Situational Irony In George Orwell's Animal Farm

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“One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship” (A Quote from 1984). When a country is ruled by an incompetent person who has too much power, its citizens suffer and they will eventually overthrow the dictatorship. Communist dictatorships are just that, a dictatorship. George Orwell satirizes the rise and fall of the Soviet Union in his book Animal Farm. In Orwell’s Animal Farm, the use of situational irony reveals that too much power concentrated in one individual will lead to the demise of a society. In the allegory, the memorial banquet of Boxer depicts the problems with a person with too much power by using situational irony. In chapter nine, Boxer is given a memorial for his death, however, shortly after the memorial, the pigs celebrate his death. This can be seen when “that night there was the sound of uproarious singing, which was followed by what sounded like a violent quarrel and ended at about eleven o’clock with a tremendous crash of glass” (Orwell 126). The use of situational irony reveals that the pigs are not concerned that they lost a loyal-worker and instead party, it shows that the farm is slowly reverting back to …show more content…

In the novella, situational irony is used in Boxer’s memorial banquet when the pigs celebrate and drink whiskey which shows that rules and laws will eventually be violated by the people who set them. Situational irony is also used when the pigs transform into humans revealing that if power is not evenly distributed throughout a government then that government will be overthrown by its people. This use of situational irony is implemented as a warning to society of the dangers of dictatorships and how they cannot be sustained for long periods of