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George Orwell's essay "Shooting an Elephant" gives remarkable insight into the human psyche. The essay presents a powerful theme of inner conflict. Orwell feels strong inner conflict between what he believes as a human being, and what he believes and should do as an imperial police officer. The author is amazingly effective in illustrating this conflict by providing specific examples of contradictory feelings, by providing an anecdote that exemplified his feelings about his situation, and by using vivid imagery to describe his circumstances.
Orwell begins to show his inner conflict by stating how he felt about being a European imperial policeman. By serving Britain is a policeman he is showing that he is loyal to his country, but at the same time he believed that .".. imperialism was an evil thing... " His conflict results form the fact that he hates the British Empire which should make him pity the Burmese people but he does not. This is made clear when he says, "All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited beasts who tried to make my job impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in secular sae culorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts. " The primary illustration of his inner conflict is told through the anecdote of the elephant.
In the story of the elephant Mr. Orwell paints a picture of another type of inner conflict that he experienced while working in Burma. That is, when one knows deep inside what they should rightly do, but due to outside pressures and influences they choose another course of action. The anecdote is about an elephant that is out of control and is ravaging a village. George Orwell is called out to neutralize the situation, but he does not know what he can do to help things. When he arrived at the scene he was told the elephant got away to paddy fields a thousand yards away.
As Orwell made his way to the paddy the crowd behind him grew as they all hoped and assumed he would shoot the elephant. Upon reaching the field Orwell writes, "As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect certainty that I ought not to shoot him. " By this time the crowd had grown to the size of at least two thousand, and every one of them wanted to see the animal shot. Orwell then realized that even thought he didn't want to he would have to shoot the animal to protect his public persona as imperial policeman. "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. " These sentences perfectly describe his little crisis of what to do. The pressure of the crowd caused him to make a choice he did not like. Orwell was not comfortable with his decision to kill the elephant and the strong imagery in paragraphs eleven and twelve really drives that point home.
The writer masterfully invokes the same sickening feelings he received from the incident into the reader through sentences like: "When I pulled the trigger... a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered... he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered. An enormous senility seemed to have settled upon him. " After more horrendous descriptions of Orwell's attempt to kill the elephant that just would not seem to die he shows the reader how disgusted he was when he says, "In the end I could not stand it any longer and went away. " The essay shows perfectly what it is like to experience internal conflict.
I remember a similar situation that took place when I was in junior high. I was walking through the school hallway with a friend who happened to be a starter on the school's football team. His athletic success sparked his ascent up the social ladder and he began the process of phasing out his "uncool" friends to hang out with the popular crowd. We spotted a congregation of my friend Ted's new "cool" friends shamelessly taunting a student at his locker. As Ted and I approach the crowd we recognize the student as our friend mike.
After greeting his new "cool" friends Ted almost immediately joins in on the harassment. Ted even continued to make fun of Mike when he was no longer at his locker. By this time Ted and I start for class and I ask him why he did that to Mike. Ted sighed and basically said that he knew what the right thing to do was, but with his new friends there he felt it more important to protect his new "cool guy" persona than to stand up for what he felt he should have done. George Orwell basically goes through the same emotions as Ted did by protecting his resolute policeman persona rather than doing what he thought inside to be the right thing to do.
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Research essay sample on Kill The Elephant Imperial Policeman Orwell
