SHORT STORY ANALYSIS IN GEORGE ORWELL

“SHOOTING ELEPHANT”

BY

KAHARUDDIN (214300027)

MERLIN.D (214300042)

SYNOPSIS OF THE STORY

The abuse he suffers from Burmese confuses Orwell, because he is theoretically—and secretly on their side, and opposed to the oppressive British empire he serves. His work handling wretched prisoners gives him a close-up view of the dirty work of Europe and makes him feel guilty for his role in colonialism. He has yet to understand that the British empire is waning, and will soon be replaced with even worse regimes. However, while Orwell considers the empire an unconscionable tyranny, he still hates the insolent Burmese who torment him. This conflicted mindset is typical of officers in the British Raj, he explains.

One day, a minor incident takes places that gives Orwell insight into the true nature of imperialism and the reasons behind it. He receives a call from another policeman, informing him that a rogue elephant has been causing damage in the town. Orwell heads toward the affected area. On the way, locals explain that the elephant is not wild, but rather a domesticated one that has had an attack of “must.” “Must” occurs when tame elephants, held in chains, break their restraints and go berserk. The Burmese have been unable to restrain the elephant. Its “mahout,” or handler, pursued it in the wrong direction and is now twelve hours away. On its rampage, the elephant has destroyed public and private property and killed livestock.

Orwell goes to the neighborhood where the elephant was last spotted, which is one of the town’s poorer districts. He tries to figure out the state of affairs, but, as is common in his experience of Asia, he finds that the story makes less and less sense the more he learns about it. The neighborhood’s inhabitants give such conflicting reports that Orwell nearly concludes that the whole story was a hoax. Suddenly, he hears a commotion nearby and rounds a corner to find a “coolie”—a laborer—lying dead in the mud, crushed and skinned alive by the rogue elephant. The mutilated corpse appears to have been in excruciating pain. Orwell orders a subordinate to bring him a gun strong enough to shoot an elephant.

Orwell’s subordinate returns with the gun, and locals reveal that the elephant is in a nearby rice paddy. Orwell walks to the field, and a large group from the neighborhood follows him. The townspeople, who were previously uninterested in the destructive elephant, have seen the gun and are excited to see the beast shot. Orwell feels uncomfortable—he had not planned to shoot the elephant, and requested the rifle only for self-defense.

His inability to resist the crowd’s bloodlust makes Orwell realize that his authority over the locals is a hollow sort of power. Orwell, the imperialist, cannot do anything other than what the Burmese expect him to do. He is constrained by having to “impress” the empire’s subjects by embodying the “conventionalized figure” of Western authority. In this way, Orwell reflects, “when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.” Orwell realizes that he committed to killing the elephant the moment he ordered that he be brought a rifle. He entertains the possibility of doing nothing and letting the elephant live, but concludes that this would make the crowd laugh at him. His entire mission as a colonialist, he says, is not to be laughed at—thus, sparing the elephant is not an option.

The elephant lies on the ground, breathing laboriously. Orwell waits for it to die, but it continues to breathe. He fires at its heart, but the elephant hardly seems to notice the bullets. Orwell is distressed to see the elephant laboring to die, clearly in agonizing pain, so he fires his smaller-caliber rifle into its body countless times. These bullets do nothing; the elephant continues to breathe torturously. Orwell leaves the scene, unable to bear the elephant’s suffering any longer. He is later told that the elephant took a half hour to die. Shortly thereafter, the Burmese stripped the meat off its bones.

Orwell’s choice to kill the elephant was controversial. The elephant’s owner was angry, but, as an Indian, had no legal recourse. Older British agreed with Orwell’s choice, but younger colonists thought it was inappropriate to kill an elephant just because it killed a coolie, because they are of the opinion that elephants are more valuable than coolies. Orwell notes that he is lucky the elephant killed a man, because it gave his own actions legal justification. Finally, Orwell wonders if any of his comrades understood that he killed the elephant “solely to avoid looking a fool.”

CHARACTER AND CHARACTERIZATION

Narrator

George Orwell. He works as the sub-divisional police officer of Moulmein, a town in the British colony of Burma. Because he is, like the rest of the English, a military occupier, he is hated by much of the village. Though the Burmese never stage a full revolt, they express their disgust by harassing Europeans at every opportunity. Burmese trip Orwell during soccer games and hurl insults at him as he walks down the street. The young Buddhist priests torment him the most.

Sub-Inspector

Burmese officer who calls the narrator for help after an elephant gets loose in town.

Black Dravidian Coolie

Indian laborer from the town of Coringa, India, who is killed by the elephant. A Dravidian is a lower-caste Indian who speaks his own language, Dravidian.

Friend of the Narrator

Man who provides the narrator an elephant gun.

Police Orderly

Person who fetches an elephant gun for the narrator.

Mahout

Owner of the elephant. He becomes very angry after learning that the narrator has killed his elephant. A mahout is a skilled elephant trainer and handler.

Indian Constables
Crowd of Townspeople
British Who React to the Shooting

PLOT

This Short story uses forward plot. It consist of parts of story.

Exposition

As a British police officer in the hillside town of Moulmein in Lower Burma, the narrator frequently endures jeers from the natives. They do not realize that he, too, opposes English occupation of Burma. In his position, he sees the misery that imperialism produces.

