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Shooting an Elephant
Throughout the short story, the narrator expresses his conflicting feelings towards the Burmese people. As a British police officer, the narrator sympathizes with the oppressed Burmese citizens,...
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Shooting an Elephant
In "Shooting an Elephant," the colonial officers are concerned about the elephant. The sub-inspector who calls Orwell, for example, says the elephant is "ravaging" the area and he wants action to...
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Shooting an Elephant
There are three general reasons why the Burmese might not have weapons, reasons that each might apply but that are very different from one another. The first reason is there is a history of...
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Shooting an Elephant
The narrator clearly has no intention of killing the animal when he first gets the order that a loose elephant is ravaging the village. He mentions that he brought an old .44 Winchester, a weapon...
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Shooting an Elephant
From the first two paragraphs of "Shooting an Elephant," it is clear that Orwell hates his job as a colonial police officer because of the way locals treat him. Orwell appears to resent that the...
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Shooting an Elephant
Orwell dwells on the elephant's misery because the creature's suffering is symbolic of the painful and slow decline of the British Empire. While Orwell, who is part of the Imperial Police, must try...
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Shooting an Elephant
Orwell seems to have wanted to emphasize the internal conflict experienced by the narrator, who does not really want to shoot the elephant but feels compelled to do so to "avoid looking a fool." He...
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Shooting an Elephant
During his time as a policeman in Burma, which was then a British colony, the story's narrator learns to hate imperialism. As he puts it: In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at...
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Shooting an Elephant
Orwell is serving as a police officer for the British Empire in Lower Burma, and he writes that the anti-European sentiment in the country is "perplexing and upsetting." His experience makes him...
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Shooting an Elephant
The officer is provoked by the mob into shooting the elephant because he feels he must do so in order to avoid displaying weakness as a member of the ruling class. After a call comes in about a...
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Shooting an Elephant
The narrator shot the elephant "solely to avoid looking a fool." After the elephant storms through the bazaar and kills a man, it calms down fairly quickly, and when the narrator, a British...
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Shooting an Elephant
In "Shooting an Elephant," Orwell's experience of working in Burma suggests that the native people did not like being ruled by the British. We see this through their reaction to Orwell as he...
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Shooting an Elephant
In "Shooting an Elephant," the elephant functions as a symbol of imperial oppression. This is demonstrated most clearly through the image of the elephant "chained up" which illustrates the extent...
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Shooting an Elephant
In "Shooting an Elephant," Orwell uses language effectively to convey the harsh realities of British imperialism. In the second paragraph, for example, Orwell uses imagery to describe the...
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Shooting an Elephant
The officer is self-aware and has enough of a sense of morality to recognize the fundamental evils of colonialism. But he is also filled with a deep contempt for the colonial people. In short, he...
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Shooting an Elephant
The denouement of "Shooting an Elephant" describes the quibbling over the death of the elephant and the justifications for its shooting. The Europeans disagree about the outcome; some think the...
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Shooting an Elephant
Orwell uses the events in "Shooting an Elephant" to show the absurdity and cruelty of the colonial system. The narrator is a police officer in Burma during the period when Burma was a British...
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Shooting an Elephant
In "Shooting An Elephant," George Orwell writes about his experiences while he was employed as a "sub-divisional police officer" in Moulmein, a town in Lower Burma. This means Orwell policed the...
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Shooting an Elephant
"The dirty work of empire" in "Shooting an Elephant" is the violence used by imperialists to maintain control over colonized peoples. Orwell, who uses this phrase, describes it this way: the...
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Shooting an Elephant
This line demonstrates what Orwell describes as an "aimless, petty...anti-European feeling" among the people of imperial Burma. Orwell says that the Burmese people do not openly riot or resist...
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Shooting an Elephant
In "Shooting An Elephant," both George Orwell and the elephant appear to possess a degree of power and control. Orwell, for instance, is a sub-divisional police officer, in charge of bringing the...
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Shooting an Elephant
In "Shooting An Elephant," the Burmese people are marginalized and silenced by the British in a number of ways. We see this most clearly in the second paragraph when Orwell describes life in Burma...
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Shooting an Elephant
The elephant was wreaking havoc in the town of Moulmein (now Mawlamyine, the fourth largest city of Myanmar), when the narrator was called for help. It wasn’t a wild elephant, but it was under...
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Shooting an Elephant
In this paragraph of "Shooting an Elephant," Orwell describes the elephant's demise after he has shot it with the rifle. That Orwell characterises this time period as a "long time" suggests, above...
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Shooting an Elephant
Orwell wants to draw the readers into this essay, and narrative or story telling is the way to do this (we all like a good story), so he begins with his narrator's first-person account. More...
