Focalization In Shooting An Elephant

Shooting an elephant, by George Orwell (1936)

The internal struggle of George Orwell in regard to his conscience in terms of his stance towards the British Empire and the native Burmese is one of the main characterstics of Shooting an elephant. Orwell himself opposes the British empire, but due to the role he is required to play, as a police officer, his physical appearance indicates that he opposes the native Burmans. His role as a police officer disables him to interact with the Burmans on an equal level; the narrator is required to keep the Burmans in their subordinate place. Though Orwell doesn’t completely oppose the Burmans, he despises and loathes them for ridiculing him and laughing at him. His conscience really struggles when he is about to shoot the elephant, because he knows that the main

(Parker, Robert Dale) Also, throughout the text, Free Indirect discourse is used, because the distinction is difficult to be drawn between the internal character focalization and the narration of Orwell’s thoughts and speech. (Bal, Mieke) The actantial model is a method of bringing any possible interpretive issues in a syuzhet to light. When applying Shooting an elephant to this model, we can list Orwell in the fabula as the subject, the British empire as the sender, the elephant as the object or the opponent, but we could list the Burmese mob also as an opponent. Though it makes more sense to see the elephant as the object, because the interaction between subject and the object is what the fabula is built around and what is it’s essence. It could be that the fabula has a different helper than the narrative, since there is no helper in the passage that is studied. Clearly, there are different ways of interpreting this tale. It doesn’t consist of the clear boundaries sometimes found in