Annotated Version of the Short Story Shooting an Elephant (1936)

George Orwell’s Shooting an Elephant (1936) Text type: Essay/short story Personal Context: George Orwell (born Eric Arthur Blair) was born in India in 1903, where his father worked with the Indian Civil Service. When he was one year old his mother took him and his older sister to live in England. His great-grandfather was wealthy but by the time of Blair’s generation the family was no longer rich. In spite of this, Blair attended an expensive boarding school and then studied at Eton. He was (briefly) taught French by Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World, the other great 20 th century work of English dystopian fiction. Blair joined the police force in Burma in 1922. In 1926, he was posted to Moulmein for a year before returning to London with Dengue Fever. In 1927, Orwell moved to Paris. He ‘slummed it’ in both cities and wrote his first book Down and Out in Paris and London, adopting the pseudonym ‘George Orwell.’ He worked as a teacher but soon became a full-time novelist and journalist. In 1936 Orwell not only published Shooting an Elephant, but also married Eileen O’ Shaughnessy. Later that year they went to fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War. When World War II broke out he was declared unfit, so he joined the Home Guard. He also worked for the BBC and edited for The Tribune. In 1945, Eileen died and Orwell was diagnosed with tuberculosis. During this year, Orwell also published Animal Farm, an allegorical narrative which critiqued much of the Bolshevik (Russian) Revolution. Orwell also worked relentlessly on 1984, which was published in 1949 to great critical acclaim. A novel highly critical of fascist and totalitarian governments, the term ‘Orwellian’ has since become synonymous with authoritarian social and political practices. Orwell died in 1950, his grave marked with a headstone saying ‘Eric Arthur Blair,’ making no mention of his famous pen name. Social/Political Context- English Imperialism English Imperialism evolved through several phases, including the early colonization of North America, involvement in South Asia, the colonization of Australia and New Zealand, its role in the nineteenth century scramble for Africa, involvement with politics in the Middle East, and its expansion into Southeast Asia. At the height of its power in the early twentieth century the British Empire had control over nearly two-fifths of the world's land mass and governed an empire of between 300 and 400 million people. It is the addition of the Southeast Asian countries today known as Burma (Myanmar), Malaysia and Singapore that set the stage for Orwell's vignette from the life of a colonial official. Thematic concerns:         Colonialism – British authority over other peoples Power – authority Brutality – violence Morality – right and wrong Performance in your job – what is expected of you Discovery of the complexity of sacrificing morality for a larger political ideology. Discovery of the world as a brutal and uncompromising place. Discovery of the individual and their place within the broader world. Definitions: Bazaar: Marketplace on a street with walk-in shops and outdoor stalls. Coolie: Unskilled labourer. Coringhee: From or having to do with the town of Coringa, India. It is in the state of Andhra Pradesh in the southeast part of the country. Dravidian: Lower-caste Indian who speaks his own language, Dravidian. Imperialism: Policy of controlling weak or underdeveloped countries for economic, political, and military purposes. in saecula saeculorum: Latin forCin this age and for all ages;Cforever;Cfor eternity;Cuntil the end of the world. Mahout: Skilled elephant trainer and handler. Raj, British: British government rule in India, of which Burma was a part; the period when the British government ruled India.C Sahib: Master, sir. Indian and Burmese people used the word when addressing an Englishman. “Must” occurs when tame elephants, held in chains, break their restraints and go berserk. (The word musth OR must originated from the Hindi language meaning “mischievous” and was used to describe the Indian elephants when they went into this stage. Musth is the heighten level of testosterone in a male elephant’s body which can make him much more aggressive and unpredictable. Testosterone levels in an elephant in musth can be on average 60 to 140 times greater than in the same elephant at other times.) Shooting an Elephant George Orwell (c. 1936) IN MOULMEIN, IN LOWER BURMA, I was hated by large numbers of people--the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. Power/authority I was sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way anti-European feeling was very bitter. (inter conflict) No one had the guts to raise a riot, (colloquial) but if a European woman went through the bazaars alone somebody would probably spit betel juice over her dress. (behaviours due to oppression – by British overlords.) As a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter. (his values are showing) This happened more than once. In the end the sneering yellow faces (racist language, but he was a product of his time) of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves. (The locals – fearful of British authority – which Orwell represented. Orwell – foreshadows some challenge that will break him – intellectually) The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. (high modality / irony) There were several thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans. [While Orwell considers the empire an unconscionable tyranny, he still hates the insolent Burmese who torment him. This conflicted mindset is typical of officers in the British Raj, he explains.] All this was perplexing and upsetting. (Nice short sharp sentence to start paragraph – sets the scene) For at that time I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better. (high