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Shooting an Elephant
Not to split hairs, but it is the narrator of "Shooting an Elephant," an English policeman who is part of the colonial government in Burma, who shoots the elephant, not Orwell. While the bizarre...
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Shooting an Elephant
In "Shooting an Elephant," a mutual hatred exists between the Burmese people and George Orwell, a colonial police officer. The Burmese often humiliate and mock Orwell, as he tells the reader: When...
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Shooting an Elephant
A good introduction for any essay should serve two purposes: provide a little background information on the subject of your paper, and introduce the reader to your thesis statement. If you essay is...
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Shooting an Elephant
That the Burmese hate the British is made very clear in "Shooting an Elephant" and, in this essay, Orwell provides a number of examples to support this claim. In the bazaar (the market), for...
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Shooting an Elephant
In the story, the narrator shoots the elephant because the crowd demands he do so. The beast had run wild through a bazaar, trampling one man to death, and causing the Burmese people to demand that...
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Shooting an Elephant
In his essay, “Shooting an Elephant,” George Orwell relates not only the experience of shooting an escaped elephant, but also the understanding that he gains while being a police officer in...
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Shooting an Elephant
In his essay, “Shooting an Elephant,” George Orwell reveals a lot about himself. From what he tells the reader, he does seem to consider himself a coward for giving in to the crowd and shooting...
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Shooting an Elephant
It is true that while this essay illustrates some of the salient characteristics of despotism and imperialism, it never puts a "face" on these terms, relying instead on the reader's understanding...
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Shooting an Elephant
George Orwell’s short story "Shooting an Elephant" opens with the narrator discussing his setting and station in life at the time. The tone of the first two paragraphs is serious and conveys an...
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Shooting an Elephant
"Shooting an Elephant" shows the cruelties of imperialism, because to maintain power and control over the Burmese, the narrator, an English policeman representing British imperial interests, must...
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Shooting an Elephant
The most obvious conflict in "Shooting an Elephant" is the narrator's unwillingness to shoot the elephant that went on a rampage. This conflicts with the perceived need for him to do so as a...
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Shooting an Elephant
In "Shooting an Elephant," Orwell's attitude to the Buddhist priests is uniformly negative. As a colonial policeman in Burma, he admits to being hated by those he polices, as he comments in the...
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Shooting an Elephant
In Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant," Orwell is asked to solve the problem of having an elephant on the loose. The problem that runs deeper than that, however, is the issue of the government's...
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Shooting an Elephant
Yes, George Orwell's essays are suitable for college level students to read.
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Shooting an Elephant
George Orwell’s Shooting an Elephant talks about how imperialism and colonialism negatively affected both the oppressed and the oppressors, albeit in different ways. In the first few lines of the...
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Shooting an Elephant
In "Shooting an Elephant," Orwell doesn't reconcile social construction and individual freedom: in the imperial world of Burma in which his narrator operates, the two are at odds. We learn from the...
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Shooting an Elephant
Orwell's narrator stereotypes the Burmese. He calls them "evil spirited little beasts," equating them with animals. He labels them twice as "yellow faces." He also groups them together as a mass...
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Shooting an Elephant
Both the Indian coolie and the elephant died painfully and miserably. Both of these deaths elicit our pity. Nevertheless, there's a difference in the way we feel pity for them. The mutilated body...
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Shooting an Elephant
While the short one- or two-page essays you are expected to write in introductory writing classes are expected to have a singular argument, George Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant" is a longer, more...
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Shooting an Elephant
I'm not sure Orwell does, or that it matters. You can read this story as a brutal kind of entertainment, and not consider the issue of trust at all. So, that is one option. If you really want to...
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Shooting an Elephant
A qualifier is a word or phrase the puts limitations on a statement. Instead of saying something is absolutely true or not true, a qualifier will indicate a possible exception or a specification....
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Shooting an Elephant
"Shooting an Elephant" describes an incident in George Orwell's early life, when he was working in Burma as a sub-divisional police officer--in other words, as a lower-ranking government official...
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Shooting an Elephant
Generally, the writer's experiences of the Burmese people were negative. From the beginning of the story, for example, Orwell declares that he was "hated by large numbers of people" and was an...
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Shooting an Elephant
The narrator fulfilled the expectations of the natives by shooting the elephant. Because it had caused so much damage and, most importantly, killed a man, the crowd demanded that it be killed even...
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Shooting an Elephant
The most obvious symbol of empire in "Shooting an Elephant" is the narrator himself, as he is the actual representative of the British Empire in Burma. One could argue, certainly, that the elephant...
