Sunday, November 25, 2012

The Elephant's Demise

Remember how we mentioned Gandhi and Churchill during the last posts?
Well, what a better way to conclude than with a story about elephants.

Have you ever had that moment when you just had to shoot an elephant?
Me neither. But George Orwell did. Well his character did. In "Shooting an Elephant".
Here's the basic story: the narrator goes to Burma, where he kills an elephant. Yay. He says he killed the elephant merely to "not look like a fool" in front of the natives, who were excited to see what the narrator would do to the escaped rogue elephant.

Knowing that we've been seeing some British and Indian stuff lately, I immediately knew that this had something to do with it, and it came to me rather easily.

The narrator is describing or portraying the nature of imperialism, especially the British one. Britain only does it to avoid looking like a fool. Basically. So the narrator symbolizes Britain. What about the elephant? It surely symbolizes countries under the imperialism. They are portrayed as beasts, and they just won't die. Or something like that.




Orwell successfully manages to shove his opinion about British imperialism into this seemingly-not-totally-innocent story about killing elephants.

I shall cut this post a bit short because I am utterly demotivated since the last time my post got deleted stuff.

Have some salad.


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