George Orwell’s “Shooting And Elephant” And Lenore Essay

Orwell’s perspective as a reluctant and disgusted colonizer shapes his essay’s development, detail and main thesis. The essay’s first-person narrative, causal analysis and the detail it employs obviously produce a powerful condemnation of British colonialism. However, while Orwell briefly lists the obvious abuses of colonialism---the torture of prisoners, the appalling conditions in imperial jails, the destruction of the colonized’s spirit---he focuses his essay’s detail and development on colonialism’s effects on himself as colonizer, how this system causes his degradation and corruption as a human being. He presents his younger self as tormented by his role in this system, but also as someone who has absorbed its racist attitudes. He emphasizes his “intolerable sense of guilt” (313), but also his contradictory hatred of the Burmese, those “evil-spirited little beasts” (314), as well as his callous disregard for the native man killed by the elephant (319). When Orwell reveals he was “glad” over this death, since it protected him from legal action from the elephant’s owner, this detail is typical of how the author generalizes from his own earlier experience to that of other colonizers:   the young Orwell’s callousness shows his personal degradation, but since his reaction is shared by all the young white colonizers, his reaction is clearly produced by the inhuman system they are all trapped within (319).
The essay’s causal development and personal detail lead naturally to Orwell’s conclusions, which arise out of his shooting of the elephant. When Orwell finds himself with 2,000 Burmese villagers standing behind him, a rifle in his hands, the now-quiet elephant in front of him, he knows there is no reason to the shoot the animal, but he does so, realizing that it is he who is dominated and subjugated, not the colonized. He shoots the elephant, he says later, to avoid being “laughed at” (317), suggesting that the power in this situation only seems to be his....