Nikki Cortez
Professor Hodges
English 1A
30 April 2018
Pressured to Shoot the Elephant?
Shooting an Elephant is an essay written by George Orwell to have people understand him better as to why he made the decision to shoot an elephant. After reading this essay, some might think that Orwell is a coward for not actually doing what his conscience told him to do. This is completely accurate. He does something that he himself knows is wrong, which is shooting the elephant. Now let’s look at the whole picture here first. For example: What caused this to happen? What was the motive behind it? Did he have motive at all? If not, why did he shoot the elephant? This entire tragedy could have been prevented if specific people’s morals were in the right places.
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Elephants should not be kept as pets. The reason why the elephant killed a man is because it was in musth. When an elephant is in musth, it is caused by their hormones which makes them become extremely aggressive. This elephant is tamed by a man and was kept in chains, but his chain broke overnight and he got loose. Unfortunately, the owner was not around when this happened and the elephant escaped and went into the bazaar. Elephants should be kept as wild animals. Animals who have brains in which shares great resemblance to the human brain, they tend to have emotions just like humankind. If an animal is held captive, their happiness begins to deteriorate, which can cause growing anger. This leads to the animals lashing out and attacking what and who they view as a
Throughout the story, Orwell described how he was heavily pressured by the Burmese into shooting an elephant, stating that he became "... an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind" (Capote 583). Through Orwell's diction it became known that Orwell was hated by the majority of his residing village since he upheld the position of a sub divisional police officer for the British Raj in colonial Burma. Orwell was driven to killing the animal out of desperation of the public dropping all forms of hatred towards him. Although killing the elephant was against his will, Orwell went through with the deed earning a new profound identity known as the elephant
Initially, in the text Elephant, by Orwell, the speaker, who is actually a younger Orwell back when he was a policeman for England stationed in Burma, is faced with the decision to shoot an elephant that is running around like crazy, destroying everything because it is in must, or in heat. Although the elephant is destroying things, it is also a very important animal to the people of Burma, because they use it for farming, and other things. The thing that really messes Orwell up is the fact that there is peer pressure mixed into his feelings. The other police officers believe that killing the elephant is the ri...
The first text by George Orwell entitled, “Shooting an Elephant” shows how peer pressure greatly influenced him in making his final decision. While George made his way to where the elephant was spotted he stated, “I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. I was an immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute.” (Orwell, Shooting an Elephant, page 1322) With two thousand people around wanting him to shoot and kill an “innocent looking” would be peer pressure to say the least. Orwell then states, “I did not want to shoot the elephant” (Orwell, Shooting an Elephant, page 1323) However, in the end, with the large crowd drooling over the excitement of seeing an elephant being shot, Orwell shot the elephant. Technically the elephant did go on a rampage, killing a man in the process, but now the elephant had calmed down. The reason the elephant was in suc...
A police officer in the British Raj, the supposedly 'unbreakable'; ruling force, was afraid. With his gun aimed at a elephant's head, he was faced with the decision to pull the trigger. That officer was George Orwell, and he writes about his experience in his short story, 'Shooting an Elephant';. To save face, he shrugged it off as his desire to 'avoid looking the fool'; (George Orwell, 283). In truth, the atmosphere of fear and pressure overwhelmed him. His inner struggle over the guilt of being involved in the subjugation of a people added to this strain, and he made a decision he would later regret enough to write this story.
In this story ,Orwell is taking part in imperialism by proving his power and dignity to the natives presenting imperialism metaphorically through the use of animals. He is using the elephant as a symbol of imperialism representing power as an untamed animal that has control over the village. He uses a large and very powerful animal to represent a significant metaphor for imperialism.. In doing so he leads to the understanding that the power behind imperialism is only as strong as its dominant rulers. Orwell?s moral values are challenged in many different ways, ironically enough while he too was the oppressor. He is faced with a very important decision of whether or not he should shoot the elephant. If he does so, he will be a hero to his people. In turn, he would be giving in to the imperial force behind the elephant that he finds so unjust and evil. If he lets the elephant go free and unharmed the natives will laugh at him and make him feel inferior for not being able to protect the...
In the article “Shooting an Elephant,” by George Orwell, Orwell struggles with the hatred his town had for him considering him being a European police officer. Eventually, Orwell had come across the opportunity to rescue the Brumans from an elephant that was destroying huts and eventually killed an Indian man. With the intentions of shooting in the air to scare the elephant away, he was feeling pressure for the Brumans to shoot the elephant. Orwell must conduct a tough decision to either shoot the elephant to receive respect from the Brumans, or to wait for the elephant’s owner to take him to a safe place.
People make mistakes every day, hour, minute, and second. Some mistakes are bigger than others and they take a lot of thinking and praying to fix. Man makes mistakes by giving into peer pressure on a daily basis because of things like money and popularity. We see one of these messages in the short story “Shooting an Elephant” by George Orwell. The message of this story is to show that man often lives with unnecessary regret, pleases others, and makes poor decisions.
