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Analysis shooting the elephant by george orwell
In the story shooting an elephant what does the elephant symbolize
Two themes in shooting an elephant
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A police officer in the British Raj, the supposedly 'unbreakable'; ruling force, was afraid. With his gun aimed at a elephant's head, he was faced with the decision to pull the trigger. That officer was George Orwell, and he writes about his experience in his short story, 'Shooting an Elephant';. To save face, he shrugged it off as his desire to 'avoid looking the fool'; (George Orwell, 283). In truth, the atmosphere of fear and pressure overwhelmed him. His inner struggle over the guilt of being involved in the subjugation of a people added to this strain, and he made a decision he would later regret enough to write this story.
Early on in his essay, Orwell describes how the abuses and treatment he witnessed oppressed him '… with an intolerable sense of guilt,'; (Orwell,277). This is not some minor pang, or nagging worry. The shame pressed down on his shoulders with an unbearable weight. He also describes the injustices in detail, using vivid pictures like 'The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages…'; (Orwell,277). This does not come from someone who condones such behavior. It stems from a troubled, remorseful soul.
The mob, thousands by his description, also pressured him. 'I could feel their two-thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly,'; he emphasizes (Orwell, 280). It is hard to resist the peer pressure of one or two people, much less a crowd of thousands. He admits, '…in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the faces behind.'; Thus, the desire and will of the crowd urge him on, ominously.
The people despised him. He speaks of being 'hated by large numbers of people'; and the 'sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere..." (Orwell, 276). As one man, how could he dare to go against them? Two thousand could easily overtake one. They would not have aided him, should anything go wrong, and eagerly anticipated that eventuality. He describes his fear that they would watch him be '…pursued, caught, trampled on, and reduced to a grinning corpse…'; should the elephant charge (Orwell, 281).
While he was obtaining a rifle and following the elephant, more people continued to trail behind him, eventually growing to become a crowd of more than two-thousand. Knowing that the force behind him was much greater than his own, it was distracting him and knew “…even then I was not thinking particularly of my own skin, only of the watchful yellow faces behind”. The pressure from his military duty was eating away at him as well, thinking to himself “the crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man’s life in the east, was one long struggle not to be laughed at”. Afterwards, the old soldiers believed he did the right thing because he was doing his duty by resolving a casualty; the young soldiers thought "it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie" because the elephant had already calmed down and the owner was not present. Relying on optimism, Orwell in the end was content with the casualty and saw his actions legally justified because of
Orwell starts off his story by sharing that with us. “I was hated by large number of people, the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.” (181) Its only when there’s a time in need do they express appreciating. Hating his job because of certain beliefs. “…I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing…” So why did he shoot the elephant? He knew it was wrong, in fact he had a plan on what to do in order not to kill it. “The crowed would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man’s life in the East was one long struggle not to be laugh at” He deffinaly felt the pressure of the crowd. “It was an immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute” In order for him to seem as he done the right thing even though in his heart he knew was wrong, he did it, he shot the elephant. He didn’t even shoot to kill, the poor guy was at a suffering state. He justified his action with the elephant’s wrong doing, killing a man. Orwell had lack of integrity to himself, but for the town’s people, he did what was in his jobs nature. And policemen need integrity to serve the law, even if its ageist your own
The people's’ control of him supports the idea that allowing others to influence you in society is harmful to oneself in that he now makes his decisions solely to avoid conflict with the crowd, and in the end does actions he is not proud of. When Orwell finally gives into the mob mentality of the crowd convincing him to shoot the elephant, he “heard a devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd.” (Orwell). This oxymoron juxtaposes the happiness from the crowd with that of a devil, representing the faux persona the crowd puts on of being harmless, yet in actuality they are dictating every aspect of society. The crowd sets the societal normalities which are expected to be followed by all, though the actions these normalities enforce contradict with the morals of Orwell. The people have Orwell under their total control, though they have a slight twinge of doubt that he will abandon their persuasions and do as he pleases, as mentioned when Orwell writes “The crowd grew very still, and a
George Orwell is a novel writer, born in India and have only spent five days there. Ida Mabel Limouzin, his mother, brought him and his sister too England while his father stayed in India. The novel Shooting an Elephant, that George wrote, took place in the bottom of Burma in the middle of Moulmein. The story is about George Orwell hesitating to kill an Elephant that has killed a man. All George planned to do was to test the elephant to see if it really meant any harm. George feels pressured by the crowd following him because they expect him to kill the elephant. He eventually made the decision to kill the elephant to make the mad crowd happy and plus he doesn’t want to fail at doing his job. Throughout the story George Orwell exert many Metaphor
According to Orwell his freedom was destroyed when he took on the role of the tyrant. His job was that of a sub-divisional police officer in Lower Burma. A crisis arose in which he was faced with a hard decision to make. An elephant had gone on a rampage in the village and had destroyed countless huts and killed a man. When Orwell came upon the elephant it was clear to him that it had calmed down and that the elephant would cause no more harm to anyone. Orwell was faced with a decision: he could either shoot the beast or wait until his master came to get him. However, this decision was made much more complicated. Orwell was surrounded by two thousand Burmans who, as Orwell said, “were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to perform a magic trick.” Although the Burmans were all underneath him and subject to him, he was very concerned about what they thought he should do. He was so concerned in fact he concluded that he had to do as they wished of him.
