As a police officer, he was able to experience the hatred of the Burmese and the evils of imperialism himself. At the beginning of his essay he talks about his life in Burma, how he “was an obvious target” of all the insults, hideous laughter, and the sneers. He provides us detailed information and uses the idea of pathos. Orwell was able to let the readers understand his side about imperialism through his own experience. Orwell’s use of logos is evident when he finally decided to kill the elephant.
This is shown through their similar opinions on death. In Shooting an Elephant, Orwell is forced to shoot an elephant because it went on a rampage and killed an unskilled worker. According to most laws, something that kills something else is usually killed itself. This law of an eye for an eye has been used by humans since around the year 4 A.D. with Hammurabi’s
Even though Orwell did commit the crime of shooting an elephant, throughout the story he used ethos, pathos, and figurative language to convince the audience if given the opportunity he would never shoot an elephant again because the elephant represents the innocence of people. First and foremost, Orwell establishes his ethos. As stated in Everything’s an Argument, ethos is described as the author's credibility. He establishes his ethos right from the beginning of the story when he states he works for the British but he despises them.
Pg 269 The feeling i get from George Orwell’s shooting an elephant is that when he started out working as a civil servant for the British Raj that he didn't hate the Burmese. It feels like when he first started out, he got into it with good intentions and that this job wore him down. He has very strong thoughts on the empire and his distaste for it but then he turns around and has an uncontrollable rage for the Burmese.
Through this incident, there is a clear examination of the empire with the eyes of a single officer and how an individual tends to behave when he fights with his own motivation to perform an action. Orwell himself never intended to kill the elephant because he believed that it was not worthy to kill a tame animal, he said in text “it is comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery”. Towards the end of the story he finally kills the elephant not because he did not want to come out as a coward or he wanted to, but in order to fit in the personality of a police officer. He uses elephant as a metaphor in the text to show the hatred of Burmese people, and shows how Imperialism is weakling the empire. Another metaphor used in the text was, the use of word “elephant” till the time Orwell saw the elephant lying nearly dead, however in the very end author calls it a great beast in the sentence “it seemed dreadful to see the great beast lying there powerless to move, powerless to die” (ORWELL 477) just to symbolize the negative opinion of the crowd towards the animal.
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.
Well known author and journalist, George Orwell, in his essay, Shooting an Elephant, describes his experiences as a Policeman in Moulmein, Burma during European Imperialism. Orwell’s purpose is to convey the ideal that what is right and what is accepted don’t always align. He adopts a remorseful tone in order to convey to the reader the weight of his actions. By looking at George Orwell’s use of imagery and figurative language, one can see his strongly conflicting opinions on Imperialism. Orwell begins his essay, Shooting an Elephant, by explaining the actions of the Burmese people and by expressing his contempt for imperialism.
This narrative piece is an effective expository technique that describes the narrator’s thoughts and tone. Orwell uses oxymoron such as “grinning corpse” and paradox phrases such as “the story always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of events the vaguer it becomes”. Another paradox statement is shown in “I perceived this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys”. Orwell’s decisions were briskly altered as he was deciding on whether to kill the elephant or not. His mind altered from “I ought not to shoot him” to “I had got to do it” and also to “But I did not want to shoot the elephant”.
At a young age, parents tend to teach their child right from wrong. They teach you this to become responsible, so when your an adult you do not have to rely on them while making decisions. In George Orwell's Shooting an Elephant, we notice he wanted to do the right thing by not shooting the elephant but gave into peer pressure to fit in. The narrator felt the need he had to shoot the elephant because the people of Burma were frightened and he wanted to be their hero. Peer pressure can lead people to do bad things for what they think are good reasons but are actually not.
In the beginning of the essay, the elephant manifests an unbending tantrum. The rampage kills a local man and destroys much of the village. Orwell, by using a tumultuous elephant destroying the village, is a reference to imperialism and its disastrous effects. Orwell writes, “He was lying on his belly with arms crucified and head sharply twisted to one side… (Most of the corpses I have seen looked devilish.)” to show how imperialism’s devastation was the opposite of the initial extension of Britain 's influence through colonization. You can see in Orwell 's writing the diction he uses such as “crucified” and “devilish” in the essay show that the religious influence of imperialism takes a large toll on the culture of the Burmese people and British officers there.
To support this Orwell tells of the hardship he faces as being not only a white man in an Indian society, but a cop as well, to help convince the audience that imperialism needs to end before it leads to many country’s demise, including his own. Orwell did not just give a general description of what happened he made it so the reader could feel what he felt, see what he saw, and experience what he experienced. Way of the ways is through his graphic imagery of the story, including the moments after he shot the elephant, “his legs collapsed beneath him…” describing the pain and suffering the elephant went through as he took each shot; this strong imagery strengthens the emotions of anger and sadness in the reader to better his argument against
Throughout “Shooting An Elephant” , Orwell’s narrative style brings out internal and external conflicts that are relatable in society today. The narrator faces multiple internal and external conflicts. One external conflict being the Burmese and how they mock him because he is a representative of the British Empire, but he will do what it takes to show them he is not a fool. "I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.
Criticism started to beat down his self-confidence, and made him rethink what a police officer was. Orwell describes in text how he felt he was an “obvious target.” While everything was going on, he felt baited whenever it was safe to do so.
There are numerous themes in this short story such as British imperialism and colonial resentment however the most prominent theme in this story is fear of humiliation and the effect peer- pressure has on an individual. The setting of Burma helps work with this theme as it provides an area for the plot to take place and develop. After marching miles to the destination of the elephant, a crowd had surrounded George Orwell and encourages Orwell to kill the elephant. George Orwell is compelled to kill the once ravaging elephant due to the fact that Orwell wants to avoid looking like a fool. George Orwell is willing to sacrifice his role of doing the right thing and fulfilling the Burmese wishes in order to save himself from
(pg. 322) and “As a police officer, I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so.” (pg. 322) The Burmese showed him no respect, but it wasn’t to a point where crime was common. Even though Orwell was the ring leader of the Burmese crowd, he didn’t call the shots. Orwell says he “had no intention of shooting the elephant.”
