In this story Shooting an Elephant was written to show that the British Empire was evil, and discriminatory. This what I got from my second and third read, on first read I thought it was just about a police man hating the people around him. After reading it again I got a better understanding of the essay written by George Orwell. Orwell uses imagery, metaphor and characterization to show the central idea that the British Empire was immoral.
Orwell uses imagery to see the bad in the British Empire; hid descriptions are very detailed which make the images stay in your head. On the third page he describes a man, dead from being stepped on by the elephant. This one passage really explains it “He was lying on his belly with arms crucified and head sharply twisted to one side. His face was coated with mud, with eyes wide open, the teeth bared and grinning with an expression of unendurable agony.” This passage really paints a picture; once I read it I couldn’t get it out if my head. I believe that Orwell is trying to convey that the British empire are bad people, they kill and do mean things to people. Another quote from the same page also shows the pain the British inflict on to others “The friction of the beasts foot had stripped the skin from his back as neatly as one skins a rabbit.” This quote also gives another gruesome image that, again shows how bad the British are.
They’re a couple of metaphors in this essay, the elephant and the policeman. The elephant is a metaphor for the British Empire, sometimes it can be and look harmless for example “He was tearing up bunches of grass, beating them against his knees to clean them and stuffing them into his mouth”. Other times the British Empire can be deadly, and destructive, just like the quote before “He was lying on his belly… unendurable agony”. The policeman could be considered as the “savor”, because he was the one that shoot the “elephant”. Though at the beginning he never wanted to kill the elephant just scare it away with a .44 gun, but after seeing the threat the “elephant” was he decided to be prepared to kill the “elephant”. These metaphors again show the fact that the British Empire we “elephants” harmless at time and destructive at other times.
The central idea in this essay is that the British Empire was made of men with two faces, sometimes nice sometimes mean. The metaphor, the “elephant”, shows how destructive the British Empire was to people. The imagery shows what the people felt like what was happening to them while under the rule of the British Empire.
P.S. I did like this story very much it made me think, it was great. The imagery, the metaphors and the story, it was a great story. I just had one thought that just occurred to me in Orwell’s 1984 he writes about how the government controls everything. It also explains the punishment and destruction the government could do, just like the “elephant”.
