majestic animal only to "avoid looking a fool" because of the natives' expectation of violence. As an officer of the British government, he feels that he has no choice but to shoot the elephant since the crowd anticipates this violence from him.

...I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it: I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment...that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East.

With his rifle in his hand and a native crowd behind him who are all unarmed, Orwell, nevertheless, feels that he is manipulated by the existence of the empire and his position in it. 

I perceived at this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.

Orwell shoots the elephant, not because it is dangerous. He shoots the magnificent creature because he must "impress" the natives, and it is what they expect of him. In this act, he loses his freedom because he really does not want to shoot the elephant, but he does so "solely to avoid looking the fool." Thus, he concludes that the concept of imperialism is irreconcilable with his moral assessment of the situation.  

Orwell argues, in this essay, that imperialism has a number of unintended effects. It does not, contrary to popular belief, position the white imperialist in the powerful role. In fact, it turns him into a "puppet," according to Orwell, a puppet of the people he supposedly rules or controls. He has, at best, only the appearance of power and superiority but is actually controlled by the expectations of the colonized. He says:

Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd—seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy....For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the "natives," and so in every crisis he has got to do what the "natives" expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.

Orwell does not want to shoot the elephant; he does not find it to be necessary in the least, as the animal is now as docile as a cow. However, he feels that he must because all of the "natives" are watching him and that this is what they expect. If he refuses now, he loses all pretense of power and control.

The premise of "Shooting an Elephant" is that imperialism is an evil and corrupting system which forces both the imperialists and the native population to behave in a specific (and unnatural) way. Specifically, it forces the native population to live in subjugation while simultaneously making the imperialist act in a way which maintains his authority and control at all times. For Orwell, this is explicitly demonstrated through his decision to shoot the elephant: he did not want to kill the animal but felt that he had no choice because he had to act in an authoritarian manner in front of the Burmese people, for fear of losing face:

"The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly."

By putting the elephant at the heart of this story, Orwell is persuasive in making his argument: he transforms the elephant into a symbol of oppression, of both the British colonial officers and of the native population, more generally. 

Throughout Orwell's short story "Shooting an Elephant," he critiques imperialism by illustrating the conflicting nature of colonialism as well as the tense relationship between the ruling Europeans and the marginalized Burmese citizens. As a British police officer stationed in Lower Burma, the narrator describes his rough life being an authority figure who is continually ridiculed by the Burmese citizens. The narrator has his own particular views of imperialism and favors the oppressed Burmese citizens, despite being a British police officer. The narrator describes his perplexing situation by saying,

"All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible" (Orwell, 1).

As the story progresses, the narrator is informed of a loose elephant that is terrorizing the bazaar. The narrator begins his search for the elephant, and a crowd gathers behind him. Once the British officer finds the elephant calmly eating grass by itself, he feels an extraordinary pressure from the Burmese crowd to shoot the massive elephant. Despite not wanting to kill the animal, the narrator feels that he must shoot it because he is worried about how the Burmese citizens will view him. Herein lies Orwell's argument regarding the nature of imperialism. The narrator says,

"I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the "natives," and so in every crisis he has got to do what the "natives" expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant" (Orwell, 3). 

Orwell's short story gives a unique insight into the life of a British police officer who represents an imperial regime that he does not inherently support. Interestingly, Orwell not only portrays the jaded, perplexed feelings of the British officer but also depicts how his position of authority negatively affects his decisions and conscience.

From his introduction, George Orwell seems to have ambivalent feelings about the Burmese.   On the one hand, he states that he is theoretically and secretly "all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British and he feels an "intolerable sense of guilt" for the "wretched prisoners."   On the other hand, he writes that he feels rage toward the "evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make his job impossible:

With one part of my mind I though of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down...upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts.

It is ironic that Orwell is exploited by those who are themselves exploited by the British. Because of the conduct expected of a British official, Orwell cannot allow the elephant to live, as he knows that he should.  As he contemplates whether to allow the elephant to live or to shoot it in order to display his lack of fear, Orwell thinks that if anything goes wrong,

those two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught, trampled on, and reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill.  And if that happened it was quite probable that some of them would laugh.  That would never do.

And, so Orwell shoots the elephant "solely to avoid looking like a fool."  And, like the Burmans who hate their British oppressors, Orwell hates his oppressors in this situation, the Burmans, whom he blames for his comprising of his principles:  "They were going to have their bit of fun, after all," Orwell writes bitterly.

One message that George Orwell might be trying to get across in “Shooting an Elephant” is the ease in which humans can be coopted by society or groups of people.

In the story, Orwell presents his narrator as partaking in activities that he disagrees with. The narrator starts off by declaring his dislike of the British Empire and his support of the Burmese. Yet he isn’t working for the Burmese. He’s employed by their “oppressors.” Though the narrator hates his job “bitterly,” he continues to perform his duties. His willingness to perpetuate the “evil thing” (i.e, British imperialism) highlights the ways in which an individual’s preferences and ideas can be abrogated by systems and society.

As the story unfolds, the Burmese people start to use the narrator for their own means as well. The narrator doesn’t want to shoot the elephant. However, when a crowd of Burmese people spot him with a gun, they grow excited and pressure him to shoot the elephant. He says, “I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces.”

Once again, the narrator feels the need to conform to the wants of a crowd and a culture. Only this time, it’s not the British who are using him: it’s the Burmese. The message seems to be that humans are vulnerable to pressure from others; when assessing their actions, it is necessary to consider the external pressures, norms, and conditions that caused them to make the choices that they did.

For a literary commentator, it's usually unwise to reduce a story, or even a relatively short essay like "Shooting an Elephant," to a single message. Orwell presents an episode in the daily work of a colonial policeman in Burma in order to analyze the dynamic that exists between the British and the "native" population. But his intent seems more to understand the internal dynamic of imperialism and the effect it has on the colonial "occupiers," such as himself.