mod. Coll. Lang. represented British authority – thus hated him for it – conflict arising.) Theoretically--and secretly, of course--I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British. (irony) As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. (High Modality) In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock- ups, (treated like animals – dehumanized/pitied)the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been Bogged with bamboos--all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt. (Listing showing BRUTALITY - he was part of it)But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill- educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East . (sense of isolation) I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, (written in hindsight) still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it. (predicting that to come will be worse) All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil- spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. (high modality/emotive) With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, (simile) in saecula saeculorum, (Latin – for now and forever) upon the will of prostrate peoples; (people that are useless) with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts. (a very conflicted character – hates the “British Raj” = IMPERIALISM - violent image – reflects his emotions/psychological welfare + his anger) Feelings like these are the normal byproducts of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty. (first person/informal/speaking directly to us) in other words – colonialism and imperialism are dehumanizing and demoralizing. Formal lang. colloquial lang. highly descriptive imagery. S + M’s) Recounting of an anecdote begins - One day something happened which in a roundabout way was enlightening. It was a tiny incident in itself, but it gave me a better glimpse than I had had before of the real nature of imperialism--the real motives for which despotic governments act. Early one morning the sub- inspector at a police station the other end of the town rang me up on the phone and said that an elephant was ravaging the bazaar. Would I please come and do something about it? I did not know what I could do, but I wanted to see what was happening and I got on to a pony and started out. I took my rifle, an old .44 Winchester and much too small to kill an elephant, but I thought the noise might be useful in terrorem. Various Burmans stopped me on the way and told me about the elephant's doings. It was not, of course, a wild elephant, but a tame one which had gone "must." It had been chained up, as tame elephants always are when their attack of "must" is due, but on the previous night it had broken its chain and escaped. Its mahout, the only person who could manage it when it was in that state, had set out in pursuit, but had taken the wrong direction and was now twelve hours' journey away, and in the morning the elephant had suddenly reappeared in the town. The Burmese population had no weapons and were quite helpless against it. It had already destroyed somebody's bamboo hut, killed a cow and raided some fruit-stalls and devoured the stock; also it had met the municipal rubbish van and, when the driver jumped out and took to his heels, had turned the van over and inflicted violences upon it. (local left in a vulnerable situation – not able to have guns) The Burmese sub-inspector and some Indian constables were waiting for me in the quarter where the elephant had been seen. It was a very poor quarter, a labyrinth of squalid bamboo huts, thatched with palmleaf, winding all over a steep hillside. I remember that it was a cloudy, stuffy morning at the beginning of the rains. We began questioning the people as to where the elephant had gone and, as usual, failed to get any definite information. That is invariably the case in the East; a story always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of events the vaguer it becomes. Some of the people said that the elephant had gone in one direction, some said that he had gone in another, some professed not even to have heard of any elephant. I had almost made up my mind that the whole story was a pack of lies, when we heard yells a little distance away. There was a loud, scandalized cry of "Go away, child! Go away this instant!" and an old woman with a switch in her hand came round the corner of a hut, violently shooing away a crowd of naked children. Some more women followed, clicking their tongues and exclaiming; evidently there was something that the children ought not to have seen. I rounded the hut and saw a man's dead body sprawling in the mud. He was an Indian, a black Dravidian coolie, almost naked, and he could not have been dead many minutes. The people said that the elephant had come suddenly upon him round the corner of the hut, caught him with its trunk, put its foot on his back and ground him into the earth. This was the rainy season and the ground was soft, and his face had scored a trench a foot deep and a couple of yards long. He was lying on his belly with arms crucified (western image of a sacrificed individual) and head sharply twisted to one side. His face was coated with mud, the eyes wide open, the teeth bared and grinning with an expression of unendurable agony. (Never tell me, by the way, that the dead look peaceful. Most of the corpses I have seen looked devilish.) The friction of the great beast's foot had stripped the skin from his back as neatly as one skins a rabbit. As soon as I saw the dead man I sent an orderly to a friend's house nearby to borrow an elephant rifle. I had already sent back the pony, not wanting it to go mad with fright and throw me if it smelt the elephant. The orderly came back in a few minutes with a rifle and five cartridges, and meanwhile some Burmans had arrived and told us that the elephant was in the paddy fields below, only a few hundred yards