The story engages the reader through Orwell's first-hand experience as a police officer in Burma, presenting complex ideas about humanity's indifference of death and 'what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man.”. The story entails the execution of a Hindu prisoner by hanging through the point of view of a guard and the desensitization of the prison workers afterward. Orwell starts his work with imagery, showing how the guard internally feels about the execution, later using anaphora to represent the inhumanness of taking a life, and lastly irony to contrast what the jailor and the victim was feeling.
Orwell uses imagery to create a sinister scene to symbolize the inconsolable conditions of the prisoner, trying to draw out sympathy and empathy from the reader to create a captivating writing piece. The narrator starts the story with a description of the weather, giving the story a dark and gloomy mood as he describes, “a sodden morning of the rains”, “a sickly light, like yellow tinfoil”, as well as “desolately thin in the wet air”. This mood shows the narrator as nervous and apprehensive, depicting the jail with clarity. Because he’s describing the bad weather and focusing on the gloom of the day it exhibits that the narrator can’t just ignore what was going to happen to the man. The dark weather conditions also try to rouse sympathy from the reader, his and many others' last minutes to be spent in a bleak jail, stressing the cruelty of the British rule. The cells are described as “small animal cages” with bare necessities included. The prisoners waited in anticipation in these tiny cells surrounded by minimal light and a wet courtyard as they saw their countrymen lead to their death, with the morbid imagery of this helping the reader to.
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The narrator's tone turns guilt-ridden and sarcastic during the man's hanging. He realizes that the man's body would still be healthy and growing but “with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone. One mind less, one world less.”. The use of anaphora deeper the psychological impact of the death to the narrator. The narrator contemplates how they were allowed to kill a healthy man. When describing the man he characterizes him as weak and unthreatening “a puny wisp of a man, with a shaven head and vague liquid eyes” that “yielded his arms limply to the ropes, as though he hardly noticed what was happening.” yet he was flanked by six massive guards. This description shows how the man is just as much human as the guards “walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world.” Again, he questions the reasons behind the execution and the reason the real crime would be “cutting a life short when it is in full tide.”.
Orwell narrates the irony of the situation as the feelings of the guards compared to the prisoner. Before the man is hanged he shouts out to his god, Rama. “Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!” The prisoner shouts void of fear as if he has already come to terms with his death. At first, the jailer lets him call out to his god but soon everyone starts to get antsy because of it. “Everyone had changed color. The same thought was in all our minds: oh, kill him quickly, get it over, stop that abominable noise!” The narrator states. The anxiety that the prisoner should have been feeling is instead felt by the men killing him. Orwell shows that the prison workers are clearly more tormented by the hanging than the man getting hung but afterward the jailers act as if it was a nuisance, ridding them of empathy and dehumanizing them completely due to their lack of remorse. Once the hanging is over the narrator writes, “It seemed quite a homely, jolly scene, after the hanging. An enormous relief had come upon us now that the job was done. I found that I was laughing quite loudly. Everyone was laughing. Even the superintendent grinned in a tolerant way.” The jailers feel more relieved that it's over instead of remorseful. This shows how capital punishment not only affects the prisoners but also the guards.
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