The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged with bamboos—all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt,” he says.

Raising Action

So here he is walking a line between anti-imperialism and "the evil spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible." One morning at the beginning of the rainy season (between June and October), an incident occurs that enlightens him about the motives of imperialism. An elephant is loose in a bazaar in a poor section of town, and a Burmese sub-inspector phones him to come and remedy the situation. The elephant, normally tame, is in must, a state of frenzy brought on by sexual heat. After it had broken its chain and run away, its mahout pursued it in the wrong direction and was now many miles away. So far the elephant had demolished a hut, overturned a garbage van, killed a cow, and eaten produce in the fruit stalls of the bazaar. Because the Burmese have no weapons of their own, the elephant is free to run wild.

Climax

The narrator gets his .44 Winchester and travels to the site on a pony. The Winchester is not powerful enough to kill an elephant, but the noise it makes can frighten an animal. After the sub-inspector and several Indian constables greet the narrator, he investigates a hubbub at a nearby hut. Around the corner of the hut, he discovers the body of an Indian, a black Dravidian coolie, in mud. Onlookers report that the elephant captured him with its trunk and then ground him down with its foot. His body is a ghastly sight—skin torn from his back, head wrenched askew, teeth clenched in agony.

A friend of the narrator owns an elephant gun, and the narrator sends a police orderly to fetch it. After he returns with the rifle and five cartridges, the narrator heads down a hill toward paddy fields where the elephant was last seen. Throngs of people follow him to witness the shooting of an elephant and to reap the harvest of meat afterward. However, the narrator hopes it will not be necessary to shoot the beast.

Falling Action

The elephant, meanwhile, remains calm, ignoring the crowd. His left side is parallel to the road, the narrator, and the crowd. Having never before killed an elephant, the narrator is unsure of the exact location of the its brain. Nevertheless, he loads the gun, gets down on the ground in order to steady his aim, and fires at his head, in front of the ear. (He should have fired at the ear.) After about five seconds, the elephant falls to its knees. The narrator fires again. The elephant rises. He is wobbly. The narrator fires a third time, and the elephant collapses. The people rush across the road to view it close up. He is still breathing. The narrator fires his remaining two cartridges into its side, where he thinks its heart is. Blood flows from the wound, but still he breathes. Then, with his Winchester, he fires one shot after another into the beast—first into the side, then into the throat. The elephant continues to breathe.
Unable to stand there and watch it suffer, the narrator leaves. He finds out later that the beast lasted another half-hour and that the Burmans “had stripped his body almost to the bones by the afternoon.”

Resolution

Afterward, the Burmans and the Europeans were divided on what should have been done. The owner, of course, is angry. But as an Indian, he is powerless to take action. Besides, the narrator has the law on his side. An elephant has to be killed if its owner fails to control it. The older Europeans defend the narrator. The younger ones say it is wrong to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, for the it is worth much more than the victim. The narrator says, "And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool."

SETTING

The setting of this short story is Burma (present-day Myanmar) in the 1920s, when the country was a province of India. The action takes place in the town of Moulmein in the southern part of the province, called Lower Burma, a rice-growing region on the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea. 

THEME

The Evil of Imperialism

Imperialism is evil. First, it humiliates the occupied people, reducing them to inferior status in their own country. Second, it goads the occupiers into making immoral or unethical decisions to maintain their superiority over the people. In “Shooting an Elephant,” the narrator acts against his own conscience to save face for himself and his fellow imperialists. 

Loss of Freedom in a Colonized Land

When imperialists colonize a country, they restrict the freedom of the natives. In so doing, the imperialists also unwittingly limit their own freedom in that they tend to avoid courses of action that could provoke the occupied people. In “Shooting an Elephant,” the narrator realizes that he should allow the elephant to live, but he shoots the animal anyway to satisfy the crowd of natives who want him to kill it.

MESSAGE BEHIND THE STORY

Shooting an elephant by Orwell is an anecdote of his time as an officer in the British colony of Burmans  where he describes his views on the native populace, his life and duty there, as well as British imperialism. Through many example of animal imagery, as well as the uses of diction.

Orwell describes the native Burmans as being Lesser to Europeans, and in some cases less than human. Overwell never calls the native people human but instead refer to them as Colie or yellow faced and uses animal imagery to describe them or the dead man having been skinned.

This antagonist by the crowd is expressed farther once he shoots the elephant and a devilish or of glee goes up from the crowd.

The elephant is a symbol of the British empire showing how imperialism is weaking the emprie, forcing them into unnecessary suffering.

AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY

George Orwell (1903-1950) was the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair. Orwell, a British citizen, was born in Motihari, India, in 1903, and attended school in England. Between 1922 and 1927, he served the British government in Burma as an officer of the Indian Imperial Police. After becoming disenchanted with British treatment of the native Burmese, he left the police service, traveled in Europe, and in 1934 published his first novel, Burmese Days, which impugned British imperialism. He also wrote several fine short stories, including "Shooting an Elephant," which are based on his experiences in Burma. His most famous works, both of which warn of the dangers of totalitarianism, are his novels Animal Farm and 1984.