Though the elephant in this narrative has become dangerous and has even killed a man, Orwell repeatedly states that he doesn't want to shoot it. The attack of "must" which has caused the animal's violent behavior has apparently passed, and it seems likely that it can be recaptured by its owner without further mayhem. But Orwell feels himself egged on by a huge crowd of Burmese people to act, because the white man has put himself into a situation where he's the one in charge and is expected to do something decisive to resolve every crisis. He feels that his own ability to choose his actions has been constricted by the very nature of his position within the colonial authority. His ultimate conclusion, which he states explicitly, is that "when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom he destroys."

Because this is a critique of a system (imperialism) which nearly every enlightened person today agrees was unjust and immoral, a modern reader may be inclined to accept Orwell's analysis at face value. There is an element of truth in his seeing himself as the victim in the elephant episode. But it is also to some degree a sign of his own narcissism. The "native" population, in Burma and elsewhere, were much more victimized by imperialism than even the low-level functionaries, such as Orwell, of the colonial authority. In any event, however, "Shooting an Elephant" is a remarkably insightful essay, like all of Orwell's writings.

Orwell, in his "Shooting an Elephant" persona (based on his real-life experiences as a colonial policeman in Burma) comes to understand what he considers the true reason despotic governments act as they do. Despotic governments seek to control and manipulate their own people. In his famous and much-quoted epiphany, he realizes that "when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom he destroys."

Orwell's persona declares repeatedly that "I did not want to shoot the elephant." He does so, he says, only because the crowd of Burmese people is egging him on, expecting him to do something decisive because he is "the white man with the gun." He's an operative of a colonial power, so he's the man in charge, a kind of Mister Big in the imperialist world. His greatest fear, he admits to us, is that he'll be laughed at by the crowd, and at the conclusion he says he killed the elephant solely in order to avoid "looking a fool."

There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Orwell's observations. At the same time he appears to view the whole scenario in a blinkered way. If we consider that the white man has destroyed his own freedom by taking over other countries, it's still only low-level functionaries such as himself to whom this applies. The ruling class, the government big-wigs, and company owners back in London were and still are aggrandizing their own power by exploiting (i.e., stealing) the resources of what came to be called the "third world." Orwell himself recognizes elsewhere. The ruling class was not destroying their own freedom. In a subtextual sense, Orwell may be realizing that a working person such as himself has more in common with the Burmese people than he has with the capitalist class of his own country. But he doesn't make this the real point, the actual thesis of his narrative. He admits that being a colonial functionary in Burma has caused him reflexively to dislike "the natives," and he knows this is wrong, as we would hope any progressive person of his time (and later) would realize. However, the main point of his story comes across as an almost narcissistic one. His concern is chiefly about himself and his own predicament, rather than with the far worse situation in which the colonized people find themselves.

At first glance, "Shooting An Elephant" is a tale of a colonial policeman who is forced to take control after an elephant breaks free and ravages the town of Moulmein in Burma. But, looking closer, this essay reveals much about the nature of colonialism and colonial relationships. Through Orwell's dilemma over whether or not to shoot the elephant, for example, we come to realise that he must behave in a very specific manner if he is to maintain his authority as a colonial officer:

"A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things."

Moreover, Orwell uses a metaphor to describe the pressure he feels from the local people:

"I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly."

This demonstrates that colonialism also has expectations for the native population. Specifically, they will mock him if he does not shoot the elephant because that is what they expect from a colonial officer.

In essence, then, the real meaning of Orwell's essay is that colonialism has a negative impact on everyone because it forces them to behave in a way which is neither natural nor ethical. 

George Orwell's 1936 essay "Shooting an Elephant" is about a British police officer, serving the Empire in occupied Burma, who has grown weary and bitter about the role of his nation in the less-developed regions the occupation of which constituted that empire. The narrator recognizes that he is, in the eyes of the Burmese people, synonymous with the British Empire and, as such, is a lightening rod for anti-British sentiments that run deep among the indigenous population. The narrator's description of his responsibilities as a colonial police officer and of the quandary in which he found himself when an elephant temporarily rampaged and killed a local serves as a microcosm for the far greater conflict that inevitably results when one nation invades and occupies another. As Orwell's essay progresses, the narrator is convinced that he must shoot the elephant, which is now passive and nonthreatening, in order to prove himself in the eyes of the public he has come to loathe while secretly cheering on as his attitude towards his own country continues to deteriorate. In Orwell's narrative, then, neither side is particularly meritorious, although his sympathies clearly lie with the victim and not with the oppressor. 

When contemplating a thesis statement for "Shooting an Elephant," it is precisely the narrator's bitterness and observations regarding the effects of occupation on occupier as well as on occupied that should form the basis of such a statement. Illustrating this point is the following sentence from Orwell's essay that encapsulates the author's sentiments well:

"All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evilspirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible."

A logical thesis statement for "Shooting an Elephant," then, could be "George Orwell's essay is an indictment of the injustices of empire and a scathing comment on the nefarious way imperialism dehumanizes the conqueror as much as it does the conquered." 

In this essay, the narrator is a colonial officer in Burma. He discusses the tense relationship between the British overlords who run the country and the native Burmese. The two groups hate each other. The narrator himself both loathes the brutality of the British and understands it.

A pivotal moment comes when the narrator is called to take care of a rampaging elephant. The natives call on the narrator for protection because they are not allowed to have guns. The narrator arrives on the scene and realizes that the elephant is no longer a threat. Nevertheless, because so many Burmese are watching, the narrator feels compelled to shoot the animal. It is senseless, unnecessary and cruel to do so, but the narrator feels he must save face. The animal suffers and dies slowly.

