Analysis Of George Orwell's Hooting An Elephant

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Mac Ferguson
Professor McCabe
English 110
6 September 2014
Letting an Elephant Live Within Orwell's short piece entitled 鉄hooting an Elephant,he forms a memoir to describe the white man's role of attempted hidden control within British controlled Burma. However, Orwell chooses to dive deeper into the actual situation by creating an extended metaphor by evaluating the idea of the 展hite Man's Burdenin the specific situation. Orwell depicts himself as an officer to ensure safe travel for Europeans by controlling the native people, but ironically he becomes more like them by the end of the story, at least within his own mind. Orwell uses several literary techniques to mock the 展hite Man's Burdenand poke fun at the idea of controlling the Burmese. He also gives the reader a sense of sorrow for the officer by making him seem as if he were truly human. Orwell's memoir piece uses the technique of flashback in order to depict the scene, which is extremely common, but the memory used comes with the annotations of thoughts and seems to slow down in moments rather than a recount of typical events. The way the narrator weighs so heavily on two moments: the moment when he sees the elephant and the moment when he fires his first shot. Of course, these two points are the point of rising action as well as the point of climax within the story that come back to back. Orwell spends time dancing around these two topics to compare the 展hite Man's Burdento the event. He uses it to show that the officer is the white man and the crowd is in need of rescue from the elephant, the government, suggesting that they need to be shown a way past the elephant. The officer hears claims of this corrupted elephant and it is his duty to help, but when he reaches the actual elephant, it seems docile and well-natured. However, the twist to this is that the crowd is cheering for the officer to kill the elephant, but the shot doesn't, it stays alive for another half hour. Orwell is using this to parallel the fact that the British never truly killed the true empire of Burma, but rather tried to kill it and failed. The original empire was taken to pieces by the people themselves over time, but only after the British had left in the same way the officer had left from disgust of seeing it still alive. The interesting point is the devil's advocate in this situation. The question of the events if the officer chose to not shoot the elephant. In his own suggestion, he would have been laughed and jeered at, a common practice that had happened before in places such as the football field, but he was cheered
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