George Orwell's 'To Shoot An Elephant'

In George Orwell’s “To Shoot an Elephant” the reader is teleported to Southeast Asia. They are taken to a time of British take over from the perspective of a young Englishman. As a police officer for a British colony in Burma, our narrator is in charge of keeping the peace. But due to the Imperialistic nature of the British Empire, the people of Burma give Englishmen a stigma. A stigma that causes our narrator to be jeered and laughed upon by the native people causing him to in turn have a hatred towards the Burmese. So instead of properly doing his job, he would rather avoid contact with the Burmese people. This was how it was until one day; a captivated elephant gets loose during mating season and starts to wreck havoc. The narrator is then

In times of racial tension and social divides in cultures, it’s hard for two different peoples to unite or at least be hospitable to one another as seen during the Apartheid, Civil Right movement, and so on. This will always happen as long as there is the oppressor and the oppressed. But in Burma, it’s so bad that even a peaceful people such as Buddhist even made their animosity known to the British. “The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were several thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans.” (Orwell) Already feeling out of place our narrator is also faced with living up to the reputation of the British Empire. The British Empire was the strongest world power at the time, and due to this every British officer has to have a demeanor of control and power. “A white man mustn’t be frightened in front of “natives”; and so, in general, he isn’t frightened.” (Orwell) So when our narrator is in the situation where he is being watched by thousands of locals as he contemplates shooting the elephant, he decides to shoot because otherwise, he would look weak or fearful. As said by the narrator regarding the incident with the elephant; “It was a tiny incident in itself, but it gave me a better glimpse

Was the narrator justified in shooting the elephant? The answer is yes, due to the unpredictability of an elephant in heat. The circumstances are still upsetting and it’s a shame the elephant had to be put down, but it already trampled a man inadvertently. “I rounded the hut and saw a man’s dead body sprawling in the mud. He was an Indian, a black Dravidian coolie, almost naked” (Orwell) The dead body not only makes the elephant a potential danger, but also a danger with no remorse if it kills another person. When someone hits someone with a car they will check on them and will be more careful next time, but in the eyes of a wild animal there isn’t an issue with murdering or hurting another creature on accident. Causing it to not learn from its mistake. Now at the time of the shooting the animal seemed docile, but one thing could awry and it could end up trampling thousands of onlookers at the scene. Even though the narrator admits to shooting the elephant to not look like a fool “I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.” (Orwell) He may have actually saved the unarmed natives from being killed “But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It was an immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute.” (Orwell) He did the right thing by terminating the