The incident crystallizes in the narrator's mind the systemic evil of colonialism. Colonialism  locks everyone into a system of brutality that in the end serves nobody. 

The subject of the story was in fact a young George Orwell, servant of the British Crown in India.  He was  working for the government and was called out to deal with an elephant that had broken away from its master and was rampaging through the town.  The story follows his journey through the town to find the elephant and his difficulties in actually killing it and focuses in particular on his disgust for the task itself and his role there among the indigenous population.

The story is considered a metaphor for the role of the British in India, something that Orwell felt was deeply troubling, and his self-loathing attitude in the story reflects his attitude towards the British colonial power.  So the purpose of the essay, according to many, is to demonstrate the conflicts inherent in such an occupation and their effect on Indians and British alike.

In “Shooting an Elephant,” the principal concrete detail is the elephant itself. Although the elephant functions as a symbol of colonialism, it is also a flesh and blood elephant, the size and solidity of which is an important detail in the essay. Orwell says that somehow it seemed worse to kill a big animal than a small one and, though this may not be strictly logical, it is easy to see that an essay on “Shooting a Dog” would not come close to having the same impact. Other concrete details include the huge crowd that had assembled (Orwell says that it included at least 2,000 people) and the rifle Orwell uses to shoot the elephant.

Abstract details in the essay include Orwell’s frustration at the false position in which he was placed, not wanting to shoot the elephant but having to do so to avoid looking foolish and losing his authority. There are several other abstract concepts bound up with this frustration, including the idea of imperialism itself and Orwell’s own idea that this was an evil thing, to which he was opposed even while acting as its instrument. Another abstract detail is the psychological pressure the crowd exerts upon Orwell, which makes him feel like a puppet even though he is ostensibly in control of the situation.

"Shooting an Elephant" by George Orwell is an essay originally published in New Writing in 1936 and aired by the BBC Home Service. It is not absolutely certain whether this is a straightforward piece of journalism describing a real experience Orwell had when working as a police officer in Burma, which was, at that time, a British colony, or whether it was all or partially fictionalized.

The main argument of the essay is that imperialism has a bad effect not only on the oppressed victims such as the Burmese but also on the character of the British people acting as colonial administrators. First, Orwell makes it clear that he was unqualified for the amount of authority vested in him and concerned that people expected of him a level of decisiveness and wisdom that he, being young and inexperienced, simply did not possess. That disconnect can lead either to a sort of impostor syndrome or to arrogance if one begins, as many of his colleagues did, to believe that one really does deserve the authority one has simply by virtue of one's nationality and position.

Next, Orwell is also arguing that the need to keep up his appearance of authority and act in a way that would reinforce the precarious British rule in Burma led him to act against his own moral judgment. This example is meant to suggest to readers that British colonial officials often did end up compromising their own moral integrity due to the expectations of their positions.

Shooting an Elephant is an autobiographical essay by Eric Arthur Blair, better known since he began publishing his works as George Orwell. When contemplating the time period in which Orwell's story takes place, then, one need merely examine the late author's biography for key details, such as the period of time during which he served in the Southeast Asian nation of Burma as a member of the Imperial Police Force, in which capacity he enforced the dictates of Great Britain's colonial administrators. That is the key indicator of the time period in which Shooting an Elephant takes place. British rule of Burma extended from the early 19th century and ended during the period of post-World War II decolonization -- 1948 in the case of Burma -- that witnessed the end of the British Empire. This period of time is characterized by the fact that the author, Orwell, is describing his own experiences and observations as a colonial enforcer, a position that made him both the face of the occupation and the target of the indigenous population's wrath. As he writes in the opening of his story, "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." To a certain degree, Orwell's observations are prescient in describing the dehumanizing nature of imperialism for conqueror and vanquished alike. As he reflected retrospectively on this formative period in his life, Orwell notes the inevitable decline of the empire he served and the just-as-inevitable rise of new practitioners of imperial expansion: 

"I was young and ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East. I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it."

Orwell could not have known at the time of the events described in this essay that the end of the British Empire was growing near, but he certainly was able to infer for from his experiences as the hated representative of a foreign power occupying another country that long-term occupation was unsustainable. More to the point, however, the fact that Shooting an Elephant is autobiographical and that Orwell did in fact serve in Burma during the 1920s is all the evidence we need that the time period depicted is the 1920s.

George Orwell's “Shooting an Elephant” is an essay of extraordinary honesty and depth. To look at this essay critically, a reader must look for the meaning beneath the surface. Sometimes this is a little easier said than done.

It is usually important to look at the context in which a work is written. Orwell is writing about his experience as a British police officer in colonial Burma. Burma at this time was still a part of the British Empire. As such, it had been subjugated to some degree, as all colonial countries are. This subjugation often leads to resentment on the part of the indigenous people, a resentment that sometimes becomes dangerous for the colonial power.

The essay, as the title indicates, involves the shooting of an elephant that has escaped its owner and wreaked havoc in a village. If we are reading critically, we have to ask ourselves why Orwell would bother to write about this experience. In this case, Orwell explains part of his purpose directly:

And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd--seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.

Orwell is communicating the idea that a colonial power will eventually destroy itself. It doesn't take a lot of critical thinking to get Orwell's point here, he spelled it out for us. But, since this passage appears just past the halfway mark of the essay, Orwell isn't done yet. The rest of the essay shows Orwell tracking and finally killing the elephant. What's important here isn't so much the actual killing of the elephant, but how it happens.

Orwell spends over half a page describing the killing of the elephant. It takes many shots, and the creature does not die neatly or quickly:

His body did not even jerk when the shots hit him, the tortured breathing continued without a pause. He was dying, very slowly and in great agony.

