Shooting An Elephant

”, the author’s character (who is based directly off of a young George Orwell), is a policeman in Burma who is sent to work there by the crumbling imperialistic government of Great Britain. His assignment is to supervise and essentially patrol the poverty stricken Burmese people, who vehemently resent British rule. While on duty one day, a giant elephant that has lost contact with its master goes on a mad rampage in a local market. In his fit of panic, he scares and endangers several of the civilians, topples over and damages shops, and even tramples a slave man to death. In this sequence where the slave’s body is found with a twisted neck and flayed back, the policeman realizes how much of a danger this monstrous animal has become and

As he goes to find and approach the elephant, all of the frightened civilians follow closely behind and are anxiously anticipating for him to kill the elephant that has caused them all of this danger. Once he finally finds the elephant, he sees him grazing in a field innocently and peacefully, as his fit of “must” had passed, and was now simply waiting for its master to find him and guide him home. At this point in the story, the suspense and dread hits Orwell’s audience hard, as the young policeman is torn between whether or not he should kill this elephant because it has both taken and endangered lives, and if he lets all the people in the village down for not killing it, he will be mocked and laughed at by the people, and very likely be reprimanded for not doing the “right thing”. But on the other hand, the elephant is still only an animal that didn’t know any better, and the policeman feels that he should wait until the elephant’s master can find him and retrieve the

Orwell portrays this pitch perfectly by putting his character in a very tight situation where he must choose between sparing the life of an innocent animal and risking his reputation in the process, or taking the life of this innocent creature and maintaining the authority of his office and the respect of the villagers. In either circumstance, there is an even mix of consequences and benefits in the character’s balance. He’s torn because he knows that what the elephant did wasn’t something that made up who the elephant was. The elephant had gone into a must and had had a panic attack that could not be brought under control without the expertise of his master. This was not something the elephant wanted to, but the villagers didn’t know this. He knew that the villagers saw the elephant only as a threat to their people and a resource for food if it were to be dead, so it was much better to be dead for these villagers than it was to be left alive for a master who may or may not be coming back at all. Once the policeman figured that out, I think he had begun to realize that his own opinion in this very moment was a lot weaker compared to that of those people, so he decided to kill the elephant because he knew it was useless to try let the situation fix itself. For example, if he were to