Shooting an Elephant

The British ruled Burma for 124 years. Orwell was British but “was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British” (148). This difficult position, stuck between who he is on the outside and what he believes on the inside, persists throughout the essay. The narrator cannot help that he was a white man with privilege just as the Burmese cannot help they were, from the British perspective, uneducated and poor. Orwell’s rage over the circumstances frames the essay. Imperialism becomes almost symbolic, however, as the levels of rule and control shift. When the crowd grows to more than 2,000, the native people become quasi-imperialists over the narrator’s conscience.

From Shakespeare’s plays to today’s video games, violence and death have been treated as a spectacle by people of every age. Just as the Romans used the Coliseum for battle and performance, turning killing into entertainment for the masses, the spectacle of death pervades Orwell’s essay. In “Shooting an Elephant,” the elephant’s killing of a man and the subsequent hunting and death of the enormous beast become a mass spectacle. Although readers might like to believe the narrator kills the animal to save the native people’s lives and property, he does so, in fact, under the pressure of the crowd’s delirium.