away. As I started forward practically the whole population of the quarter flocked out of the houses and followed me. They had seen the rifle and were all shouting excitedly that I was going to shoot the elephant. They had not shown much interest in the elephant when he was merely ravaging their homes, but it was different now that he was going to be shot. Irony in the lack of humanity shown. It was a bit of fun to them, as it would be to an English crowd;(common human experiences/behaviours) besides they wanted the meat. It made me vaguely uneasy. I had no intention of shooting the elephant--I had merely sent for the rifle to defend myself if necessary--and it is always unnerving to have a crowd following you. I marched down the hill, looking and feeling a fool, with the rifle over my shoulder and an ever-growing army of people jostling at my heels. At the bottom, when you got away from the huts, there was a metalled road and beyond that a miry waste of paddy fields a thousand yards across, not yet ploughed but soggy from the first rains and dotted with coarse grass. The elephant was standing eight yards from the road, his left side towards us. He took not the slightest notice of the crowd's approach. He was tearing up bunches of grass, beating them against his knees to clean them and stuffing them into his mouth. Orwell humanizes animal with pronouns/majestic animal/content with freedom/ just being an elephant///innocent, peaceful, content juxtaposed to image of an elephant tearing up a man. I had halted on the road. As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect certainty that I ought not to shoot him. (high modality – presents his inner (moral) conflict) It is a serious matter to shoot a working elephant--it is comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery—(compared to machinery – irony – nature is more important) and obviously one ought not to do it if it can possibly be avoided. And at that distance, peacefully eating, the elephant looked no more dangerous than a cow. I thought then and I think now that his attack of "must" was already passing off; in which case he would merely wander harmlessly about until the mahout came back and caught him. Moreover, I did not in the least want to shoot him. I decided that I would watch him for a little while to make sure that he did not turn savage again, and then go home. But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It was an immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute. It blocked the road for a long distance on either side. I looked at the sea of yellow faces above the garish clothes - faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be shot. (he represents them the way they are behaviours – it) they were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to perform a trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; (high modality - SOCIETAL PRESSURE) I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd--seemingly the leading actor of the piece ; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet (metaphor – motif – facades) pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. Imperialism is his oppressor – he has a role to play. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the "natives," and so in every crisis he has got to do what the "natives" expect of him. He wears a mask , and his face grows to fit it. Forced conformity leads to permanent transformation I had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing-- no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man's life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at. Almost like on a stage – “not to be laughed at”. EXPECTATIONS/laughed at if not met/lose authority/humiliated/mask of authority is simply façade IRONY - once again, the Burmese appear to wield power over Orwell, subverting the colonial hierarchy. He is no longer an authority figure, but rather a spectacle/an actor on a stage, performing his role, and the force of the Burmese’ anticipation is beginning to make Orwell feel like he cannot completely control how he handles this matter. But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of grass against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have. It seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him. At that age I was not squeamish about killing animals, but I had never shot an elephant and never wanted to. (Somehow it always seems worse to kill a large animal.) personal reflection (…) Besides, there was the beast's owner to be considered. Alive, the elephant was worth at least a hundred pounds; dead, he would only be worth the value of his tusks, five pounds, possibly. But I had got to act quickly. I turned to some experienced-looking Burmans who had been there when we arrived, and asked them how the elephant had been behaving. They all said the same thing: he took no notice of you if you left him alone, but he might charge if you went too close to him. [Note that for the British all of Burma was essentially a valuable piece of property—another metaphorical link between the elephant and colonialism.] It was perfectly clear to me what I ought to do. (foreshadows) I ought to walk up to within, say, twenty-five yards of the elephant and test his behavior. If he charged, I could shoot; if he took no notice of me, it would be safe to leave him until the mahout came back. But also I knew that I was going to do no such thing. I was a poor shot with a rifle and the ground was soft mud into which one would sink at every step. If the elephant charged and I missed him, I should have about as much chance as a toad under a steam-roller. To lighten mood But even then I was not thinking particularly of my own skin, only of the watchful yellow faces behind. For at that moment, with the crowd watching me, I was not afraid in the ordinary sense, as I would have been if I had been alone. Irony Resorting to 3 rd person again. A