Boxer

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Boxer is a fictional character, a horse, present in George Orwell's Animal Farm. He is the farm's most hard-working and loyal worker. Boxer serves as an allegory for the Russian working class who helped to oust the Tsar and establish the Soviet Union, but were eventually betrayed by the Stalinists.

Boxer fights very bravely in the Battle of the Cowshed, and the Battle of the Windmill, but is upset when he thinks he has killed a stable lad when, in fact, he had only stunned him. When Boxer defends Snowball's reputation from Squealer's revisionism, the pigs designate the workhorse as a target for the Great Purge, but he easily outmuscles the dog executioners, sparing them at Napoleon's request. His death shows how far the pigs are willing to go — when he collapses from overwork, the pigs say they have sent him to a veterinarian, when they sent him to the knacker's yard to be slaughtered, in exchange for money to buy a case of whiskey for the pigs. A strong and loyal draft horse, Boxer played a huge part in keeping the Farm together prior to his death, and was the only close friend of Benjamin, the cynical donkey.

During Old Major's speech, which inspired the principles of Animalism, a specific reference is made to how he would be turned into glue under Jones' rule, thus implying that it would not happen to him under Animalism. This is possibly a further decline from Animalism to Napoleon's government.^{[citation needed]}

Boxer is quite dim; he can only remember the first four letters of the alphabet; he is partly illiterate. He represents the working-class citizens who were fooled and tricked into thinking that their life would be a Utopia.^{[citation needed]}

Boxer is a loyal supporter of Napoleon; he listens to everything he says, and assumes, sometimes with doubt, that everything Napoleon tells the farm animals is true: "If Napoleon says it, it must be right."

Boxer's mottos

• "I will work harder!": a response to nearly all problems. This motto may be a reference to the novel The Jungle, which illustrates the abuse and swindling of the working class, as it was the motto of the main character in that novel also.^{[citation needed]}
• "Napoleon is always right": similar to "Mussolini is always right."^{[citation needed]}