Now is the time to read and think critically. The essay's historical context should tip us off to the symbolism that Orwell is employing. The elephant exemplifies the occupying power, the British. Like the British, he is an undesired presence, causing problems, even death, in the village. The Burmese, in the same way that they want to rid themselves of the elephant, also want the British out of their lives.

Orwell sees a future in which the British will suffer the same fate as the elephant, a long, painful, difficult decline. It ended in death for the elephant; for the British it will end in the withdrawal of their forces.  

The essay Shooting an Elephantby George Orwell is perhaps based on Orwell’s personal experience with British Imperialism in the East. The story is set in Moulmein, Burma where the English narrator, who is most likely Orwell himself, is presented with a task of shooting an elephant that had killed a local man. The Burmese crowd gets agitated by the dangerous elephant and wants the narrator to shoot it. But the narrator does not want to shoot the elephant because he realises that it is no longer dangerous and, so, it will be a brutal act to kill it. He wants to let go the animal. However, he is forced by the local crowd to shoot the elephant. He knows that he cannot escape shooting it, as he will be humiliated by the mob and tagged coward. While the mob and his fellow policemen felt that he made a good decision, he “wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.” But the shooting of elephant results in severing his disgust and inner struggle, as the elephant doesn’t die easily even after many shots. The elephant’s pain and suffering in its final moments makes the narrator even more uncomfortable.

Shooting an Elephant depicts a conflict between the colonisers and the colonised. The Burmese carried anti-British sentiments, and even though Orwell was a British, he was “all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British”. In fact, Orwell was against Imperialism.

"For at that time I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing".

Orwell carried the view that imperialism devastated both the oppressors and the oppressed, albeit in different ways. According to him, tyrants suffered along with the oppressed. He describes this through his personal experience as a British policeman in the colonised land.

“every white man’s life in the East was one long struggle not to be laughed at”.

Orwell shared his mental anguish and suffering, being a British policeman and doing a job he hated the most. He felt “when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys”

kairos: Rhetorical analysis of any sort begins with some orientation to the kairos ... the exigencies and constraints of place, time, culture, and audience that affect choices made by speakers and authors to influence that moment.... (Silva Rhetoricae, Brigham Young University)

Since "Shooting an Elephant" is retrospective discussion of what happened in the past, the kairos that is of most importance is the kairos in place in the events of the past as they occurred in the past. Orwell's job is to re-establish this kairos for his readers to evoke a different time and place where a different set of "exigencies and constraints" are current.

Orwell emphasizes the kairos in the opening paragraphs. "Kairos" is a Greek term in rhetoric that signifies the time, place and culture that determine, undergird, influence and generate an author's communication. To this are added the demands (the exigencies) of the place and time, such as how a British police officer in India is expected to behave (shoot an elephant), and the restrictions (the constraints) of the time and place, such as what a police officer may not do.

Colonial India in the time of Orwell's narrative is strained by oppression and building hatred. Moulmein, in Lower Burma, was then a peasant area where emotional restraint in local unschooled peasants was strained and broken whenever it seemed safe to do so. Enough adversity had come from British colonialism that some British government and civil workers in India and Burma were beginning to question colonialism and to inwardly rebel against it. At the same time, there were expectations of what the British should do with their greater power and their weapons to protect the people in their charge. This is a brief description of the kairos set up in the early paragraphs by Orwell: the place, time, the exigencies (expectations of protection) and the constraints (legal limits restraining behavior).

They had seen the rifle and were all shouting excitedly that I was going to shoot the elephant. ... It was a bit of fun to them, ... besides they wanted the meat. It made me vaguely uneasy. I had no intention of shooting the elephant....

The structure of the essay is a straightforward narrative piece that looks backward through a present first-person narrator who always speaks in the past tense about events that happened in a specific chronological place and time. Each event occurred as the result of a causative first event creating a cause and effect chain of chronological events until he reaches his final conclusion: "I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool."

"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 of the occupying white British government. Burma, which is modern-day Myanmar, is bordered by India, China, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. It was initially colonized by Britain in 1824, and following the Anglo-Burmese wars, was fully annexed in 1885. Thus, Burma became part of the British Empire in the East.

Orwell describes the incident with the elephant as revealing, although in a roundabout way:

And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd – seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.

Orwell's argument is that those who would rule and subjugate others do so at the price of their own liberty: absolute control of others is actually a constant struggle, not only to maintain control but also to maintain the appearance of control, which becomes of subjugation of the ruler himself. Though the tyrant may wear the crown, Orwell argues, it is a very hollow crown indeed. The ruler is no more free than the people he rules, and the barbarities rulers are enticed into committing ultimately cost the rulers their own humanity.

Orwell notes that he shot the elephant not because he wanted to, not because he felt the elephant deserved it, but because maintaining the appearance of control meant he had to do something personally distasteful:

I had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing – no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man's life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.

For young Orwell, the elephant becomes a symbol of the nations subjugated under British rule. He sees that killing the elephant does not make him greater or more in control or a better official. Crushing the imperial subjects does not, in Orwell's dawning understanding, make Britain greater than they. It removes the humanity of the British rulers, forcing them to do distasteful and barbaric things, much like shooting the elephant feels to Orwell.

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 complex work attempting to portray the experience of being a colonial policeman in Burma. Generally, the essay argues that the effect of colonialism is to demoralize and brutalize both the British and the natives, but it also makes important points about how mob pressure can make one act against one's best judgment and how fear can lead to mob hysteria.

For the British, to control a large native populace despite being outnumbered, they felt that they constantly needed to project an image of strength. This meant always appearing to act decisively and with what appeared efficiency bordering on brutality. Orwell himself, young and insecure, would have preferred a more moderate and reflective approach but caves in to the way the people expect him to act and is ashamed of it. He suspects that the outward appearance of strength often is grounded in inner weakness and is ashamed when his fellow policemen compliment him on killing (slowly and painfully) a harmless and innocent creature, concluding:

I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.

