Rhetorical Analysis Of Shooting An Elephant By George Orwell

In the article “Shooting an Elephant,” by George Orwell, Orwell struggles with the hatred his town had for him considering him being a European police officer. Eventually, Orwell had come across the opportunity to rescue the Brumans from an elephant that was destroying huts and eventually killed an Indian man. With the intentions of shooting in the air to scare the elephant away, he was feeling pressure for the Brumans to shoot the elephant. Orwell must conduct a tough decision to either shoot the elephant to receive respect from the Brumans, or to wait for the elephant’s owner to take him to a safe place.
To begin with, Orwell was a police officer in a town that was anti-European. He was often criticized from a distance by the young Brumen men that he meets on a daily basis; when they thought it was safe to do so. Orwell

Orwell shows emotions on how he feels about shooting the elephant by stating “But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of grass against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have. It seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him. At that age I was not squeamish about killing animals, but I had never shot an elephant and never wanted to.” Orwell also used the rhetorical approach, taking kind of the elephant worth using ethos stating “Alive, the elephant was worth at least a hundred pounds; dead, he would only be worth the value of his tusks, five pounds, possibly.” To Orwell the elephant was better off alive than dead. Moreover, Orwell uses rhetorical appeals using logos stating “I ought to walk up to within, say, twenty-five yards of the elephant and test his behavior. If he charged, I could shoot; if he took no notice of me, it would be safe to leave him until the mahout came back.” Orwell put his logic into thought in order to find a valid reason to shoot the