George Orwell Shooting An Elephant Response Paper

Prior to prominence, George Orwell was a police officer in Moulmein, Burma. During this time, Moulmein is under British control and Orwell writes a story about his duty and how he struggled with the choice to be in accordance with the crowd and shoot an escaped elephant roaming the lands or follow his morals and do what he believed was right and wait for the animal control to rescue him. Choosing to go against his morals, saying it was peer pressure and not feeling ashamed is a struggle that disregards his own ethics. Morality and Colonialism are reoccurring themes in Orwell’s Shooting an Elephant. These themes create conflict within Orwell because he claims to be an anti-imperialist and sides with the Burmese. This struggle creates otherness

His acts make his suffering worse. In this quote “But in reality, I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind me” (Orwell 3) Orwell tells how he is used by the people to shoot the elephant. Orwell promotes the image of a white savior, “A white man mustn’t be frightened in front of “natives”; and so, in general, he isn’t frightened” (Orwell 4) by establishing his moral superiority over the Burmese while yet showing sympathy for them. Within this, it creates conflict for Orwell and how his otherness between what he thinks is morally right separates him from the colonized and the colonizer. Which results in him being the draw

Relating the fact that the elephant, like a colonized population, has its liberty restricted, and it becomes violently rebellious as a response to being enclosed. The citizens represent the colonizer in pressuring Orwell to shoot the elephant when he knows it is against his morals. Orwell is stuck in between the colonizer and colonized and has the liberty to do something about it yet falls short and is sucked in with the colonized. “I perceived at this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys” (Orwell 5). The freedom of the colonized is stopped by the choice of each colonized and the people who hold a higher power to change