Concerning your question about "Shooting An Elephant," I don't know if "received" is the correct way to think about the ideas presented in the essay.  If one is precise, a main idea is presented in the essay.  You can also think in terms of thesis.

The main idea of the essay is something like:

The imperialist power is transformed and corrupted by its imperialism. 

The colonized are not the only ones damaged by colonization. 

By his/her position of power, an imperialist is morally corrupted.

The speaker is made to do things he would not otherwise do.  He not only is forced to kill the elephant needlessly, but because of the abuse he suffers at the hands of the locals, he actually develops prejudice and hatred against them.  Because he must maintain his position of authority, he must behave as he's expected to.  Because he is in an illigitimate position of authority, he is mistreated by those he is in charge of, and he responds naturally.

An episode in which he feels forced to kill an elephant against his will crystallizes for the narrator everything that is wrong with the imperialist system in Burma that he is a part of.

Although the British were the rulers in Burma in the 1920s, the story emphasizes how powerless the narrator, a member of the British Imperial police force, feels. The Burmese jeer at him every chance they get, because they hate the British presence in their homeland. The narrator dreams of sticking a bayonet into the guts of a Buddhist priest, showing how impotent his rage is against the subject race that torments him—he can only dream of enacting revenge.

By the time the narrator is summoned to kill a rampaging elephant, he realizes the creature has become peaceful again and poses no threat. It is cruel, senseless, and wasteful to shoot it. Yet the narrator does so, because he does not want to lose face in front of the crowd of Burmese who have followed him to the elephant.

After killing the elephant, an act that appalls him, the narrator has the realization that imperialism controls everyone in its grasp as if they are puppets. The British masters are as much in its grip as the Burmese, forced to uphold a system of governance that, in the end, hurts everyone. The narrator recounts,

And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd—seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet.

George Orwell's context is that of a young man who was raised in English society in the early twentieth century. He was part of the class system in England but lived, nevertheless, in a more equitable society than Burma—England did not have a conquering group of overlords from another country oppressing the native English people.

When Orwell arrived in Burma as a middle-class Englishman, he was shocked and dismayed by the hatred between the British imperialists and the native Burmese. He was not used to being hated and not used to the huge gulf in privilege that separated people like him from the native population.

Orwell's narrator blames the tensions and problems in Burma on imperialism, saying of the imperialist system,

I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better.

Because of Orwell's context, in which he knew both British norms at home as well as what imperialism was like abroad, he was well positioned to tell a story that illustrated the senseless cruelty of imperialism in a way people at home could easily understand.

George Orwell’s essay “Shooting an Elephant” tells the story of an event from his life when, as a young police officer in Burma, he was manipulated into killing an elephant by social and cultural forces he could not control or defeat.

Orwell’s context in this story is his position in Burmese society. England colonized Burma in the early 1800’s and engaged in several wars to expand their power over the Burmese and increase their access to the country’s resources. Colonization is usually not a pleasant process, resulting in conflict between the indigenous people and the invading power. Although the conflict might not always be violent in nature, it can have negative psychological and emotional effects on both sides.

Orwell was a police officer in Burma from 1924-1927. The opening line of the essay expresses his feelings about his relationship with the Burmese:

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.

We can see from the essay that he was very uncomfortable with some aspects of his job. Orwell then relates that he was more or less forced to shoot an escaped elephant, against his own wishes, because of a large group of Burmese who were insisting that he do so:

The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. 

Part of the context in which Orwell is operating requires that he maintain a level of respect and fear among the Burmese. After all, the British were not in Burma by invitation--they were occupiers, and to hang on to power they had to show force. This kind of relationship can exact a psychological toll on those who must maintain it:

And my whole life, every white man's life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.

In the end, Orwell must brutally and savagely kill a magnificent animal simply because his situation dictates that he take any necessary steps to avoid being “laughed at”—he cannot afford to compromise his position of authority among the Burmese people. This is what his context forces him to do. Had he been at home in England, chances are that he would have been able to follow his conscience and find a way to spare the animal and still keep the respect of the people around him.

“Shooting an Elephant” by George Orwell

Summary

Orwell begins by saying that when he was a police officer in Moulmein, Lower Burma, he was hated by many people, the only time he has ever been important enough for this to happen to him. The Burmese people loathed their British colonizers, but had not enough courage for open rebellion. They expressed their bitterness in petty ways, spitting and jeering at any Europeans they saw. Orwell sympathized with them, in theory at least, and realized that the British imperial regime was oppressive. He detested his job, which meant that he saw “the dirty work of empire at close quarters.” Prisoners were flogged with bamboo canes, and kept in filthy, stinking cages. However, Orwell was torn between his hatred of the tyrannical British Raj and his everyday anger at the abuse he received from the Burmese people around him.

One day, the sub-inspector at a police station on the other side of the town told Orwell that an elephant had got loose and was causing chaos in the bazaar. Orwell did not know how to respond, but he armed himself with a rifle and started out. As he went, various people told him what had happened. The elephant had broken its chain and had destroyed a bamboo hut and turned over a van, as well as killing a cow and eating fruit from stalls. When he arrived at the quarter where the elephant had last been seen, there were various confused and conflicting reports of where it had gone. However, there was physical evidence in the form of a dead man whom the elephant had killed by putting its foot on his back and grinding him into the earth. When Orwell saw the corpse, he sent an orderly to borrow an elephant gun from a friend.

Some Burmans told Orwell that the elephant was in a nearby paddy field, and many more followed him, eager to see the elephant shot. Orwell, however, did not intend to shoot the elephant, and felt foolish as he marched towards it with a large crowd behind him. The elephant was standing placidly near the road, eating grass and paying no attention to the approaching crowd. Orwell felt certain that he ought not to shoot such a valuable animal, which was now no danger to anyone. He decided to watch the elephant for a while to ensure that he remained calm, then go home.

