Shooting An Elephant Analysis Essay

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What if Beauty never fell in love with the beast? What if Sleeping Beauty didn’t prick her finger on a spinning wheel? Everything that we do creates a chain reaction that goes well into the future. The main idea George Orwell wants readers to learn from “Shooting an Elephant” is that we can’t change the past – what we do is permanent and will stick with us forever. Orwell uses exceptional literary tools such as descriptive, detailed scenes so that we remember the story well, and he uses the tone of the story to reflect a person’s ever-swaying emotions; moreover, he uses symbolism to make small details in the work have different effects on the overall view of the story. Orwell adds excellent description adjectives throughout the story to …show more content…
The description of the corpse relates to Christ dying on the cross. The phrase “with arms crucified” corresponds with Jesus dying on the cross with nails in His hands and arms out wide. The phrase “grinning with an expression of unendurable agony” correlates to Christ’s facial expression while He was on the cross; He possibly smiled because He knew that He was going to see His Father again. Also, the text written about the elephant links a similarity between the animal and a stumbling block. Many people face situations where they don’t know what to do. The narrator has many decisions to make in this work and he questions the ethics of his actions and contemplates the value of shooting the elephant. Although we may get past hardships, we continue to reflect on them later in life. Orwell adds the information about the elephant sitting quietly and nicely in the grass to show that humans still hurt innocent people. The elephant at that point of the story is a symbol for a person or animal that gets badly treated for something that they didn’t mean to do. The many examples of symbolism in this work define this short story as well-developed, refreshing

analysis of shooting the elephant Essay

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