He is very cynical, he seldom talks and never laughs.Boxer's death doesn't exactly cheer up the old donkey. In fact, he's "more morose and taciturn than ever" (10.2). When the other animals want to know whether things were better before or after the rebellion, he replies with a characteristically cynical answer, "things never had been, nor ever could be much better or much worse—hunger, hardship, and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law of life" (10.6). Does Benjamin blame himself? Does he think that if he'd spoken up sooner, none of this would have happened?
Maybe—especially if you think (like Morris Dickinson) that Benjamin has a touch of Orwell in him. We'd buy it: he's definitely got the philosophical and distant air that Orwell's narrator adopts. But there's a crucial difference. Orwell speaks out against the injustices he sees, instead of just letting them unfold for his own twisted sense of humor.