Shooting An Elephant

The story that my evaluation will be based on is Shooting an Elephant written in 1936. The author George Orwell was born in 1903 in India to a British officer raised in England. He attended Eton College, which introduced him to England’s middle and upper classes. He was denied a scholarship, which led him to become a police officer for the Indian Imperial in 1922. He served in Burma until resigning in 1927 due to the lack of respect for the justice of British Imperialism in Burma and India. He was now determined to become a writer, so at the brink of poverty he began to pay close attention to social outcasts and laborers. This led him to write Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) during the Spanish Civil War. He embodied his hate for totalitarian system in his book Animal Farm (1945). George Orwell fell to the disease of tuberculosis at forty-seven, but not before he released many works. He wrote six novels, three documentary works, over seven hundred reviews and newspaper articles, and a volume of essays (1149). This particular story was very interesting and found it to hold a lot of truth. Shooting an Elephant is about an English man that was a police officer in Burman, who was hated for his race and felt it almost impossible to do his job. He had to deal with a lot of hatred and disrespect, but yet he was expected to do what the town’s people asked of him when they asked. When the elephant got loose the first person the sub-inspector at the opposite end of the town called was the main character, who was to be nameless throughout the entire story. He wanted him to go do something about the loose elephant because the mahout (the keeper and driver of an elephant) was away and no one else could handle a situation such as this. The main character grabbed his 44 rifle and set out to find the elephant. The purpose of the gun was not to kill the elephant but to just scare it with the noise. Little did the officer know the act of grabbing the gun to just scare the elephant would lead to its demise. On the way to find the elephant the officer learned it had destroyed a garden, a bamboo hut, devoured some stock and had trampled a cow. As the officer went further on he found that the elephant had killed a townsman just minutes before. Now thinking that the elephant could be dangerous he asked for a larger and more powerful rifle. He only wanted the bigger gun in...

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...t; I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool" (685). This made me feel that he had no real remorse for the killing and that his reputation was winning out over his very own conscious. This story did fit into this particular section very well because of the portrayal of the cultural and identity aspects of life. The officer is forced to deal with and question his identity by the feelings he has when finds and kills the elephant. The culture is represented by the "coolie, yellow faces, and Buddhist" (680-685). It also fits very well with the author’s feelings on imperialism, because the main character states that he feels that it is an evil thing (680). In all consideration I understood why the author had to describe the slaughter of the elephant in such detail. It added to the effectiveness of the story by painting a very clear picture that the actions of the officer were wrong. His point would not have been taken so seriously if he just stated that the elephant died after many shots or in any other basic way. Overall I did enjoy the message very much and felt that it fit into the section very well, but I did not care for the way the author displayed the message.