What causes the animals' struggle with the windmill stones in chapters 5-7 of Animal Farm, and the outcome?
At first, the animals could find no way to break up the stones into smaller pieces. Picks and crowbars seemed to be the most logical tools, but they were useless to the animals, who had no hands and could not stand on their hind legs. However, a solution was finally discovered. Large boulders were in abundance on the farm, so, with much effort, the animals attached ropes to them and dragged them
... to the top of the quarry, where they were toppled over the edge, to shatter to pieces below.
The smaller pieces were then transported by the horses in carts and pulled to the site where the windmill would be constructed; old Benjamin and Muriel both helped, and the sheep "dragged single blocks." The work was painstakingly slow, and sometimes the boulders did not break. Boxer , of course, was the hardest worker of all, always reminding the...
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other animals that "I will work harder" and "Napoleon is always right."
How did the animals break up the windmill's stone in chapter 6 of Animal Farm?
The animals use gravity to break up the stone for the windmill by throwing boulders over the edge of the quarry.
When the animals decide to build the windmill, they know there is a “good quarry of limestone on the farm” and plenty of sand and cement that “had been found in one of the outhouses” (ch 6). The animals are not able to use human tools such as “picks and crowbars” because they cannot yet stand on their hind legs. So they decide to “utilise the force of gravity.”
There were huge boulders lying everywhere, so the animals figured out a way to break them.
The animals lashed ropes round [the boulders and] dragged them with desperate slowness up the slope to the top of the quarry, where they were toppled over the edge, to shatter to pieces below. (ch 6)
All of the animals helped. Once the boulders were broken into smaller pieces of stone, it was easy to pick them up and transport them in the wagon to the building site.
The building of the windmill is an example of accomplishment and progress for the animals. They decide that they are going to get electricity, they figure out how the build the windmill, and they build it. Yet the windmill also serves as a distraction. It keeps the animals busy so they don’t see what the pigs are really doing.
To answer this question, take a look at chapter 6. Although the farm has a large supply of limestone, the animals initially find it impossible to break the up the stone into smaller, more manageable sizes because they do they cannot stand on their hind legs to use a pick or crowbar.
After a few weeks, however, one of the animals realizes that this task can be achieved if they use the power of gravity. To do this, the animals dragged a boulder to the top of the quarry and let it fall off so that it would smash on impact into lots of smaller pieces.
Although this solution seems simple, the animal struggled to drag the large stones to the top of the quarry. In fact, it could take all day to drag a single one. As the narrator says, it was a "slow and laborious process."
Despite the difficulties involved, the animals did not give up. In this scene, Boxer shows himself to be the most determined and hardest worker of all, refusing to stop even when he was in danger of overstraining himself.