After reading, “Shooting an Elephant”, many questions came to my head at the end of the story. My first question was if the man deep inside felt like he shouldn’t have shot the elephant, then why did he? “I looked at the sea of yellow faces above the garish clothes-faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be shot.” (George Orwell) this sentence tells me that the police officer was going against what he believed in just to make the 2000 plus crowd happy. I firmly disagree with this decision, one because I do not partake in killing massive animals such as the elephant, and two because if he knew deep down how he felt about killing the creature he shouldn’t have done it. I was very shocked by his gory decision to be honest.
Is society accounted for the actions of a single person? In the passage “Shooting an Elephant” by George Orwell I feel that Orwell was not justified for shooting the elephant but who was pressured into killing it by the power of the people. The people who George Orwell was supposed to be rulling, ruled him. Orwell did not want to shoot the elephant but the feelings he had and the way he was mistreated by the people of Burma he had no choice but to listen to them. “As soon as I saw the elephant perfect certainty that I ought not to shoot him” When Orwell saw the elephant for the first time he knew that it wasn’t being dangerous, it was peacefully eating grass.
Orwell puts his own feelings aside to please the villagers and kills the elephant. Although Orwell thought he had legally done the right thing, he should have gone with his first instinct and observed the elephant in hopes that it was done with its rampage so that he could avoid killing the elephant, and if it weren’t, then Orwell would have been doing the right thing when shooting the elephant. George Orwell was a native of British India, 1903-1950. “George Orwell was a master of wit and satire, critically observing the politics of his time and prophetically envisioning the future. He devoted much of his life to various causes critical of capitalism, imperialism, fascism, and Stalinism, but in the end what he “most wanted to do is to make political writing into an art.“ (C.D Merriman) His real name was Eric Blair and George Orwell was his pen name.
He understands that the will of the crowd demands the death of the elephant despite his unwillingness to shoot the animal. Conflict The narrator’s inner struggle of shooting an elephant, He has to choose between being laughed of and being seen as a fool or shooting an elephant which he does not intend to do. Style The essay exhibits a certain structure, which is very notable. That of meditation and action; it starts with reflection, tells part of the story, reflects further, offers its climax, and then ends with a final reflection. Broken up by the narrator’s reflections on the events he is remembering.
Jade Paul Dr. Jackson AP Lang Period 7 15 September 2013 Murder For The Purpose of Image By the end of George Orwell’s essay, “Shooting an Elephant”, Orwell being a police officer representing the imperialistic government, makes a final decision to kill an elephant that has caused destruction throughout a village in Burma. Orwell was not respected by the people he was protecting and in his mind he was trying to keep peace throughout the village, but instead created a disturbance by being in Burma. The people look at Orwell as someone coming from the British government to contain the people and make sure violence and resistance does not outbreak. Orwell tries to change this image of himself in their eyes by killing the elephant but in reality it just inserted more fear into the people. The elephant was used as a display to the people that they should fear Orwell and his authority to intimidate the people.
In “Shooting an Elephant” George Orwell is a foreigner in the midst of British-controlled Burma. While he despises imperialism and is on the side of the Burmese, his experiences with local natives have made it difficult to sympathize with them. As the passage progresses, Orwell is given an assignment to deal with a rampaging elephant. When Orwell arrives on the scene, a citizen has already been killed but he finds the elephant to be calm. Although Orwell brainstorms a logical plan in which he would test the elephant’s aggression prior to shooting it, he is unable to withstand the pressures of the natives who are surrounding him, wishing for the elephant to be put to wrest.
But this is not what he would prefer to do. After he finds the big elephant he have gather a big audience of the locals that all are excited to see what he is going to do. He can feel that they would like him to shot the animal and he also starts to think that this could be an opportunity for him to get some popularity among the locals. So he decides to use all his bullets to shot the elephant, but the big animal is still not dead. This results in that the elephant gets a slow and very painful death.
George Orwell’s essay ‘Shooting an Elephant’ presents remarkable insights of human mind and human nature. The story mainly focuses on Orwell’s behavior under peer pressure. “Should I shoot the elephant or should I not?” or “Will I lose face with these people if I don’t shoot the elephant?” First, Orwell expresses the pressure he feels as an Anglo- Indian, European imperial policeman in Burma. He would give in to what he thought the people of Burma wanted, not what he wanted. But secretly, he hated where he lived, he hated the government in Burma.
This has a strong impact on Orwell when a working elephant escapes from its owners’ home and begins to terrorize a local village, killing a man. The owner of the elephant, and the only one who can control it, is looking for the elephant but in the wrong direction, and is about twelve hours away. When the elephant is located grazing in a nearby field, Orwell has to decide whether or not to shoot the elephant or wait for the owner’s return. The added pressure of the locals behind Orwell, some of whom want the meat from the elephant and others just hopeful to see a European being crushed to death by the elephant, make it much more difficult for him to reach a decision. In the end Orwell reluctantly decides to shoot the elephant “solely to avoid looking a fool” (479) in front of the Burmese people.
As usual he could not get it straight from the natives, “we began questioning the people as to where the elephant had gone … but the nearer you get to the scene of events the vaguer it becomes” (p.286). When he finally caught up with the elephant, feelings had been mixed, the excitement had risen, and the people wanted a show. It was in there that laid the personal dilemma. Riffle in hand, the elephant only a few yards away, Orwell was forced to make a decision: to play into the crowd, or make the right choice. The essay “ Shooting An Elephant” provided