Theme Of Colonialism In Shooting An Elephant

The Narrator as The Writer’s Device to Express His View of Colonialism in George Orwell’s Shooting an Elephant

Colonialism, in the eyes of many people, is a bad thing. The people involved usually suffer greatly as a result of this few people’s greed. In the literature works, such things often catch the writers’ interest to be documented in their work. In George Orwell’s Shooting an Elephant, he pictured The Great Britain’s colonialism and its effects on parties involved, particularly the natives, the Burmans, and the narrator, a white police officer stationed there. This essay focuses in the narrator’s opinions and standings. By considering the narrator’s viewpoint, this essay intends to give an insight on how Orwell supposedly placed himself in the side of the narrator, and by extent, the white men that had the same position and circumstances as the narrator.

Background

“Shooting an Elephant” is an essay by George Orwell, first published in the literary magazine New Writing in the autumn of 1936 and broadcast by the BBC Home Service on October 12, 1948. It tells a story about a narrator that is an English police officer stationed in Burma. The essay tells many hardships the narrator, as a foreign man hating by the natives, endure. The story also tells about the narrator’s experience in dealing with a mad elephant, hence this essay’s title. George Orwell himself had been a police officer in Burma, an experience that possibly inspired him to write the essay, although it