Analyzing Stanley Milgram's 'Shooting An Elephant'

Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, conducted an experiment exploring the reason behind the determination of the Germans to take part in the genocide during World War II. The experiment involved members of the audience questioning a man (a hired actor) connected to an electric-shock generator. Each time he answered a question wrong, the person in charge of the query would electrocute the man. The results revealed that although the man displayed agonizing pain (even though it was fake), the subjects continued to execute their victim. Similar to the despotic behaviour of the colonizer, the subjects demonstrated an indifference to their actions when they were faced with the conflict of obeying authority versus personal conscience.

He employs the possibility that the colonizers can easily forget that the colonizedthe Burmeseare human. The callous effect that colonization has on the natives is evident in the imprisonment of the Burmese. The narrator states, “the wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lockups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been bogged with bamboos” (Orwell 276). The narrator learns to play the role of a stereotypical colonizer which results in the line between his role and his personal identity being blurred. Powerless to resist the commands of colonialism, the police officer obeys what the British tells him to do leading to a shift in his sense of reality. This shift allows the imprisonment of the Burmese to become a normalized situation ultimately portraying the colonizer as callous and indifferent. He continues, “all I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible.” (276). The British created an overwhelmingly powerful situation limiting the narrator’s power to intervene in the ways the Empire treats the Burmese. The lack of influence or rather his obedience to authority further encourages the overall dehumanization of the natives reducing them