“I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom he destroys.” (6) The inert ironic nature of this statement truly depicts Orwell’s feeling about being an oppressor. He feels that he is oppressed by those he oppresses. On its death bed the elephant is both “powerless to move yet powerless to die.” It is ironic that such a powerful beast has been put in a position of complete futility. This situational irony alludes to Orwell’s own powerless situation. Orwell did not want to kill the elephant in the first place and yet, ironically, he bestowed it a slow, torturous death fit for the devil. Orwell is just one more to add to the bloodbath that directly results from imperialism. The bloodbath in futility shows the excessively abysmal effects of
Orwell was the kind of person that did not have a very high self-esteem. He did not have his ducks in a row, so to speak. I don’t think that Orwell was one to function under pressure. He would give in to what he thought the people of Burma wanted, not to what he wanted. But secretly inside he hated the environment in which he lived, he hated the imperialistic government in which resided in Burma. He hated the residents of Burma. He stated that he would love to stick his bayonette into the stomach of a Buddhist priest. He felt all of this hatred for the people around him, but yet he felt as if he had to go along with everything and everyone else just to live in harmony.
In “Shooting an Elephant,” from The Seagull Reader: Essays, George Orwell explains about his time as a police officer in Moulmein, Lower Burma when an elephant turned loose in the village. He knew that from the start he “had no intention of shooting the elephant” (246), but as he starts his search for the elephant, the Burmans tell him that the elephant trampled a person to death. As Orwell continues his quest to find the elephant, a crowd joins his side. Soon, he finds the elephant doing no harm but knows he must shoot the elephant because the Burmans would think of him as a fool if he didn’t. Finally, Orwell goes against his morals and shoots the elephant five times causing the elephant to have a slow, painful death. The author’s key point
Orwell was a cop in another land where the people there didn’t really like him much because he was there to keep order because his country just took it over. The people there made him feel like a failure and like really bad. “As a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter.” So being the guy that is from the country that just took over your country he was
The people of the town soon all crowd around Orwell waiting for him to slaughter the beast. He doesn’t want to but he feels if he wishes to keep up the "imperialist" impression he must kill the elephant. Orwell ends up shooting the elephant many times and leaves
If a seven year old read Animal Farm he/she would have thought that it is a sad story about a farm in England. If an older person reads it however, he/she realizes that this story has much more meaning to it. The story is filled with themes that help us understand the world around us. In this essay I am going to talk about four themes that Orwell discussed in this story. They are power, totemism, coercion, and violence. Power leads to absolute power, the job of totemism is to keep the people loyal, and after that doesn't work coercion comes in effect by using violence.
He describes, “I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro” (60). He is dealing with the internal conflicts of who he should align with: himself, the British, or the Burmese. If he were to acknowledge his beliefs and align with himself, he could be the start of an uprise. Surely, others would follow. He even confirms his “thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny” and says, “Ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you catch him off duty,” referring to the hatred of the English empire (58). By expressing his dislike for the British, Orwell is finally attempting to stand up for his beliefs. The fact that his character is unable to execute his beliefs, though, highlights him trying to not look foolish in the presence of others. Clearly, he is in an unbearable circle of self-deprecation and doubt. By the end of the narrative, Orwell’s character regrets his decision to shoot the elephant. This ultimately represents Orwell’s uncertainty as he goes through life. He, like all of us, is struggling to predict which path is the best for him to go down as he ventures through his existence. Because of this, his actions for shooting the elephant are justified. He is just trying to accomplish all that he can while simultaneously dealing with his own questions of identity. This allows Orwell to be seen as a humble individual who is just trying
Orwell uses language to express his remorse over shooting an elephant. In the first paragraph, Orwell draws attention to the enormous creature's "agony" after the third shot had "[knocked] the last remnant of strength from his legs". Then later in paragraph two, he continues to use language to describe how the elephant was "breathing very rhythmically with long rattling gasps". However, as the "agony" of the elephant continues, Orwell begins to describe the breathing as incessant rather than rhythmically. These examples of language allow us to visualize the powerless creature's never-ending suffering. With each breath the helpless animal takes, the more Orwell realizes he had never wanted to shoot it in the first place. He tries everything
People make mistakes every day, hour, minute, and second. Some mistakes are bigger than others and they take a lot of thinking and praying to fix. Man makes mistakes by giving into peer pressure on a daily basis because of things like money and popularity. We see one of these messages in the short story “Shooting an Elephant” by George Orwell. The message of this story is to show that man often lives with unnecessary regret, pleases others, and makes poor decisions.
First, Orwell displays many times throughout his essay where he feels guilty. Orwell says “The Wretched prisoners huddling in… the grey, cowed faces of the long term convicts… all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt” (320). Orwell is suggesting that seeing the way the prisoners had been treated, seeing the way they looked, and seeing their living conditions had made him feel so guilty he was oppressed by it. Another instance where Orwell feels guilty was when he killed the elephant. He only decided to shoot it when all of the people were behind him, and he did not want to look like a fool. Another way you can recognize Orwell’s guilt is in his word usage. He uses words like “dreadful” and “tortured” to describe the slow dying process of the elephant.