George Orwell wrote the short story “shooting an elephant.” It was about an encounter he had in Burma where he was a sub-divisional police officer in one of the towns. Orwell talks about how the natives hated him for their presence in their land. A rogue elephant presented him a chance to endear to the locals whereby he shot it. The story is told with irony as Orwell battles the internal conflict as well as external before killing the rogue elephant.
Even though Orwell, who is presumed to be the persona in the story by having once served in Burma, was a police officer representing the interests of the British Empire, he detested the job. He talked about how he was planning to quit; ‘the sooner I chuck out of it, the better.’ He also hated imperialism since he had seen the effects it had on the locals. It is quite ironical then that he served a master whose ideals he did not like.
Another ironic thing is that when he received information about the rogue elephant, Orwell set out to find it with the intention of not harming it. However, he encounters difficulties when the natives are reluctant to tell him where the elephant was. After a while, he discovered it by following the direction of a wail. A mass of people followed him each yearning to see the piece of action and subsequently, taking the elephant meat. It presented him with a dilemma, whether to kill the elephant or not.
After deliberating for a while, he decided to shoot the elephant. It was not for the good of the Burman locals but his pride. The moral justification he presented was that it was not a good idea to shoot a working elephant, for it was much more alive than dead. The best course of action would have been to wait for the mahout to come and tame the elephant. However, the mahout himself had gotten lost as he went to look for the elephant, which had broken its chains and escaped. Even the surging crowd seemed to urge him to make a decision of killing the elephant against his will. The best course of action would have been to wait for the mahout to come and tame the elephant. Nevertheless, he shot the elephant and watched it die painfully.
The people of Burma did not like them in the first place; they detested Europeans. Orwell talks about how easy it was for the natives to spit at a white woman at the bazaars. He got tackled in football matches, and the Burman referee did not say anything amid cheers from locals. But then he still went ahead to shoot an elephant to please thousands of people whom he says waited as though he was a conjurer about to perform a trick.
In the end, the description Orwell offers on the dying elephant shows that he felt the elephant’s pain and agony after shooting it severally. He says that the beast was powerless to die and yet also powerless to rise. The slow death tortured Orwell causing him to leave the scene where locals proceeded to butcher the elephant for its meat.
Subsequently the death of the elephant presented a point of discussion among the people. The owner, who did not have any other source of income, was furious that his livelihood had been taken away from him. Orwell talks about the fact that he had legally killed the elephant for having killed a native. The justification for the death he gave at the end was not the one he had set out in the beginning. He was glad that the elephant had killed someone, which gave him a reprieve.
In conclusion, the rogue elephant presented Orwell with a moral dilemma, which is ironical in the first place. The locals despised him yet he was willing to kill an elephant that was worth more alive than dead. The surging crowds seemed to be in the thrall of a white man in possession of a gun, yet deep down them, they hated him. It was this crowd, which convinced him that he had to kill the elephant despite his contrary judgment.
