Irony In George Orwell's Animal Farm

The primary issue that Old Major has with the principle of working for man is that the animals do the work for no benefit, while Mr. Jones lives a life of excess. Old major is disgruntled by the fact that the man barks orders at his animals, and the animals remain malnourished and neglected even though they do the bulk of the man’s work. Soon after Napoleon and Snowball seize control of Animal Farm, as the animals work tenaciously in the fields, the pigs “…did not actually work, but directed and supervised the others” (50). The pigs’ integrity continues to decline as the story unfolds; the reader sees that they become more akin to the parasitic man which they had sought to be liberated from than diligent leaders they portrayed themselves to be. The pigs, who have taken the place of man at the farm, now begin to reap the benefits of the other animals’ work.
Irony is visible in the fact that the leaders the animals though they wanted, eventually become the exact same as the leader they overthrew. Orwell uses this powerful irony to illustrate the deeper idea pervading the story--the issue was not a matter of who had complete power, but a matter of whether one leader should have absolute power at all. The animals thought that their issue was with the fact that a human was in control. The animals of Manor Farm believed that if only an animal was in control, then they would have the utopian society that Old Major had dreamt of. However, Orwell promptly shows that this is not the case, but quite the contrary. Orwell shows through the animals of Animal Farm, that it makes no difference who the leader is if they have absolute power. Power has a way of corrupting people, a fact that Orwell knew to be true, and he uses his masterful literary skills to illustrate this