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Student Response 3

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Nicky Robertson
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93 views2 pages

Student Response 3

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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The text written by George Orwell appears to be an autobiographical extract; written in first

person, the reader is given a front seat view of his internal monologue, connecting with his
audience through his intimate thoughts. A regretful tone pervades the whole text as he
admits how he ‘did not want to shoot’ the elephant and in confessing his actions to us we are
placed in a seat of judgement, lending an ear to his inner debate, brackets and dashes
letting us in on each additional thought.

Short paragraphs filled with sentences chopped up by commas reflect his anxiety as he
wavers between whether to “shoot him” or not. His moral compass is shown through modal
verbs as he inwardly knows what he “ought” to do as it feels to him that it “would be murder”
to shoot but he is self-aware enough to know he would “do no such thing”. Orwell tries to
distance himself from the moral question to shifting his focus on the materialistic one by
judging how much the elephant is “worth”.

The text takes on a tone of urgency as he battles between appeasing his conscience and
appeasing “the crowd”. The “devilish roar” let out by the crowd fixes in the reader's head the
image of a dangerous monster, rather than the elephant, that forces Orwells hand as he
juggles between satisfying them and his conscience, his moral failure like the mud he could
“sink into with each step” as he nears the elephant, each moral transgression easing his way
towards what he knows “would be murder”.

Longer sentences slow down time, allowing the reader to bare witness to each excruciating
detail as the elephant loses his “last remnant” of strength, stretching continuously onwards
steadily “as the ticking of a clock” , this simile implanting within the reader's mind the terrible
length of eternity steadily traipsing forward already settling upon the elephants shoulders
making him seem almost “a thousand years old”.Through the use of adjectives like
“desperate” and ‘terrible’ the “frightful impact” of Orwells actions strikes the reader and the
text reeks of regret and Orwell once more tries to remove himself from the events by
imagining the elephant in “some world remote” from himself.

The alliteration “suddenly stricken, shrunken” hammers into the reader the effect of the bullet
on the elephant and the text zooms in on every detail of the elephant's “agony” forcing
Orwell to witness the result of his actions that he guiltily relates to us. The initial mood of
excitement sours and turns melancholy as the “mysterious change” settles upon the
elephant, and in turn Orwell's attention fixates itself on the elephants draining life, zooming in
on the “long, rattling gasps” and down his “caven[ous]” throat, chasing that warm breath of
life that now struggles on, leaving the reader feeling as helpless and powerless as the
elephant “powerless to die”.
Orwells confesses in a concise manner his actions, spliced in between with insistences that
he had no desire to kill the elephant, yet, despite all his “ought to”s he reasons himself into
killing the elephant for that “happy sigh” of a faceless crowd demonised by what he
perceives to be a “devilish roar of glee”, leaving the reader as disturbed as he feels when he,
unable to bare the result of hs actions, “went away”.

556 words

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