visited as a child and the changes the years have wrought both in the place and, more importantly, in him.Orwell's "Shooting the Elephant" is an overtly political piece, focused on exposing the systemic evils of imperialism and the way it damages everyone involved, including the overlords.

However, both essays are alike in that they are first-person narratives that deal with a moment of personal transformation. In returning to a lake beloved by him as a child, this time with his own son in tow, the narrator of White's essay comes face-to-face with a complex set of issues and memories: he is now identified both with his son, who reminds him so much of what he once was, and, in a new way, with his father, as he has assumed his own father's role. In the end, he has a moment of coming profoundly to grips with his own mortality, recognizing that he is no longer a boy with endless summers before him; he is now a man, who will eventually die.

Likewise, Orwell's narrator has a similar moment of transformation. Killing the innocent elephant in a slow, painful way while at the same time knowing he is participating in a cruel and wasteful act crystallizes in the narrator's mind the evil and pointlessness of imperialism, a system that dehumanizes and controls everyone who is a part of it.

One essay is domestic, the other political, but both deal with moments of personal insight and transformation.