white man mustn't be frightened in front of "natives"; and so, in general, he isn't frightened. The sole thought in my mind was that if anything went wrong those two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if that happened it was quite probable that some of them would laugh. That would never do. Dark humour - Short sharp sentence. Very effective!!! AGAIN ABOUT APPEARANCES. There was only one alternative. I shoved the cartridges into the magazine and lay down on the road to get a better aim. The crowd grew very still, and a deep, low, happy sigh, as of people who see the theatre curtain go up at last, (again the symbolism of the theatre – we all have a role to play in society) breathed from innumerable throats. They were going to have their bit of fun after all. Tone – defeated/sarcastic The rifle was a beautiful German thing with cross-hair sights. I did not then know that in shooting an elephant one would shoot to cut an imaginary bar running from ear-hole to earhole. I ought, therefore, as the elephant was sideways on, to have aimed straight at his ear-hole, actually I aimed several inches in front of this, thinking the brain would be further forward. [With the crowd behind him, Orwell realizes that he is now compelled to shoot the elephant.] When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick--one never does when a shot goes home--but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd. In that instant, in too short a time, one would have thought, even for the bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken, (sibilance) immensely old, as though the frightful impact of the bullet had paralysed him without knocking him down. At last, after what seemed a long time- -it might have been five seconds, I dare say--he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered. An enormous senility seemed to have settled upon him. One could have imagined him thousands of years old. I fired again into the same spot. At the second shot he did not collapse but climbed with desperate slowness to his feet and stood weakly upright, with legs sagging and head drooping. I fired a third time. That was the shot that did for him. You could see the agony of it jolt his whole body and knock the last remnant of strength from his legs. But in falling he seemed for a moment to rise, for as his hind legs collapsed beneath him he seemed to tower upward like a huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching skyward like a tree. He trumpeted, for the first and only time. And then down he came, his belly towards me, with a crash that seemed to shake the ground even where I lay. Slow motion descriptions- long sentences. The description of the elephant’s physical distress is excruciating, and Orwell clearly intends to emphasize the barbarity of his decision and actions. It is particularly notable that the elephant appears to be at its most magnificent just as it falls. This illustrates that at the elephant’s moment of bodily defeat, it only becomes a more powerful symbol of the irrational savagery of colonialism. There is nothing humane about Orwell’s killing of the elephant. He does not even know enough about marksmanship—or elephants—to kill the elephant painlessly. In the same way, the British empire is inhumane not out of necessity, but rather out of reactionary ignorance regarding both the land it has colonized and the pernicious way that colonization acts on both the colonized and the colonizer. I got up. The Burmans were already racing past me across the mud. It was obvious that the elephant would never rise again, but he was not dead. He was breathing very rhythmically with long rattling gasps, his great mound of a side painfully rising and falling. His mouth was wide open--I could see far down into caverns of pale pink throat. I waited a long time for him to die, but his breathing did not weaken. Finally I fired my two remaining shots into the spot where I thought his heart must be. The thick blood welled out of him like red velvet, but still he did not die. His body did not even jerk when the shots hit him, the tortured breathing continued without a pause. He was dying, very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him further. I felt that I had got to put an end to that dreadful noise. It seemed dreadful to see the great beast Lying there, powerless to move and yet powerless to die, and not even to be able to finish him. I sent back for my small rifle and poured shot after shot into his heart and down his throat. They seemed to make no impression. The tortured gasps continued as steadily as the ticking of a clock. In the end I could not stand it any longer and went away. I heard later that it took him half an hour to die. Burmans were bringing dahs and baskets even before I left, and I was told they had stripped his body almost to the bones by the afternoon. Afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting of the elephant. The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do nothing. Besides, legally I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed, like a mad dog, if its owner fails to control it. Among the Europeans opinion was divided. The older men said I was right, the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie. And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool. SO, THIS INCIDENT gives Orwell insight into the true nature of imperialism and the reasons behind it. POSSIBLE OVERARCHING THESIS STATEMENT: The understanding of contexts which influence composers’ purpose and style, is essential in attaining informed appreciations of the ideas and attitudes offered by texts regarding the complexity of the power dynamics within society. The understanding of contexts which influence composers’ purpose and style, is essential in attaining informed appreciations of the significant ideas and attitudes offered by texts regarding human experiences/relationships within society.