George Orwell’s reverse from Britain to the colony

Literature is not castle in the air. Sigmund Freud also suggested a possible connection between author’s experience in his/her childhood and his own literary works. Thus, fiction can be viewed as a kind of projection of real life and thoughts of the author. This essay is to use this perspective to discuss George Orwell and his works of A Hanging and Shooting an Elephant based on textual analysis. 

A brief introduction of Orwell’s connection with British colonial history could provide with an insight to better understanding his novels. Originally named Eric Arthur Blair, British writer George Orwell, was born in 1903 in India where his father served as a colonial officer. At the age of 14, he was enrolled in Eton College to receive British elite education. After graduation, he served Great Britain’s ambition and became an imperial policeman in Myanmar until 1927. The paradox brought by his vision from elite education and his own experience in Myanmar deeply impressed him and resulted in his profound thinking toward this issue. As a British man, he could not cut off his relation with Britain’s imperial ruling, but as an intellectual, he found himself doubting colonization. This twisted feeling was shown in his documentary works written separately in 1931 and 1936, A Hanging and Shooting an Elephant, suggesting that although Orwell received pure British elite education, which could be assumable that he should be in the same shoe with other white men, after the stay in Myanmar he felt alienated with what colonists did and even started to doubt about it.

From the first person point of view and with plenty psychological description, metaphor, and contrast, these two stories demonstrated Orwell’s doubts over colonization, his condemn of colonization, and his complex mixed feelings of sympathy and hatred towards local people. In the simple story of A Hanging, Orwell, the storyteller, suddenly felt that the prisoner is a human being as same as himself when he saw the Indian man “stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path (Orwell, 2).” He sympathized with him, and realized that he was a healthy and conscious man like himself, and therefore a feeling came to him that what they would do with him was a mysterious mistake. At this time, Orwell still stayed at the stage of writing about himself as a victim. 

In paragraphs after the hanging, he started to abandon the first person point of view, and describe what happened from a third person’s view. It constructed a distant identity, as if he was standing away from “me” and “we” to witness the farce-like event, which especially highlighted the absurdity of those whites. Meanwhile, this tone also indicated that Orwell could not fit in the other white people. When the penalty was executed, all people there fell into a delicate mixture of silence and embarrassment, and Orwell wrote as an audience who was observing what “I” and “we” did: “I found that I was laughing quite loudly. Everyone was laughing (Orwell, 4).” In comparison with this lightness in the air, he pointed out that just about hundred miles away, laid the dead body. It conveyed a strong contrast and grim anger about what white officers did. 

In the story Shooting an Elephant，his doubt came out more evidently. In that story, he was about to shoot an elephant, which had killed an Indian man. Instead of flexing his powerful gun, he asked himself whether it was necessary to kill the animal. He thought about the owner of the elephant, analyzing that “alive, the elephant was worth at least a hundred pounds; dead, he would only be worth the value of his tusks, five pounds, possibly (Orwell, 4).” This thinking showed that he was as indifferent as other cruel and thoughtless white men. 

Over time, as Orwell stayed longer in colony, what he saw and experienced made him to become increasingly doubtful and disgusting towards the ruling of British. Therefore, one can find more direct expression of his dislike of imperialism in the later work Shooting an Elephant than in A Hanging. In the story of how he ended the life of an elephant, he abandoned indirect descriptions and was very open with his negative attitude about Britain’s ruling, pointing out that he absolutely supported the local people and opposed the ruler—British. “For at that time I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing (Orwell, 1).” He held a firm standing point on his view because for a long time he had seen the persecution British had done to the local people since he worked as a policeman. As a result, he even felt like quitting the job as soon as possible, holding great sympathy with those victims who had to stay in these utterly smelly cells. 

In Shooting an Elephant, he truly illustrated the cruel nature of the colonial government. In that issue, superficially, the weaker ones were the victim killed by the elephant and the owner of the elephant since his right of his property was deprived. But in the storyteller’s point of view, “I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind (Orwell, 4).” He also projected this relation into the relation between Great Britain and its colonies. He felt that holding the gun in hand—just like Britain flexing weapons over the colonies—made him feel the weakness and emptiness of the imperial’s ruling. In exchange with the higher position, they were put into the position that must always protected and maintained orders and fulfill the locals’ expectations, which at the end deprived their own freedom.

Yet, ironically, though he didn’t want to reach any consensus with other officers, he still had to stand with them simply because he was a white man and was not welcomed among the local. Therefore, although he conducted the killing reluctantly, he was still happy to see the elephant’s death because it put him “legally in the right” and gave him “a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant (Orwell, 6).” He claimed that the mad elephant was out of control and posted danger to public, which proved that his act was correct.

Besides his struggle between identifying with the colonists and the locals, he both sympathized and disliked the colonials. In his super-ego, he clearly felt sorry for these people whose homeland had been intruded by his men. However, in reality, he could not bear the actual contact with them since they are numb and rough.  

In Shooting an Elephant, this dilemma was given to a full play. At the beginning, the storyteller “had no intention of shooting the elephant.” He had “merely sent for the rifle to defend myself if necessary (Orwell, 3).”However, when he was armed with the weapon, colonials had not stopped him from the unnecessary killing but felt excited about the issue. They even gave him the feeling that if he did not kill the elephant, all white people, including himself, would be laughed at. This description revealed the sad reality in the colony that those local people had been already turned into creatures equally cold-blooded as the colonists. At the beginning of the story, this problem was already pointed out by the author in plain words—“petty kind of way anti-European feeling was very bitter (Orwell, 1).” As a policeman, he had unavoidable problem with the local people though at the bottom of his heart he had pity for them. 

Through the detailed textual analyses in combination of Orwell’s personal experience, he successfully exhibited his charming penetrating style in description. Instead of lengthy psychological illustration, he took a plain way to tell a story where readers could feel what he was feeling. A Hanging and Shooting an Elephant also exemplified this characteristic. In these two pieces of work depict his life in the colony, one would read a troubled man who was burdened with the colonial mission but fail to believe in this business. The heroes of these stories always struggled between his own identity as a white man and his sympathy for the local people, between his disappointment of the imperialism and his duty to conduct a role in the imperial process, which could be traced back to Orwell’s own experiences related to the colonial history.