Chapter 3 (by Kyle)

This chapter introduced a lot of problems that were beginning to form in the new Animal Farm society. Some of the animals form suspicion towards some of the other animals, such as the cat or the donkey; the cat always goes off to some unknown place during work time, but always returns for meals, meetings, etc, while the donkey doesn't seem to be giving his full support to the farm. Another issue the animals come into contact with involves different opinions forming. Snowball and Napoleon, who are essentially the two leaders of Animal Farm do a lot of debating and have growing differences regarding their society. As time goes on, I'm predicting this will become a serious conflict for the novel's plot because it will be hard for two completely different characters to be able to control one society when they have different opinions about how to deal with certain aspects of their society. Finally, another issue the animals face is how to deal with accomplishing things the way humans were able to accomplish them. Physically, the animals are not as able at doing things as the humans were, putting aside the fact that many of them are stronger. This forming conflict seems like it is the most manageable of all the conflicts so far because in many cases they have been able to come up with a solution quite easily. This chapter seemed to possibly have a lot of foreshadowing because it gives the reader a general idea of what aspects of the animals' society will pose a problem for the "citizens" later on in the novel. We will have to read on and find out if it actually is foreshadowing! As I read this chapter, I picked up on a lot of Communist ideas on the Animal Farm because of how there seems to be a great deal of revolution in a short amount of time. There seems to be one (in this case two) absolute ruler(s). And also it seems like the citizens of the Animal Farm are focusing their society on work, much like what the Soviet Union did when they were Communist. They also focued a lot on education, making sure that the animals were as smart as can be. And the biggest one I noticed was how the pigs took all of the apples and milk for themselves because they felt like because they were in charge of the farm, they were the most important and needed the food the most. By looking at what constitutes a society as Communist and by looking at the issues the Animal Farm is having so far, I think George Orwell did an excellent job at beginning to show the reader his negative opinion about Communism by displaying Communist ideas in a fictional society and showing the negative effects that result.