Shooting An Elephant By George Orwell Analysis

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Despite Orwell not wanting to shoot the elephant, then he suddenly realizes that he will be humiliated and laughed at by the all people in the area, if he chooses to not shoot the elephant. Therefore he makes the unethical choice of shooting the elephant. After Orwell shoots the elephant three times with his elephant rifle, and the elephant in pain, does not die. Orwell shoots the two remaining shots he had left straight into the elephant’s heart. He sends someone to get his original small rifle, then decides to shoot “shot after shot into his heart and down his throat.” Surprisingly, the elephant still does not die. Orwell, unable to stand the elephant’s suffering and unable to watch and listen to it, leaves the elephant. The elephant, like the Burmese people, has …show more content…
He says that “every white man’s life in the East was one long struggle not to be laughed at,” that “when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys,” and that the imperialist “becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib.” Orwell’s essay, however, is more than one person’s riveting narrative about the beginning of an awareness. “Shooting an Elephant” captures a universal experience of going against one’s own humanity at the cost of a part of that humanity. This that’s how this story also discuss how doing an ethical or an unethical choice can different from opposing sides in this cases Orwell did not want to shoot the elephant to not be cruel and the people wanted the elephant dead because of how he/it murdered one of them and how they could gain on the elephants death materialistically. Of course the consequences the decision brought was that Orwell was not the laughing stock of the area and the harmless animal was killed. This shows us the magnitude of an ethical decision or in the case an unethical