Contents: IntroductionCharacters Themes Style Critical Overview Criticism Sources Further Reading |
Plot Summary
“Shooting an Elephant” begins with a meditative prelude to the action in which the narrator, who may be presumed to be Orwell, comments on being a colonial policeman in British Burma in the middle of the twentieth century. “I was hated by large numbers of people, “he says, and “anti-European feeling was very bitter.” A European woman crossing the market would likely be spat upon and a sub-divisional police officer made an even more inviting target. Once, at a soccer match, a Burmese player deliberately fouled the narrator while the Burmese umpire conveniently looked the other direction and the largely Burmese crowd “yelled with hideous laughter.” The narrator understands such hatred and even thinks it justified, but he also confesses that his “greatest joy” at the time would have been to bayonet one of his tormenters.
The action of “Shooting an Elephant” begins when the narrator receives a telephone report of an elephant “ravaging the bazaar.” He takes his inadequate hunting rifle and rides on horseback to the area where the animal allegedly lurks. The narrator remarks on the squalor and poverty of the neighborhood, with its palm-leaf thatch on the huts and unplanned scattering of houses over a hillside. The narrator asks about the elephant and receives a vague answer. Suddenly an old woman comes into view shooing away a group of children. She is trying to prevent them seeing a corpse, a Burmese man crushed by the elephant. With a death confirmed, the situation has escalated. The narrator still hopes not to have to shoot the elephant. Nevertheless, he sends for an elephant rifle and five cartridges.
The narrator locates the now-calm elephant in a field. The crowd has followed him. He suddenly understands that, although the elephant no longer poses a threat, the crowd’s expectation of the killing will force his to do it. Here Orwell suspends the narrative to insert a continuation of the story’s opening meditation. The narrator speculates on the role-playing doom of the imperialist, who becomes so committed to his having to play the part of the colonial overlord that he also becomes a grotesque caricature of that role. He becomes the very thing that his critics claim him to be, a tyrant operating outside the normal code of ethics. He must kill the elephant because the crowd will otherwise laugh at him and the laughter of the “natives” is intolerable to the notion of empire.
“There was only one alternative,” the narrator says. He loads the cartridges into the gun (“a beautiful German thing with cross-hair sights”) and pulls the trigger. A compressed paragraph describes the elephant’s death. The animal, Orwell writes, suddenly looked terribly aged, as if transformed from a lively youth to an old sick man in a single second; the creature staggers pathetically as it collapses to its knees, and saliva pours from its mouth. The narrator shoots again. The animal staggers but attempts in an agony to rise. The narrator fires a third time, and now the animal is down to stay. Its crash shakes the ground under the narrator’s feet. The three bullets have not killed the elephant, however, which continues to gasp in pain as it lies in the field. The narrator now takes up his small-calibre hunting rifle and fires into the animal’s heart. Still it does not die. Too shaken to remain, the narrator departs, adding that he afterwards learned that it took the elephant a half-hour to die.
The denouement concerns legalistic quibbling over the deed. The elephant had an owner, which might have complicated matters, but since it had killed a man, it qualified as a rogue and the law required that it be dispatched. These circumstances vindicate the narrator’s action technically. “I was very glad,” he says, “that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right.”