When he looked behind him, however, Orwell saw a crowd of more than two thousand Burmese people staring expectantly at him. They were certain that he was going to shoot the elephant, and regarded this as an exciting entertainment. They were watching Orwell as though he were “a conjurer about to perform a trick.” Orwell realized that he would be forced to shoot the elephant after all, and understood for the first time the hollowness of his apparent position of power. He was not in control of the situation; he was the puppet of the crowd. When he had sent for the elephant gun, he had committed himself to shooting the elephant, and if he did not do so, he would look weak and foolish in front of the crowd, and they would all laugh at him.

As he watched the elephant, which looked peaceful and “grandmotherly,” it seemed to Orwell that killing him would amount to murder. Apart from this, a working elephant was worth a hundred pounds alive, but would only be worth about five pounds – the value of his tusks – if he was shot. Orwell knew that the correct thing to do would be to test the elephant’s behavior by walking towards him. If the elephant charged, he could shoot; if he remained docile, there was no danger. However, Orwell felt that he could not take this course of action. If the elephant charged, he might well miss the shot, and then he would be trampled into the mud in front of a huge crowd, some of whom would probably laugh. This would destroy his prestige, a fate worse than death for an Englishman in Burma.

Orwell loaded the gun, lay down on the road, and shot the elephant, to the accompaniment of a “deep, low, happy sigh” followed by a “devilish roar of glee” from the crowd. The elephant’s body sagged, and he suddenly looked terribly old. Orwell fired two more times, and at the third shot, the elephant fell to the ground with a crash. Even then, he was not dead, and Orwell could see him breathing rhythmically. He fired two more shots, but still the elephant did not die, even after Orwell sent for another rifle and “poured shot after shot into his heart and down his throat.” Eventually, he went away, and later heard that the elephant took half an hour to die. The crowd had stripped almost all the meat from his body by the afternoon.

This incident was followed by numerous discussions. The owner was angry, but powerless, since he was an Indian, and Orwell was legally justified because the elephant had killed a man. The older Europeans in Moulmein said that Orwell was right to kill the elephant, while the younger men said it was a shame, as the elephant’s life was worth more than that of the Burman he had killed. Orwell wondered whether any of them realized that he had only shot the elephant “to avoid looking a fool.”

Themes

Colonial Guilt and Tyranny

Orwell is known as a democratic socialist who hated imperialism, and by the time he came to write “Shooting an Elephant,” he had reached this mature perspective. The young man he describes in this incident a decade ago, however, was a less systematic thinker, uncomfortable and confused in his role as a low-level official doing “the dirty work of empire.” He also believes that his own attitude was approximately typical of Anglo-Indian officials, since such feelings are “normal by-products of imperialism.”

Orwell felt guilty because he was an agent of tyranny, imposing the will of a cruel and corrupt foreign power on the Burmese people. At the same time, he resented these people because they would not hide their hatred. This resentment produced more guilt, as did the fact that, theoretically at least, he was in sympathy with the Burmese, and had to hide this sympathy. Orwell shows that the effect of hiding his sympathy was to increase his secret anger, against the empire, the Burmese and himself, while at the same time he was forced to be constantly on his guard against letting the mask slip and revealing his true feelings, all of which were in some way shameful.

Moral Cowardice

In the first paragraph of “Shooting an Elephant,” Orwell remarks that none of the Burmese people in Moulmein “had the guts to raise a riot.” They showed their hatred of him in various petty and cowardly ways, and only had a little temporary respect for him when he was killing a harmless elephant. Orwell clearly depicts his shooting of the elephant as an act of moral cowardice. He did not want to kill the elephant, and he only did so because he felt the will of the crowd bullying him into this course of action against his better judgment.

The alternative course, walking up to the elephant to test his behavior, would have taken more physical courage than shooting him from a distance. Nonetheless, when Orwell rejects this course of action, it is again a matter of moral rather than physical cowardice. He does not mind dying, but he cannot bear to lose his temporary fragile authority over the crowd by dying in an absurd manner, at which some of them might laugh. His greatest fear is that of looking a fool, and he is prepared to sacrifice any principles or compassion he has in order to avoid this fate.

Crowds and Power

Orwell is in Burma as a representative of the British Raj, the oppressive colonial power. On the surface, the story told in the essay is about the exercise of that power, as the imperial officer kills a large, powerful valuable animal. The fact that the elephant is placid and harmless, no longer posing any threat to anybody, only underlines the tyranny of the act. However, Orwell repeatedly makes it clear that he shot the elephant against his will. This fact makes it clear that the power lay not with the white man wielding the gun, but with the crowd behind him.

From the very beginning of the essay, Orwell emphasizes the fact that he was powerless against the sheer number of people who hated him. When he was playing football and another player tripped him up, the referee refused to notice, and there was nothing Orwell could do. The people in the town nominally under his control hoot and jeer at him continually, and he is powerless to prevent them from doing so. Every one of the townspeople has more freedom than he has, and it is when he is most ostentatiously displaying his power, killing a creature noted for its size and strength, that he is least free to choose his own course.

The Theater of Empire

As the crowd watches him take aim at the elephant, Orwell describes himself as a performer in front of an audience. The people, he says, are staring at him “as they would watch a conjurer about to perform a trick.” Despite their personal dislike, and their readiness to laugh if Orwell is humiliated, they find him “momentarily worth watching” because he wields a “magic rifle.” He appears to be “the leading actor of the piece,” but is really the “puppet” of the crowd. When he loads the rifle, he hears a sigh from the crowd “as of people who see the theatre curtain go up at last.”

