George Orwell's Shooting An Elephant And Crowd Effect

The Elephant and Crowd Effect Shooting an Elephant is a short story written by George Orwell in 1936. Regardless of my persuasive point that George Orwell was just writing a story about an elephant, “Shooting an Elephant” is actually a central text in modern British literature and has generated perhaps more criticism than any other comparable short story. The story is concerning an English colonial officer residing in Burma and his obligation to shoot a rogue elephant. In “Shooting an Elephant,” Orwell shows how crowds and peer pressure affect the human conscience. To begin with, the narrator (who is assumed to be George Orwell, who was an actual officer in Burma) does not enjoy the situation he is in. In Burma in the middle of the twentieth century, “I was hated by large numbers of people,” he says, and “anti-European feeling was very bitter.” He then goes to talk about how a woman from Europe crossing the marketplace would
This same laughter is the laughter the narrator cannot escape throughout the piece. It causes the author to be conflicted between becoming the object of the mob’s disappointment and anger, or shooting the elephant, a creature that he knows that should be left alone. Orwell even goes farther to show that this crowd isn’t merely a “Burmese crowd” or even more vaguely an “Asian crowd” as opposed to their European counterpart. It is an ordinary, generic crowd, behaving like a normal crowd. Crowds have an inverse relationship: as the size of the crowd increases, the less and less reason the crowd has. Also, they tend to increase the collective resentment against some arbitrary victim, here either the narrator himself, conspicuous because of his office, or the elephant, a convenient substitute and safer because, as a non-human, it tends to be blamed for more things with less