Now the question is why did Orwell shoot the elephant, when he already knew that the elephant was no longer dangerous? After all, he was supposed to be the controlling authority there, the white man, the powerful man. This is where we are generally wrong as Orwell explains very clearly how the controlling authorities in a hostile country are not controlling the country’s population but in fact are a mere tool of the populous. He says very clearly “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”. Orwell decided to kill the elephant only after seeing the immense crowd. It was at this moment the author realized “I should have to shoot the elephant, after all”, not because he wanted to but because he was expected to. When he decided to sent for the elephant rifle the crowd assumed that he was going to shoot the elephant. They expected a show from him; they expected a ‘sahib’ to act decisively without wavering. So leaving without shooting the elephant was no longer an option. The British has created a proud image that they demand the Burmese respect and they are trapped by having to live within that image. Being a white man Orwell “mustn’t be frightened in front of the natives” and he has to live up to the image of the omnipotent white man.
Still Orwell didn’t want to kill the elephant. He thought of walking close to it and finding out whether it was still mad or not. However Orwell decided against it because the ground was muddy and if the elephant charged he would be trampled on and be killed. But it wasn’t his fear of death that led him to shoot, it was his fear of being laughed at and ridiculed by the Burmese, which lead him to kill the elephant. If Orwell had walked away the air of control would have been lost, leaving Orwell to the laughter and jeers of the crowd, “And my whole life, every white man’s life in the east, was one long struggle not to be laughed at”. He had been laughed at constantly by these people around him and he would do anything to avoid it including shooting the elephant. Not fear for his own life but the mere chance that he would lose face in the presence of the natives was all Orwell needed to shoot the elephant.
So Orwell killed the elephant merely to save his pride. We must understand that the person who shot the elephant was the young Orwell, a person who was caught in a contradictory situation and couldn’t rise above it. He was confused and didn’t know what to do. He tries to rationalize that he ‘had to’, to maintain the imperial image and because that is what the natives ‘wanted’. However, the older Orwell the matured narrator of the story knows that he shot the elephant unnecessarily and many years later Orwell still seemed bothered by the fact that pride, not necessity caused him to destroy the animal.
Once Orwell had finally shot the elephant, he depicted the long death very grotesquely and in great details. Orwell has an awesome ability to describe things vividly, forcefully and clearly so that it becomes almost real. Orwell knew all the time that killing the elephant was wrong. So the longer it took the elephant to die the more Orwell suffered. The terrible guilt he felt made the moments more agonizing for him. “I felt that I had got to put an end to that dreadful noise. It seemed dreadful to see the great beast lying there, powerless to move yet powerless to die and not even to be able to finish him”. His guilt paralyzed him. He felt powerless. He poured a number of shots into the elephant’s heart, but its tortured breaths continued making it more horrifying for Orwell. He wanted to end its suffering to lessen his guilt. What Orwell felt was this intense sense of guilt which made him realize how utterly unfair it was of him to shoot the elephant. At the end he could stand it no more and left the scene.
“Shooting an Elephant” reveals a very powerful evocation of guilt. It is also an indictment against imperialism. The flaws in imperialism begin to emerge when the elephant dies solely for the selfish reason of holding up the white man’s image. Orwell presenting the shooting of the elephant as a torture for both him, who does not want to shoot the elephant, and the elephant that painfully dies, very effectively focuses the reader’s attention on the suffering that imperialism inflicts on both parties.
