In What Way Is Boxer’s Death Particularly Tragic?

In What Way Is Boxer’s Death Particularly Tragic?

  • Submitted By: rdayan
  • Date Submitted: 05/18/2011 8:14 AM
  • Category: English
  • Words: 595
  • Page: 3
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Boxer is a horse from George Orwell’s Animal Farm. The book reflects events before, during, and after the World War II, but indirectly. Each character of the book is a representation of someone, somehow important to the War, in real life. Boxer is a symbol of the working class in the USSR.
He was “an enormous beast, nearly eighteen hands high, and as strong as any two ordinary horses put together. A white stripe down his nose gave him a somewhat stupid appearance, and in fact he was not of first-rate intelligence, but he was universally respected for his steadiness of character and tremendous powers of work.” In the book, Boxer is really loyal to the farm, kind, dedicated to his hard work, and strong. All the animals liked the way he was. In the book he appears as “the admiration of everybody. He had been a hard worker. (…) his answer to every problem, every setback, was ‘I will work harder’- which he had adopted as his personal motto.” Boxer had great difficulty in thinking anything out for himself and he blind trusted his leaders, like Napoleon, the pig. This made him easy to be manipulated by the others.
In the first battle, the Battle of the Cowshed (the Russian Civil War), “the most terrifying spectacle of all was Boxer, rearing up on his hind legs and striking out with his great iron-shod hoofs like a stallion. His very first blow took a stable-lad from Foxwood on the skull and stretched him lifeless in the mud.” But after the battle, Boxer felt really bad for hurting the man that bad, and tried to wake him up but nothing happened. He did not want to kill the man, but Snowball, another pig, came and told him “The only good human being is a dead one”. The next battle, Battle of the Windmill (World War II) was more difficult to get over with. Boxer fights even more bravely than the first one. The animals won the battle. After this battle the farm was in a really bad condition, but the animals were going to work hard to fix it.
To fix the farm, “Boxer...

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