Comparison Of Frederick Douglass And Shooting An Elephant By George Orwell

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In class we learned about nine different modes of rhetoric and we were asked to use three of them to compare two of the multiple stories we read in class to each other. The two stories I chose were Learning to read and Write by Frederick Douglass and Shooting an elephant by George Orwell. Learning to Read and Write is a non fictional memoir about Frederick Douglass’s life as an african american slave in the south, and the challenges he had learning to read and write. The second story is shooting and elephant by george orwell which is also non fiction about Orwell's time as a police enforcer for the british empire occupying India and how he struggles to deal with an elephant. A theme of both these stories is oppression and how Douglass and Orwell both feel the same way about it, even though one is the oppressed and the other is the oppressor but are both stuck in their social roles and can’t change their situations. As we go through this paper i want to prove how …show more content…

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The feeling i get from George Orwell’s shooting an elephant is that when he started out working as a civil servant for the British Raj that he didn't hate the Burmese. It feels like when he first started out, he got into it with good intentions and that this job wore him down. He has very strong thoughts on the empire and his distaste for it but then he turns around and has an uncontrollable rage for the Burmese. Part of him wants the Burmese to rebel and get their way but the other part of him just wants to do his job and for the Burmese to