In “Shooting an Elephant” George Orwell writes about his grueling experience as a police officer in the East, and his attempt to kill an elephant that horribly wrong. In the East, the inequalities of life are more prevalent, and Orwell observes these in his essay. In “The Death of the Moth” Virginia Woolf writes about her own experience of death, when she witnessed a moth perish in front of her. Woolf compares all of these equalities between a moth and other living things. Though Orwell writes about the inequalities of life, his own opinion is more akin to Woolf’s view that all life is equal. This is shown through their similar opinions on death.
In Shooting an Elephant, Orwell is forced to shoot an elephant because it went on a rampage and killed an unskilled worker. According to most laws, something that kills something else is usually killed itself. This law of an eye for an eye has been used by humans since around the year 4 A.D. with Hammurabi’s
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This is explaining how there is an equality among life, across all species. That every animal has the same energy when living. All animals are therefore equal to her. When the moth is finally deceased, the last sentence she writes is “[o] yes, he seemed to say, death is stronger than I am” (38). Whatever the size of the creature, death will always be stronger than that energy of life.
So, Woolf writes about the equality of all life. Orwell writes about the inequality. To Woolf, life’s energy is shared among all creatures and so all living things are valuable. Orwell writes about how in his world a life is only worth its labor. Both write about how any creature that is dying, will struggle until it’s last breath to live. No matter the view on life, their view on death is the same. All living things will struggle futilely against