When he finial find the elephant Orwell say “I knew with perfect certainty that I ought not to shoot him.” But when he lays his eyes on the crowd he changes his stance to “but I did not want to shoot the elephant.”(Orwell 199). He felt guilty for shooting the elephant when he describe that the elephant worth more alive than dead, but despite the many reason not to shoot the elephant, he took a shot. Orwell describes “when I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick …I fired again into the same spot…I fired a third time. That was the shot that did it for him.”(199) the shooting of the elephant represent the Burma people trying to stay alive and over powering by the
The story that my evaluation will be based on is Shooting an Elephant written in 1936. The author George Orwell was born in 1903 in India to a British officer raised in England. He attended Eton College, which introduced him to England’s middle and upper classes. He was denied a scholarship, which led him to become a police officer for the Indian Imperial in 1922. He served in Burma until resigning in 1927 due to the lack of respect for the justice of British Imperialism in Burma and India. He was now determined to become a writer, so at the brink of poverty he began to pay close attention to social outcasts and laborers. This led him to write Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) during the Spanish Civil War. He embodied his hate for totalitarian system in his book Animal Farm (1945). George Orwell fell to the disease of tuberculosis at forty-seven, but not before he released many works. He wrote six novels, three documentary works, over seven hundred reviews and newspaper articles, and a volume of essays (1149). This particular story was very interesting and found it to hold a lot of truth. Shooting an Elephant is about an English man that was a police officer in Burman, who was hated for his race and felt it almost impossible to do his job. He had to deal with a lot of hatred and disrespect, but yet he was expected to do what the town’s people asked of him when they asked.
As you pass the elephant exhibit at the zoo, cherish it since it might not be there for long. "More than 100,000 Asian elephants may have existed at the start of the 20th century, but numbers have fallen by at least 50% over the last three generations, and they are still in decline today" (Asian elephants np). Most Asian elephants that live in zoos don't offer the correct living conditions. There is an Asian elephant living at the San Antonio Zoo named "Lucky" and is 56 years old. However, the Animal Legal Defense Fund and three city residents claim the 56-year-old elephant suffers harm from the conditions of her captivity, without companionship of other Asian elephants, and with limited shelter from the heat (Garza 2016). All Asian elephants like Lucky should not live in zoos because they do not fully meet their living standards. Asian elephants should be able to stay in their home zoo since they have adapted to the zoos living conditions.
As little kids, we learn lying is not okay and that we should never turn away from what we know is right and wrong. But as we get older, we find out that we end up doing what we promised to never do. In "Shooting an Elephant" by George Orwell, Orwell is faced with a problem to shoot or to not shoot an elephant on the run; he is a British officer in Burma and is looked up to as a tough, stern, and harsh man. Orwell has no intentions to shoot this poor elephant that has done nothing wrong, but peer pressure and other thoughts that Orwell has convinced Orwell to shoot it. These thoughts that arise are as Orwell puts it, "when the white man turns tyrant it is own freedom that he destroys", and "he wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it" (288).
In “Shooting an Elephant,” George Orwell achieves two achievements : he shows us his personal experience and his expression while he was in Burma; he use the metaphor of the elephant to explain to describe what Burma looked like when it was under the British Imperialism. The special about this essay is that Orwell tells us a story not only to see the experience that he had in Burma; he also perfectly uses the metaphor of the elephant to give us deep information about the Imperialism. By going through this essay, we can deeply understand what he thinks in his head. He successfully uses the word choices and the sentences to express his feeling. By reading this essay, Orwell succeeds us with his mesmerizing sentences and shows us the picture of Burma in the past.
African elephants are the largest land animals in the world. They are slightly bigger than their cousin the Asian elephant. Elephants are known for a lot of things. There are only 2 out of the 600 species of elephants left. They do some of the most interesting things. In this essay, I’m going to inform you about different things about elephants; how they live, how they do things and where they are most commonly found. Elephants overpower most other animals because of their size. These are some of the most important facts to know about elephants.
A estimate that was tallied of illegal kills during 2011 alone found out that one out of twelve African elephants was killed because poaching for ivory. although illegal to kill an elephant in Africa and most parts of the world. people continue to find reasons to justify the killing of these majestic beasts. If they are not being killed for ivory they are being killed for another reason such as revenge. In both the savannahs and forest of Africa groups of elephants are being targeted because of the human population. Some herders such as the Masai have found a way to live in harmony with the elephants. By leaving their farms without fences, elephants are able to roam through the farm without having the elephant destroying fences and hurting livestock. Farmers look at elephants as large pests that can come when they want, destroy their crops and in the way kill them also. Since that tensions are always high with elephants and farmers even if no crops were destroyed by any elephants farmers would kill the closes elephant they see to get revenge or become even with the animals for destroying their crops even if not
Orwell?s extraordinary style is never displayed well than through ?Shooting an Elephant,? where he seemingly blends his style and subject into one. The story deals with a tame elephant that all of a sudden turns bad and kills a black Dravidian coolie Indian. A policeman kills this elephant through his conscience because the Indians socially pressurized him greatly. He justified himself as he had killed elephant as a revenge for coolie.