Shooting an Elephant is a short story written by George Orwell in 1936. Regardless of my persuasive point that George Orwell was just writing a story about an elephant, “Shooting an Elephant” is actually a central text in modern British literature and has generated perhaps more criticism than any other comparable short story. The story is concerning an English colonial officer residing in Burma and his obligation to shoot a rogue elephant.
In “Shooting an Elephant,” Orwell shows how crowds and peer pressure affect the human conscience.To begin with, the narrator (who is assumed to be George Orwell, who was an actual officer in Burma) does not enjoy the situation he is in. In Burma in the middle of the twentieth century, “I was hated by large numbers of people,” he says, and “anti-European feeling was very bitter. ” He then goes to talk about how a woman from Europe crossing the marketplace would get spit on and a police officer would make an even more likely target. Also, once at a soccer game, a Burmese player fouled the narrator while the Burmese ref “conveniently” looked the other direction, the largely Burmese crowd “yelled with hideous laughter.
This shows that the narrator has an early on encounter of mass proportions with a crowd. Subsequently, the author receives a telephone report of an elephant “ravaging the bazaar. ” He proceeded to take his a low powered rifle and rides on horseback to where he expects to find this beast. He rides up to a corpse that was crushed by the elephant just moments ago.
A crowd sees this, and the narrator calls for an elephant rifle and cartridges. The narrator then finds the elephant in a nearby field, with the crowd following him.He suddenly understands that, even if the elephant isn’t a threat anymore, he must meet the crowd’s expectation of killing the elephant. Orwell recognizes that he must kill the elephant because the crowd will otherwise laugh at him and the laughter is unendurable to the notion of the British Empire.
He speculates on the doom of the imperialist, who becomes so committed to his having to play the part of the colonial officer that he also becomes a hideous cartoon of that role. He becomes the very thing that his critics claim him to be, a bully operating outside the normal code of his ethics.The inevitable happened, and the narrator loaded the cartridges into the gun and pulled the trigger. Orwell then describes the death of the elephant in a very descriptive manner.
Orwell has to fire multiple bullets in the elephant and it still does not die. Then he fires one into the elephant’s heart, and it still does not die. He leaves because he cannot take continually hurting the animal. He then later finds out the elephant suffered for another thirty minutes. All this stress was caused by the presence of a crowd full of “hideous laughter.
Moreover, the crowd makes itself known by the cackling that accompanies the trivial acts of revenge, which the Burmese inflict on their British rulers. This same laughter is the laughter the narrator cannot escape throughout the piece. It causes the author to be conflicted between becoming the object of the mob’s disappointment and anger, or shooting the elephant, a creature that he knows that should be left alone. Orwell even goes farther to show that this crowd isn’t merely a “Burmese crowd” or even more vaguely an “Asian crowd” as opposed to their European counterpart.It is an ordinary, generic crowd, behaving like a normal crowd. Crowds have an inverse relationship: as the size of the crowd increases, the less and less reason the crowd has.
Also, they tend to increase the collective resentment against some arbitrary victim, here either the narrator himself, conspicuous because of his office, or the elephant, a convenient substitute and safer because, as a non-human, it tends to be blamed for more things with less consequences. All in all, peer pressure can lead to many things in life.It can lead to that first cigarette that starts a lifelong addiction, a choice that many people wish they had not made. From dictionary. com “peer pressure” is defined as: Peer Pressure –Noun Social pressure by members of one's peer group to take a certain action, adopt certain values, or otherwise conform in order to be accepted. This is exactly what Orwell had to do to be somewhat socially accepted by the crowd.
He had to conform. He had to give into peer pressure. Peer pressure’s affect on the human conscience is game breaking.To think that someone can throw their own morals aside to just appease a crowd is unbelievable.
In conclusion, even if Orwell’s Shooting an Elephant was intended to be a simple short story about a dude shooting an elephant, there are many things to be learned from this brilliant story. It does indeed show a great example of a crowd’s affect of ones conscience. Also, peer pressure can lead to bad decisions. A lesson to be learned to make sure you think for yourself, regardless of what might be cool.