These similes and metaphors of performance show that Orwell is as helpless to determine his own fate as a character in a play, for which all the lines have already been written. He is a sahib, one of the ruling class, and “a sahib has got to act like a sahib.” When he considers the alternative to shooting the elephant immediately; walking up to him to test his behavior, he is not frightened at the thought that the elephant might kill him. His concern is that he will fail in a serious dramatic role: if the people in the audience see him looking foolish in his attempts to run away from the elephant, some of them may laugh.

Analysis

George Orwell was an Imperial Police officer in Burma, which at the time was a province of British India, between 1922 and 1927. He had been born in India, where his father worked in the Opium Department of the Imperial Civil Service, in 1903 but spent most of his childhood in England, where he won scholarships first to St. Cyprian’s School, then to Eton College. Such academic distinction would normally have preceded an undergraduate career at Oxford or Cambridge, but the family could not afford this without another scholarship, for which Orwell’s marks were insufficient. It was therefore decided that he should take the entrance examination for the Indian Imperial Police and return to the country of his birth.

The previous paragraph refers to George Orwell, the author of “Shooting an Elephant,” which was published under that name in New Writing in the fall of 1936. The man who shot the elephant, however, was known as Eric Blair. He adopted the pseudonym by which he is now known all over the world for the publication of his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, in 1933. His next book, and first novel, Burmese Days, appeared in 1934.

Orwell’s biographers have made much of the distinction between Eric Blair the reluctant imperialist oppressor and George Orwell the Socialist dissident. Peter Stansky and William Abrahams split their two-volume study of Orwell’s life and work into The Unknown Orwell and Orwell: The Transformation, claiming that the writer underwent a dramatic metamorphosis at the age of thirty when he adopted his pseudonym. David Caute, in Dr. Orwell and Mr. Blair, goes a step further, suggesting a split between the two personae reminiscent of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

When he came to write “Shooting an Elephant,” perhaps the best-known of his essays, Orwell had already fictionalized his experience of Burma in Burmese Days, one of his lesser-known novels. The line between fact and fiction in Orwell’s work is never entirely clear. Some editors have categorized “Shooting an Elephant” as a short story rather than an essay, perhaps a tribute to its vividity and dramatic qualities rather than a slight on Orwell’s veracity. In any case, it is clearly a description of something that happened to a young man very different from the thirty-three year-old author, writing almost a decade after he left Burma.

Orwell takes care not to invest his younger self with his current political opinions. If not quite an Everyman figure, the man who shoots the elephant is portrayed as a fairly typical Anglo-Indian official. At the end of the essay he depicts the club bores and bigots opining that “an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie.” This, however, is the mask of the sahib about which he has already written convincingly, the same attitude that actuated him to shoot the elephant in the first place. In the second paragraph he says that any Imperial official, “if you can catch him off duty,” will probably admit to a conflict of feelings similar to the one he describes in himself.

Ten years after “Shooting an Elephant,” Orwell set out his agenda as a writer in an essay called “Why I Write.” In it he explains that he did not initially want to write about politics, but felt compelled to do so by the atrocities of the age in which he lived. His first ambition was to be a more conventional novelist who concentrated on description, character, and language:

I wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also full of purple passages in which words were used partly for the sake of their sound. And in fact my first completed novel, Burmese Days, which I wrote when I was thirty but projected much earlier, is rather that kind of book.

Although the name “George Orwell” appeared on the cover of Burmese Days, the transformation from Blair to Orwell was not yet complete. The protagonist, John Flory, a clear proxy for the author, hates his role as a colonial oppressor in Burma, but is more concerned with his own loneliness and the possibility of romance than any of the political ramifications of empire.

Two years later, in “Shooting an Elephant,” Orwell’s didactic purpose has become clear. He signals it early, remarking at the beginning of the third paragraph that the incident he is about to describe was enlightening “in a roundabout way.” This, however, is typical of Orwell’s understatement. The essay is an evisceration of imperialism, rapidly piling up evidence against the multitude of vices this system produces: cowardice, cruelty, dishonesty, spite, bigotry and many more. It centers around an act of pointless slaughter in which the perpetrator is bullied into doing something he does not want to do in order to look powerful. The resulting irony sounds like nothing so much as one of the Party slogans from Nineteen Eighty-Four: Power is Impotence.

Quotations

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.

This may be the most successful opening line in any of Orwell’s works. It grabs the attention immediately, compelling the reader to wonder why the author was so hated. The dramatic opening is balanced the self-deprecating humor of the final clause, which emphasizes that the situation about to be discussed is unusual in the author’s life, as well as in more general terms. Although the style is distinctive, it is also direct and simple. Orwell was a great advocate of the plain style in English prose, and this laconic opening is typical of the essay’s unadorned, forceful, declarative writing.

He was lying on his belly with arms crucified and head sharply twisted to one side. His face was coated with mud, the eyes wide open, the teeth bared and grinning with an expression of unendurable agony. (Never tell me, by the way, that the dead look peaceful. Most of the corpses I have seen looked devilish.) The friction of the great beast's foot had stripped the skin from his back as neatly as one skins a rabbit.

Orwell is describing the corpse of the man killed by the elephant. The physical details are grotesque, and suggestive of the suffering the man endured before he died (the word “crucified” in particular suggests martyrdom and the torments of Christ). The comment in parentheses, generalizing from this specific circumstance with a rather dismissive “by the way” is typical of Orwell. So too is the vivid and disturbing simile at the end of the passage, which emphasizes the power of the elephant and the helplessness of the man.

I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the ‘natives’, and so in every crisis he has got to do what the ‘natives’ expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.

Orwell is a didactic writer and is often at his best drawing lessons from the scenes he describes. He emphasizes the falseness of the sahib’s posture with the words “dummy” and “mask” and uses the third sentence to reiterate the irony he mentions in the first. The man who appears powerful is less free than those over whom he ostensibly rules: the colonial master must do the bidding of the natives. The final aphoristic sentence reveals the fate of the sahib, a fate Orwell feel she only narrowly avoided: the natural man alters to fit his unnatural role, until only what is false remains.

