George Orwell's Autobiographical Essay 'Shooting An Elephant'

The non-literary text I have chosen is George Orwell's autobiographical essay, 'Shooting an Elephant', published in 1936 by the literary magazine ‘New Writing’ and broadcast by the BBC Home Service on 12 October 1948, in which his subjective, first-person narrative tells a story through its prose with a very strong political purpose. Orwell is called upon to shoot a hostile elephant whilst working as a police officer in Burma. Orwell demonstrates social pressure through the hierarchical structure of status, in this essentially extended metaphor whereby the elephant serves as a symbol of colonialism and, at the moment of its defeat, it is seen as an even more powerful symbol of the irrational savagery of colonialism. This extract was chosen to show how the narrator goes against his better judgment and is ironically compelled to entrench himself further in barbarism, simply because he feels that propriety dictates him to do so; which Orwell achieves through the differing patterns of figurative language and foreign phrase.
Social pressure could be described as the immediate influence on people by companions, or a person who gets encouraged to follow their peers by adjusting their beliefs, feelings, or
For example; one study was led to investigate “the multiple reasons that university students engage in the unhealthy practice of playing drinking games”. The demand to be acknowledged and accepted proved to be a prime reason for participating in this precarious behaviour; it seems that our urge for group acceptance is so influential that we potentially disregard others and our own well-being, solely to be recognised as one of the crowd (Johnson & Sheets: 2004). This exposes a striking similarity to Orwell's situation of social pressure in his essay, perhaps this source offers some psychology behind the cause of the