Boxer is a fictional horse from George Orwell's Animal Farm, he is the farm's most hard-working and loyal worker. He serves as an allegory for the Russian working class who helped oust the Czar and establish the Soviet Union, but were eventually betrayed by the Stalinists.
He is one of the most popular of the book's characters. Boxer is the tragic avatar of the working class, or proletariat: loyal, kind, dedicated, and strong. By contrast, he is not very clever and seldom progresses beyond the fourth letter of the alphabet. His major flaw, however, is his blind trust in the leaders, and his inability to see corruption, leading to his manipulation and abuse by the pigs in more or less the same manner as he was by Jones. His two mottos, seen below, sum up the double side of his character.
He 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 the poor boy( Although this may have been a lie from the pigs as if Boxer knew he killed another human, he might not work as hard due to sadness). His death serves to show just how far the pigs are willing to go — when he collapses due to working to hard, the pigs supposedly send him to a veterinarian, when in fact he was sent to the knacker's yard to be slaughtered and made into dog food and glue, 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.
Ironically, 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.
Boxer may have been inspired by Aleksei Grigorievich Stakhanov, a miner in the Soviet Union who became a hero in 1935 for his great productivity, or the Soviet Stakhanovite movement named after him, which was aimed at increasing worker productivity. His name was possibly based upon the Boxer Uprising in China.
Boxer's Mottos
- "I will work harder" is Boxer's response to nearly all problems. He ends up overstraining himself and collapses. 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.
- "Napoleon is always right"—similar to "Stalin is always right"— is Boxer's statement where he always shows a belief in Napoleon no matter what.