Essay On Rhys The Day They Burned The Books

Bringing back to Robertson’s question of whether participants lose or gain new cultural identities, Rhys answers that question vaguely at the end of “The Day They Burned the Books”. At the end of the short story, the narrator anticipates a good book from her book scavenging adventure with Eddie, but is left befuddled upon realizing she received a dull French book, Fort Comme La Mort—a possible personal rejection of European cultural domination by the narrator after encounter Mrs. Sawyer’s rejection of Mr. Sawyer’s books (Rhys 2596). Nevertheless, Rhys illustrates the narrator’s unclear feelings about the book, as it is only clear she is not entirely open to the book, but the narrator is not completely dismissive of the French book (Rhys 2596). Instead, Rhys leaves

This ambiguous boundary of cultural identity extends into George Orwell’s essay “Shooting an Elephant”. Through Orwell’s unnamed narrator, Orwell explores an aspect of his life, presumably during a time when he served in Burma from 1922 to 1927 and developed a “sense of guilt about British colonialism”, where Orwell reflects upon various topics of colonialism that navigates the gray areas of colonialism (Greenblatt). In Dennis Moran’s “Orwell’s Politics / Why Orwell Matters”, Moran discusses Orwell’s disenchantment with imperialism (Moran). Orwell’s lack of commitment to imperialism, dislike for Gandhi, and Eurocentric loyalties were all “troublesome reminders” that Moran discusses as ideas that made him representative of a person “of his time and place” (Moran). The colonialism feelings, which stem from Orwell’s background, are brought to the forefront in “Shooting an Elephant”. The narrator explores these ambiguous and vague concepts of imperialism that serve to show the complexity of how