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Student Response 4

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Nicky Robertson
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126 views2 pages

Student Response 4

Uploaded by

Nicky Robertson
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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By carefully analysing the perspective, style, and tense of the text it is possible to determine

that the story is meant to be much more than entertainment, and has been written by Orwell
to defend actions which he sees as more severe than they truly are.

Orwell attempts to portray himself as an empathetic victim, starting with a logical explanation
in the first paragraph of why shooting the elephant would be wrong. He first describes the
elephant as having a ‘preoccupied grandmotherly air’ whom he ‘did not want to shoot’, going
on to state with an exasperated ‘besides’ that there was ‘the beast’s owner to be
considered.’ This clearly displays Orwell as forward-thinking and empathetic tone, which
helps him to gain the audience’s allegiance.

Of course, he still did shoot the elephant, so in order to defend his actions Orwell blames the
circumstances. He says that he had ‘got to act quickly’ and was ‘a poor shot’ with ‘only one
alternative’ to putting himself in the position of a ‘toad under a steam-roller’. But really, this is
him intentionally ruling out all options other than ‘murder’ when he clearly knew ‘what I ought
to do’. Orwell tries to distract the reader from making this deduction with dramatic, shocking
descriptions and similes of ‘blood [...] like red velvet’ and ‘tortured gasps’ like a ‘ticking clock’
that impair the reader’s ability to reason. In many ways, by going into such depth of how he
‘couldn’t stand it’ and was powerless to ‘finish him’ while the elephant was ‘powerless to die’,
Orwell likens his own situation to that of the elephant, portraying them both as the victim of
the Burmans with their ‘devilish roar of glee’ wanting their ‘bit of fun’, as if he was a gladiator
being forced to fight by the crowd of a colosseum. By doing this, Orwell attempts to gain the
audience’s sympathy to the extent that they exonerate him of his actions.

Paradoxically, it is also clear that Orwell’s descriptions are a truthful perception and that he
is deeply shaken by his actions. Instead of being a clean kill, Orwell inflicted the elephant
with a ‘mysterious, terrible change’, and even though he tried desperately to kill the elephant
with ‘shot after shot’, he failed. The responsibility he feels for the elephant’s welfare is shown
by his statement that he ‘waited a long time’ for it to die despite the ‘dreadful noise’, and he
seems to willingly take the blame for the first time with unnecessary descriptions showing
that the onus is not the rifle, a ‘beautiful German thing’, but his own knowledge as he ‘did not
know then’ where he should aim. His detailed explanation on how one should shoot the
elephant, by cutting a ‘bar running ear-hole to ear-hole’, is almost an attempt to make good
this earlier failure. His long, descriptive paragraph explaining the ‘terrible change’ is clearly a
view unique to himself, as to the Burmans it was a ‘bit of fun’. From all this we can see that
his statement that he couldn’t stand the spectacle was true, and we can also see why he
feels the need to defend actions which he sees as abhorrent.

Similar conclusions can be reached by studying the sentence and paragraph structure,
punctuation and use of modals in the text.The first paragraph, his attempt to win the reader’s
allegiance, has been given flow by use of compound sentences and commas, making it
more eloquent in order to be more convincing. The repeated use of the modal ‘ought to’ in
the second shows that he clearly knew what was right, but was stymied by knowing at the
same time that he was going to do ‘no such thing’. This portrays a moral dilemma won
eventually by a failure of nerve.

The fifth paragraph’s last sentence’s use of a semicolon allows a more abrupt statement of a
new idea and hints that he finds recollecting his lack of know-how painful, so wanted to get
the admission over as quickly as possible. The length of the last two paragraphs are a
contrast to those preceding them, showing that he wished them to make an impact on the
reader to, as mentioned earlier, distract them. This must be conscious, as as mentioned
earlier he found the experience painful, and would be unlikely willing to relive it in such detail
unless he wanted to deliberately create an effect or undergo the pain in an act of
pittance.The use of a first person perspective, while sensible for a recollection,
serendipitously increases the reader's proximity to the author and allows Orwell to force his
perspective of events onto the audience. This has the effect heightening the chance that
they will see things from his stated view and pity him instead of charging him with murder,
then blame the circumstances instead of pointing to his lack of nerve and knowledge as
being responsible for the elephants death.

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