In his essay, “Shooting an Elephant,” George Orwell relates not only the experience of shooting an escaped elephant, but also the understanding that he gains while being a police officer in Burma. As a police officer, Orwell is the immediate manifestation of the British colonial government among the Burmese people with whom he interacts. From his experiences, he grows to feel that his main struggle is “not to be laughed at,” a struggle he generalizes...
In his essay, “Shooting an Elephant,” George Orwell relates not only the experience of shooting an escaped elephant, but also the understanding that he gains while being a police officer in Burma. As a police officer, Orwell is the immediate manifestation of the British colonial government among the Burmese people with whom he interacts. From his experiences, he grows to feel that his main struggle is “not to be laughed at,” a struggle he generalizes to other white men in the East.
Early in the essay, Orwell takes pains not only to describe his view of his job, but also to give the reader an overview of how he is received by the Burmese people around him. It is clear that Orwell, a self-confessed critic of imperialism, is struggling with his role, and the meaning of his role, as a representative of the British colonial government in Burma. He knows that he is not really an important piece of the governmental machine, but he also recognizes that he is a prominent face of that government with the people in the district in which he serves. This creates in Orwell a kind of disassociation between what he believes and who he has to be.
This dissociation is highlighted when he decides to shoot the elephant. He decides to shoot the elephant not because the elephant is still a danger at the time he finds it, but rather because he does not want to look foolish. He then understands that he is at the mercy of the crowd around him, and that thus he is governed by them rather than they being governed by him:
[B]ut in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the "natives," and so in every crisis he has got to do what the "natives" expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing – no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man's life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.
Orwell projects this lesson he has learned onto other people situated the same as he is. It is, he believes, the fear of looking foolish – the “one long struggle not to be laughed at” – that is the primary burden that white men in the East bear.
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