Shooting an Elephant | Characters

The Crowd
The crowd makes itself known through ‘‘hideous laughter,’’ the cackling that accompanies the petty acts of revenge which the Burmese inflict on their foreign rulers. This same laughter coercively implies a choice which the narrator cannot escape— the choice between becoming the object of the mob’s disappointment and ire, or shooting the elephant, a creature which he knows ought to be left alone. The crowd is not a ‘‘Burmese crowd,’’ or even vaguely an ‘‘Asian’’ as opposed to a ‘‘European crowd’’; it is a generic crowd, behaving...

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