But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of grass against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have. It seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him. At that age I was not squeamish about killing animals, but I had never shot an elephant and never wanted to. (Somehow it always seems worse to kill a large animal.)

The passage begins with a sentence of nine words, in which the first eight are words of one syllable. As is often the case, Orwell seems to have pared down his writing to the last degree of simplicity. At the same time, the unexpected adjective “grandmotherly” in the second sentence gives a peculiarly vivid picture of the elephant’s expression and demeanor, as well as emphasizing how harmless it is. The final statement in parentheses is a throwaway line, and is explored no further, but it might be the subject of an essay in itself. A piece titled “Shooting a Dog” or “Shooting a Cow” would scarcely carry the same impact.

He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely old, as though the frightful impact of the bullet had paralysed him without knocking him down. At last, after what seemed a long time — it might have been five seconds, I dare say — he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered. An enormous senility seemed to have settled upon him. One could have imagined him thousands of years old.

Orwell gains at least some of his effect here from repetition. The idea that the elephant looked very old after he had been shot is repeated three times in five short sentences. At the same time, Orwell is careful to record what he believes to have been the objective reality alongside his feelings and impressions. What seemed a long time to him was probably about five seconds. The passage begins with an ascending tricolon (“stricken, shrunken, immensely old”), and ends with a similar device, with three short sentences stressing the elephant’s slobbering senility, as though all the years it will not now live have been telescoped into a few seconds.

A large group of natives, some two thousand people, end up following Orwell as he locates the elephant which has gone wild and killed a man. Though the elephant no longer seems to be having its attack of "must," Orwell quickly realizes that the people still expect him to shoot it; they want him to, even, and they want the meat after the kill. He says, "They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was momentarily worth watching."

Orwell is well aware that the natives do not like him and that the only reason they find him remotely interesting in this moment is because he has sent for the elephant rifle, a move that implies an intention to kill the huge beast. He is conscious of their individual wills behind him, urging him forward to kill it. Orwell says that it was at this very moment that he first came to understands the futility of white people's authority in the East.

Anyone watching the scene would think that he is the "leading actor," but he knows that he was only an "absurd puppet" whose strings were being pulled by the natives, though they were unarmed. He realizes that he is not actually in control of his actions—though he does not want to shoot the elephant, he feels as though he has to. He says:

To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing—no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me

And his life, as well as the lives of all other colonizers in the East, was simply a fight to avoid being laughed at.

Well, it is important to remember that in this excellent essay the elephant of the title is a powerful symbol that is used to support the author's thesis statement. If we want to pick out that thesis statement, we would need to look at the following quote:

I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.

Orwell discovered through the incident when he was forced to shoot the elephant the truth of this statement. He, apparently, was the man in charge, the man with the power, and yet, he realises that he had no choice but to shoot the elephant even though he felt that it didn't need to be killed and he didn't want to do it. Ironically, becoming a tyrant has actually resulted in limiting and restricting the freedom of white men, rather than increasing it.

Thus, you are right in a sense when you say that the elephant has nothing to do with the thesis statement, however it was the incident that triggered the powerful epiphany that Orwell experienced about the colonial exploits of the "white man." In a sense, there could have been a number of incidents that would have sparked that same sudden understanding, but Orwell chose to base it on his own shooting of an elephant.

Be aware, "Shooting an Elephant" was first published in 1936, roughly a decade after Orwell returned to England, giving up his post as a colonial police officer. This means, first of all, that there is a ruminative quality to "Shooting an Elephant," derived from a place of narrative distance, as Orwell (or his narrator) thinks back on his experiences as an agent of Empire, examining the meanings and motivations behind those experiences and interactions.

First of all, note that Orwell himself emerges as a critic of Empire, somewhat who deeply loathed his time as a colonial police officer (even as he, at the same time, detested the Native people with whom he interacted and who detested him in turn).

In Orwell's view, the lived experience of the Empire proves morally corrosive to the imperialists themselves, forcing them to twist themselves to fit with the expectations imposed on them by the imperial system. The truth of the situation is that Orwell did not have any desire to shoot the animal, nor did he observe the necessity of such an action. Instead, in Orwell's explanation, it was the crowd itself, which expected the colonial agent to kill the animal, that compelled him to act accordingly. His own wishes and judgment were rendered irrelevant as he was forced to adhere to those expectations.

I am assuming from the question that you want to come up with a thesis for Orwell's essay. You can do so by isolating one theme, such as the narrator's conflict between being true to himself and doing his job as colonial policeman in Burma. Burma at this time was a British colony and the Burmese people lived under the thumb of the English who had to constantly demonstrate they were in charge. One thesis statement might be: In a world where appearances are more important than reality, people and animals suffer. 

An elephant has gone on a temporary rampage and killed a Burmese man. As the local policeman, the narrator, who is an Englishman, is expected to kill the elephant. He goes to do so with the villagers following behind him. By this time, the elephant has calmed down and is not threatening anyone. The narrator really does not want to kill the animal. It is pointless. But he knows the villagers expect it and will consider him cowardly and weak if he walks away. To keep up appearances, to show the Burmese that the British are courageous and in control, he shoots the beast. It is not easy to kill an elephant, so the animal dies slowly and painfully. The narrator feels terrible about what he has done to keep up appearances. ""I often wondered," he says at the end, "whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool." 

Orwell leaves the reader wondering what the narrator should have done. In a better world, the narrator could have followed his own heart and spared the elephant. But Orwell makes the point that in a world where the British must at all costs keep up appearances, individuals end up violating their consciences. Nobody wins. Ultimately, he is saying that we need to build social systems that give people the freedom to act humanely.