“He was lying on his belly with arms crucified and head sharply twisted to one side. His face was coated with mud, the eyes wide open, the teeth bared and grinning with an expression of unendurable agony” (23).
This quote from George Orwell’s essay Shooting an Elephant, paints the image of a dead man he found lying on the edge of a village square as a policeman in Burma. The narrator (Orwell) is called up one morning to take care of an incident in the local village involving an escaped elephant. The man finds the elephant destroying a market hut, and the people in a complete panic. The man feels conflicted in his position because the Burmese villagers dislike him as a British officer, but his feelings toward Imperial Britain are just as negative. Upon finding the elephant, the man feels pressured to carry out his duty and shoot the animal down. The villagers gather around him to watch him enforce his power with a rifle in hand. Although he stands aside watching the creature grazing peacefully by itself, he ultimately shoots it down, pressured by the waiting crowd. This essay, my favorite from the collection outlines the isolation Orwell felt in Britain, and the compassion he felt for the Burmese people. In addition to Shooting an Elephant Orwell’s essays span over the greater part of the author’s life, covering his service in the Imperial army, his exploration of other classical literature including Charles Dickens, and several political essays.
What I enjoy most about George Orwell is the symbolism that his work is centered around. The subjects are always fairly simple, and the message sent is always strong. One worldly connection that I kept being reminded of while reading his essays regarding his military service was to Gandhi. It is well known that up until his death, Orwell preferred his isolation. At a time when the English empire was a colonizing superpower in many third world regions of the globe, Orwell felt deeply for the people suppressed. Upon being sent to Burma, a colony of India at the time, he felt conflicted in his position. Similarly, Gandhi was a man in the wrong place at the wrong time. An educated lawyer in South Africa, the peaceful leader was mistreated and undermined in his homeland of India. Both men, in their respective ways, addressed the wrongdoing they saw in the world, and set out to change the world. Another surprising aspect of Orwell’s telling of his service in Burma was the brutality, painted carefully in a beautiful way that reminded a lot of very early religious artwork I’ve seen in the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain. The way pain and suffering like that in the quote above is made to seem romantic and so full of meaning and purpose. The structure of the dead man, trampled by the elephant in the village was something to marvel, almost as if the elephant was an artist making a statement of his own regarding his imprisonment. Another essay in the collection describing the dawn of spring was done in such a way that made the author of the brutal 1984 seem vulnerable. From his work, I am almost reminded of Henry David Thoreau. Both men saw a frightening evolution of society, removed themselves, and wrote about the ignorance they saw in the modern world.
The image I chose above is a screencap from American Beauty of the death of the main character. I was reminded of this image because the look in the man’s eyes just after being killed was one portrayed as beautiful. This reminded me of the quote I pulled from the essay above. The quote was actually one that I heard before picking up the book. I was learning different forms of diction in literature at the time and the imagery I read in the quote was remarkable. I found the crucified image of the Burmese man symbolic in great Orwell form.
- What significance can the political essays wrote from the 1930’s and 40’s have for a reader in 2011?
- What does the elephant in Orwell’s Shooting an Elephant represent in the context of the author’s life?
- How does Orwell’s work relate and compare to that of Dickens and Smith?
- Why do you think the last part of Orwell’s life was spent in isolation?
I have wanted to explore nonfiction work for sometime, but haven’t enjoyed a lot of the work I’ve read thus far. I was certain I would avoid that with a great novelist like George Orwell, but many of the early political references were difficult for me to understand. Aside from that I really enjoyed the variety of essays he wrote in this book. I feel like a really understand much more the reasoning behind a lot Orwell’s work and the evolution of it over the course of his life. I would have to recommend it to people who enjoy classical literature. It might be a little less exciting than the likes of 1984 or Animal Farm, interesting nonetheless.
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