7/30/2019 Shooting an Elephant Introduction

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Shooting an Elephant Introduction

George Orwells Shooting an Elephant first appeared in 1936. The British public

already knew Orwell as the socially conscious author ofDown and Out in London and Paris

(1933), a nonfiction study of poverty, homelessness, unemployment, and subsistence living on

poorly-paying menial jobs, andBurmese Days (1934), a novel of British colonialism.

Shooting an Elephant functions as an addendum toBurmese Days. The story and novel

share the same setting, and draw on Orwells experience as a colonial official in India and

Burma, two regions of the British Empire, in the middle of the century between the two world

wars. The story (which some critics consider an essay) concerns a colonial officers obligation

to shoot a rogue elephant. The narrator does not want to shoot the elephant, but feels

compelled to by a crowd of indigenous residents, before whom he does not wish to appear

indecisive or cowardly. The situation and events that Orwell describes underscores the

hostility between the administrators of the British Empire and their native subjects. Both

sides feel hatred, distrust, and resentment. The situation is universally degrading. The

shooting itself involves enormous pathos conveyed economically in a few words.

Shooting an Elephant is a central text in modern British literature and has generated

perhaps more criticism than any other comparable short piece. In the politicized atmosphere

of contemporary criticism, commentators are especially drawn into debate about whether

Orwell apologizes for or condemns imperialism. Left-wing critics see insuf- ficient

condemnation; conservative critics point out that it is the narrator, an agent of empire, who

explicitly denounces the British presence as pervasively corrupting to both sides. The story is

one of the most widely anthologized and studied items of the modern English-language

canon.

Shooting an Elephant Summary

Shooting an Elephant begins with a meditative prelude to the action in which the narrator,

who may be presumed to be Orwell, comments on being a colonial policeman in British

Burma in the middle of the twentieth century. I was hated by large numbers of people, he

says, and anti-European feeling was verybitter. A European woman crossing the market

would likely be spat upon and a subdivisional police officer made an even more inviting

target. Once, at a soccer match, a Burmese player deliberately fouled the narrator while the

Burmese umpire conveniently looked the other direction and the largely Burmese crowd

yelled with hideous laughter. The narrator understands such hatred and even thinks it

justified, but he also confesses that his greatest joy at the time would have been to bayonetone of his tormenters.

The action of Shooting an Elephant begins when the narrator receives a telephone report of

an elephant ravaging the bazaar. He takes his inadequate hunting rifle and rides on

horseback to the area where the animal allegedly lurks. The narrator remarks on the squalor

and poverty of the neighborhood, with its palm-leaf thatch on the huts and unplanned

scattering of houses over a hillside.