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What is the implied assumption in the first sentence of "Shooting an Elephant"?
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The implied assumption in the first sentence of "Shooting an Elephant" is that the narrator, being a British imperial officer in Burma, is hated by the local population. This assumption reflects the colonial tension where the Burmese resent the British authority. Additionally, it assumes the reader understands the power dynamics between the imperial officers and the subjugated native population.
In the opening line of "Shooting an Elephant," the implied assumption relates to colonialism. Specifically, Orwell makes the assumption that because he was living and working in Burma, his reader would understand two key points. The first point is that he was "hated" because, to the Burmese people, he represented the authority of the British Empire. As a subjugated people, it is expected that the Burmese would feel some resentment toward the British Empire and, as a result, would project this onto Orwell, a police officer.
Secondly, Orwell also expects that people will understand what he means by the following phrase:
The only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.
Orwell expects people to understand that, as an imperial officer, he had a higher status than the Burmese. In fact, he was at the very top of the social...
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ladder because he worked on behalf of the British Empire. The native population, the Burmese, were at the very bottom.
Orwell, therefore, works on the assumption that his readers understand the power relationship between the imperial class and the native, inferior class.
"IN MOULMEIN, IN LOWER BURMA, I was hated by large numbers of people--the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me," George Orwell writes as the first line to "Shooting an Elephant." He makes several assumptions as he leaps into the story. The first is that his readers would know that Burma at that time was an English colony. From that single line, readers would have been able to "slot" the narrator into a social position, just as "working in Silicon Valley" would, today, suggest a set of assumptions about a person's involvement in the high tech world that would include the person being well educated, young and well paid.
Contemporary audiences in England at the time would have understood that the narrator was one of the many socially marginal upper-class, well-educated people who took jobs in the colonies as the lustre faded from the British empire and as England began to offer fewer opportunities for its young people. The word "Burma" would have been a clue, but so would the phrase about it being the only time in his life he was important. People knew that being British in a colony added status just because the English were considered superior to the native peoples. The audience also would have a clue that the narrator was hated by the natives, not his fellow ex-patriots, and a foreshadowing that his power would sit uncomfortably on him, as, in fact it does in the story.Â