way that is "somehow very persuasive." From his first significant scene — justifying the pigs' monopoly on the milk and windfall apples — he is established not as a thinker or a fighter but as a performer, a creature whose entire value to those in power lies in his ability to make the unacceptable sound reasonable. He possesses no independent authority; he is Napoleon's instrument, the regime's voice box, and his identity is almost entirely defined by that function. Where Napoleon is blunt force, Squealer is the lubricant that allows that force to move without friction.

Squealer begins the novel as an eager revolutionary who appears to believe in the principles of Animalism — or at least finds them useful. His early speeches carry the energy of a true convert. By the novel's end, however, he is drunk, stumbling in the night beside a broken ladder and a spilled paint pot, having just altered the last surviving commandment. The arc is one of progressive cynicism: each lie requires a larger lie to support it, and Squealer transitions from selective emphasis to outright fabrication without visible crisis of conscience. His motivation is not ideological conviction but self-preservation and appetite. He relishes the privileges of porcine power — the whisky, the comfortable bed, the extra rations — and propaganda is simply the price he pays for them. He is not a true believer; he is a careerist who has chosen the winning side and does whatever is necessary to remain there.

The milk-and-apples justification in the early chapters establishes his template: appeal to science ("Milk and apples contain substances absolutely necessary to the well-being of a pig"), appeal to shared interest, and close with the Jones threat. This approach works immediately and perfectly, which is why he never abandons the formula.

The progressive defamation of Snowball across several chapters demonstrates Squealer's technique of incremental revision. He first minimizes Snowball's role at the Battle of the Cowshed, then questions his motives, strips his military decoration, and finally, in a jaw-dropping escalation, declares that Snowball "had been Jones's agent from the very start." Each stage prepares the animals for the next, illustrating that sustained propaganda is more effective than a single dramatic lie.

The nocturnal commandment alterations — Clover spotting Squealer on the barn wall with a lantern and paintbrush — create the novel's most visually precise image of rewriting history. His guilt is unmistakable, yet he manages to talk his way out of it by the morning.

His fabrication of Boxer's death scene, where he invents last words praising Napoleon and describes a dignified passing in a hospital, is his coldest moment. He converts the regime's most shameful act — selling a loyal worker to the knackers — into an advertisement for Napoleon's benevolence.

Squealer's relationship with Napoleon is one of absolute dependency flowing both ways: Napoleon needs Squealer's voice; Squealer needs Napoleon's protection. He never challenges Napoleon in any scene and consistently frames disagreement with him as an existential danger to the farm, collapsing the distinction between loyalty to a leader and loyalty to a cause.

With Snowball, Squealer's role is purely destructive. Snowball is an inconvenient historical fact, and Squealer's job is to eliminate him — first from the present, then from the past. The relationship is parasitic; Squealer exploits Snowball's former credibility, inverting it into evidence of treachery.

Boxer is Squealer's most tragic audience. Boxer's motto "Napoleon is always right" makes him almost pre-propagandised, and Squealer exploits this until the very end, manufacturing a peaceful death for an animal sold for slaughter.

Clover represents Squealer's greatest structural vulnerability — the partially literate, morally intuitive observer who feels the deception without being able to articulate it. Her helpless confusion at the altered commandments highlights exactly what Squealer's literacy-gap strategy depends on.