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
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.”
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.