How Does Orwell Show The Wrongness In Capital Punishment?

Orwell presents the other poignant character, the superintendent, to show the wrongness in capital punishment. The superintendent is shown to be a sympathetic person. Orwell writes, “The superintendent of the jail, who was standing apart from the rest of us, moodily prodding the gravel with his stick, raised his head at the sound” (Orwell 99. During the execution, he stands apart from rest of the group. He makes no eye contact with the prisoner and keeps flicking the pebbles with his stick. The superintendent adopts the avoidance behavior to divert his mind from the execution. He is an army doctor who has taken oath of saving healthy lives. He knows that he has been involved in sin and has done evil. To not express his emotions and griefs,

““For God’s sake, hurry up Francis,” he said irritably” (Orwell 99). This clearly shows he does not like his job at all and how he wants to get it done fast. The poking of the hanging man with his stick, and saying, “He’s all right” and checking the time represented just a tiresome inconvenience for everyone. The scene in the story doesn’t indicate feeling of sadness, but rather it has a disturbing meaning instead. It depicts the relief that the job is done (Rodden 75). The image of the hanging man seen from the distance reflects a strong symbol of how unethical and cruel cutting off somebody’s life is. Orwell’s scholar, Paul Melia in the “Imperial Orwell” states, “The laughter and the whiskey the servants of Empire enjoy postmortem may ostensibly be their means of dealing with their unease, but it made patently clear that the British and those Asians who serve their regime experience a privileged existence on quite different plane to the majority of the people” (Melia, 19). After the execution, almost everyone got drunk early in the morning. This way they are trying to dull their conscience and get rid of all the