Analysis of Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell

The 1936 short story Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell is an autobiographical essay about Orwell’s time in Burma as a police officer for the British Empire. Though it is disputed whether or not the incident described in the text actually occured due to a lack of record, the lesson remains the same. Orwell’s narrator character starts off sympathetic to the Burman’s plight under the rule of the British Empire, but is upset and a bit confused about how he himself is treated by them before realizing that imperialism ultimately ends up hurting everyone involved, even the freedom of the imperialists themselves.

The narrator states quite firmly in the beginning that he does not like the British Empire, or what they are doing to these people, at all. Even saying that he “Hated the job I was doing more bitterly then I can perhaps make clear.” He has seen the way the Empire treats the people it rules and finds it appalling, especially the treatment of it’s prisoners, describing the inmates and conditions in details as “Huddling in stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of long term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been Bogged with bamboos.” Yet, even as he has all the anger towards the institution of the Empire, he also has a different enemy. The Burman people themselves. Before diving into his hatred of the very Empire he serves, the narrator describes the strong anti-european sentiment among the Burmans - and how it makes his life difficult. Speaking of his experiences from being heckled by young Buddist priests, to being tripped at a soccer game and laughed at, a constant through all of it is the narrator feeling “perplexed and upset” by this treatment. He has this disconnect that comes with the privilege of being the ruling class to disassociate himself from the Empire he works for. He seems to not quite realize that his dislike or hatred of the Empire doesn’t remove the fact that to the people he’s policing, he is representative of the very thing he hates. 

By the time he gets the call to deal with the rampaging elephant, the narrator is already a bit uneasy with it. He grabs his pistol that is much too small to kill an animal of that size and heads out, unsure of what exactly he can do. He eventually comes across the body of a man the elephant had killed, and shortly after amasses a crowd of people eagerly awaiting him to slaughter the elephant. At this point, he notes a similarity between the Burman crowd and an English crowd, the whole thing was entertaining. When they finally find the elephant grazing peacefully in a field,  he feels conflicted about killing it. From his perspective it’s a massive waste to kill such a large and expensive animal, “like destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery”. However, there is a crowd right behind him, and he feels the pressure to shoot. Like they are forcing their will upon him. He feels pressured to do something he feels is unnecessary and perhaps even amoral by his desire to appear in control, to not be laughed at. 

It takes the elephant half-an-hour to die. The narrator justifies the whole ordeal by reassuring himself that he was legally in the right. Even going so far to be glad that the man had been killed to give the situation enough pretext. At this point however, he begins to realize the lack of control he really has. He’s glad he shot the elephant, solely because he “didn’t want to look like a fool.” The colonists spend so much of their time trying to prove to the natives how much better they are, why they deserve to be in charge, they often will sacrifice their own morals and judgement to do it. The narrator says “Every white man’s life in the east was one long struggle to not be laughed at.” As much as these people make his life and job miserable, he will still do whatever he can to impress them, and to maintain the little illusion of control he has left.