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Animal Farm Betrayal Essay

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Betrayal may be employed in many different ways. It may exist in relationships, friendships, government, and many more. Animal Farm employs betrayal within a government. The once beloved and trusted leader is discovered to be manipulative as well as greedy. Napoleon, who started as a great leader in the animals’ eyes, betrayed those who trusted him most for the sake of what he thought was the only way of acquiring him even more unsplit power. The animals on the farm were taught an exceptionally hard and valuable lesson about trust through their leader’s betrayal. In Animal Farm by George Orwell, Napoleon betrays his comrades through selfishness and deception to reveal betrayal may be provoked through greed while being masked skillfully. In …show more content…

Napoleon is viewed by the animals as a respectful figure. This allows him to betray the animals before they even realize it is too late. Importantly, Napoleon chases the innocent and heroic Snowball out of the farm and then manipulates all of the animals into believing that Snowball is evil. Explaining how he is to blame for whatever negativity is happening on Animal Farm (68). Furthermore, not only is this a striking example of greed as mentioned previously, Napoleon does in fact use deception, just motivated by greed. The animals are faced with some missing facts from “The Battle of the Cowshed” so Napoleon naturally takes advantage of this by filling those gaps with a twisted version of the truth. This allows him to not only control the animals currently, but also their own memories of the past, manipulating them into believing that they did in fact remember Snowball being a coward while Napoleon fought bravely. When in reality, it was the other way around, yet no one can contradict this point given that they all remember a lie catered by Napoleon himself. Finally, Napoleon lies when he tells the animals that he is going to send Boxer to a doctor to be treated for his injuries. Napoleon made the other animals be under the impression that he is sending Boxer off to recover, but instead actually selling him to a horse slaughterer, to be killed for money (122-125). Truly, even after Benjamin ran to the animals after reading what was written on the truck, panicking to save Boxer from the immoral death waiting for him, Napoleon quickly reacted. He claims to the others that the truck had the incorrect sign on it. He always uses the animals’ illiteracy to his advantage, knowing that knowledge means power, which threatens that his lies may have a lesser influence on them. Thus, Napoleon betrays his comrades on many different occasions, through his

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He convinces the others that Snowball is a traitor and blames him for everything that goes wrong on the farm. Napoleon makes him out to be a despicable enemy who will come and destroy their hard work in the middle of the night. Such as when the windmill is blown to bits and he blames Snowball. Napoleon uses the supposed threat that Snowball poses in order to add to his own power by creating a sense of constant emergency. In short, he created a boogeyman to keep all the animals obedient, forcing them to work even harder to build a new

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