How To Tell A True War Story And Shooting An Elephant By George Orwell
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In the passages How to Tell a True War Story by Tim O’Brien and Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell, there are many similarities and differences between the two passages, but the differences exceed the similarities. While both sections talk about a shooter, human death, and animal death; they differentiate in the shooters motives, pacing, and narration structure. Just as How to Tell a True War Story has the death of Curt Lemon, Shooting an Elephant also has the death of the coolie. In Tim O’Brien’s story, Curt Lemon is killed by a boobytrapped bomb in which O’Brien leads himself to believe is the sunlight. The passage goes on to describe the events leading up to Lemon’s death and how O’Brien believes that Curt Lemon would have thought the sunlight killed him and not the 105-round, “It was not the sunlight. It was a rigged 105 round. But if I could ever get the story right, how the sun seemed to gather around him and pick him up and lift him high into a tree, if I could somehow re-create the fatal whiteness of that light, the quick glare, the obvious cause, and effect, then you would believe the last thing Curt Lemon believed, which for him must 've been the final truth” (O’Brien 80). O’Brien explains that Lemon’s death is hard for everyone but Rat Kiley takes Curt Lemon’s death the hardest. George Orwell’s passage describes the gruesome details of the coolie’s death and explains to the readers how he died “He was an Indian, a black Dravidian coolie, almost naked, and he