Gale - A Study Guide for George Orwells Shooting an Elephant

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George Orwell

1936

George Orwells Shooting an Elephant first appeared in 1936. The British public already knew Orwell as the socially conscious author of Down and Out in London and Paris (1933), a nonfiction study of poverty, homelessness, unemployment, and subsistence living on poorly-paying menial jobs, and Burmese Days (1934), a novel of British colonialism. Shooting an Elephant functions as an addendum to Burmese Days. The story and novel share the same setting, and draw on Orwells experience as a colonial official in India and Burma, two regions of the British Empire, in the middle of the century between the two world wars. The story (which some critics consider an essay) concerns a colonial officers obligation to shoot a rogue elephant. The narrator does not want to shoot the elephant, but feels compelled to by a crowd of indigenous residents, before whom he does not wish to appear indecisive or cowardly. The situation and events that Orwell describes underscores the hostility between the administrators of the British Empire and their native subjects. Both sides feel hatred, distrust, and resentment. The situation is universally degrading. The shooting itself involves enormous pathos conveyed economically in a few words.

Shooting an Elephant is a central text in modern British literature and has generated perhaps more criticism than any other comparable short piece. In the politicized atmosphere of contemporary criticism, commentators are especially drawn into debate about whether Orwell apologizes for or condemns imperialism. Left-wing critics see insufficient condemnation; conservative critics point out that it is the narrator, an agent of empire, who explicitly denounces the British presence as pervasively corrupting to both sides. The story is one of the most widely anthologized and studied items of the modern English-language canon.

George Orwell was born Eric Blair on June 25, 1903, in Motihari, Bengal, which was then a province of India under British rule. Richard Blair, Orwells father, was a British government official. Sent back to England for his education, Orwell attended St. Cyprians, Wellington College, and then Eton. After graduating, Orwell joined the Indian Imperial Police, from which he resigned in 1927, having in the meantime settled on writing as a career.

Interested in the life of the lower classes and the poor, Orwell lived in working-class neighborhoods in Paris and London in 1928 and 1929, collecting material that he would eventually publish, after many rejections (including one from T. S. Eliot), as Down and Out in Paris and London, under the pen-name George Orwell, in 1933. In the interval, Blair wrote essays, poetry, and journalism, including the drafts of Burmese Days, which also appeared in 1933. A series of novels followed, all under his new pen-name, with which he increasingly identified himself. He published A Clergymans Daughter in 1935, Keep the Aspidistra Flying in 1936, The Road to Wigan Pier in 1937, and Coming up for Air in 1939, just before the outbreak of the war that the book predicted. Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side. His motive was to fight against Fascism, represented by Francos anti-Republican Falange Party. Orwell soon became disillusioned with the Republican side, however, seeing the hand of Stalins KGB everywhere in its increasingly corrupt and ineffective policies. He published an account of his Spanish experience in the booklength essay Homage to Catalonia in 1938.

Orwell worked for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) during World War II while working on the two novels for which he remains best known, Animal Farm (1944), a satire of Stalinism and of coercive collectivism in general, and 1984, published in 1949, a bleak depiction of a world entirely subjugated to a totalitarian regime. In addition, he wrote essays and journalistic and broadcast pieces, and was active throughout the war on behalf of the Allied military effort.

Orwell had contracted tuberculosis in the 1920s. Overwork during the war years exacerbated his condition, and he became ill shortly after completing the manuscript of 1984. He married his second wife while in the hospital, and was planning a trip to Switzerland to recuperate when he died of pulmonary edema on January 26, 1950.