A Hanging By George Orwell Essay

George Orwell is a man with a hard past. He had to face many difficulties in life and had to overcome many social and health problems. His texts were inspired from personal experiences and he strongly focused on those living in poor conditions going through hardships. His essays “A Hanging” and “Marrakech” are both texts that describe similar themes such as the dangers and inhumanity of colonialism, the realities of class separation and the discrimination of native races. He even uses the landscape and nature as a whole depicting it as brittle, harsh and lifeless.

The text “A Hanging” is based on George Orwell’s experience as a policeman witnessing a Hindu man being hung. The theme spins around the inhumane nature of taking a human life.

What triggered the emotions Orwell felt was when the Hindu man avoided a puddle of water so his feet don’t get wet, which made George Orwell curious considering the man’s fate. Though the man is about to die he is still fully conscious and very much alive. He breathes the same air and has his own thoughts. He is just another human being like everyone else there which gives George Orwell a sickening feeling because his life is about to be taken away form him. “I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man” (A hanging, George Orwell). The author also chooses specific words like sickly, condemned, bare and silent to describe his emotions of disgust. As they were on the way to execute the Hindu man a stray dog appeared and started playing around and barking delaying the execution. The dog distracting the process could’ve been when George Orwell had enough time to start developing the thoughts of it being wrong killing this man and not wanting to be part of it anymore. His main concern in this text is that nobody should have the right to take away the life of a healthy man.
“Marrakech” is based on George Orwell’s experience as a British officer in Morocco giving us a look at how he witnessed the relationship between the white and native people.

He delivers very vivid and saddening descriptions like the funeral custom which was to wrap the bodies in sheets and just dump them in the ditches with a layer of dirt over them. When he would walk over the ground he knew he would be standing over the “graves” of those who recently died. “Sometimes, out for a walk, as you break your way through the prickly pear, you notice that it is rather bumpy underfoot, and only certain regularity in the bumps tells you that you are walking over skeletons.” (Marrakech, George Orwell) George Orwell also describes how poorly treated the animals were by telling us about the donkeys that were used as beasts of burden and often severely overloaded sometimes dropping dead from being unable to carry all that weight that was placed on them. Just like the donkeys Orwell describes old women workers carrying bundles around, being treated just like the animals. In a very touching scene George Orwell was captivated by this well fed beautiful wild gazelle he kept feeding bread to until he realized that a beggar near him was witnessing this situation and was being left out without getting any pieces of bread, which he very much needed. This shows us how easy it can be to get distracted by something “pretty” and ignore the struggles the desperate locals are

facing.
Both essays are based on people being mistreated as victims of colonialism. Orwell uses saddening and repulsive imagery such as describing a morning in “A Hanging” with sickly yellow color and in “Marrakech” with flies swarming from the restaurant table to go on the corpse passing by and then returning back. Orwell uses a first person point of view in both essays since he is the one telling us his story. He uses specific colors like grey, brown and earthy to describe the landscape and nature which gives us an image of a very gloomy place. Some of the characters being used such as condemned man, super intendent, and workers are meant to show us that people are being mistreated and their fate is controlled by someone else (e.g. an authority figure).