Shooting An Elephant Analysis

Adam Smack
7/26/15
ENG 101
Response Analysis The reading, "Shooting an Elephant" takes place in Moulmein. He starts of the story in spectacle as to why the locals have so much hatred toward the Europeans when in all reality his main goal was only to help and protect the townspeople from any hurt, harm or danger that may come their way. In this story, the police officer's duty was to respond to a report of the death of a man who was killed by a stray elephant. Upon approaching the dead man, he finds the man "lying on his belly with arms crucified and head sharply twisted to the side." It was at this point, that he senses the communal determination of the crowd pressuring him into shooting the elephant. So after a constant debate within himself,
The main idea within the story is somewhat subtle and has a lot of bearing on the main events that take place in the text. The officer is heavily laughed at from all the people within the town and however hard he tries to be accepted, the society will not receive him. With this being so, he is willing to do whatever it takes, at any cost just to fit in and to be somewhat respected by the locals. This causes him to go against his own premonition and go to the extremes of killing an elephant. In the text it states that the whole situation made him feel both uneasy and unnerved. The author goes into even more detail, describing the various tests and precautions he took before taking the shot. As he comes upon the time before he chooses to take the shot, a sense of regret and sorrow comes over him and the whole tone of the story changes from one of haughtiness to one of distress and indecisiveness. Now that he is here, he feels as if there is no way out of the situation which was created by all the people who had followed him. There are many factors which contribute to the idea of the tone being indecisive, such as when he starts referring to the elephant as "it" and "he." He also makes notes of the "preoccupied grandmotherly air," concluding
His basis for support is not credible and he has no sound backing for this claim. The evidence the author uses that the burden of the will of the people weighed heavy on him and felt that he couldn't let them down. This evidence is somewhat accurate, but it is not sufficient enough to provide support for this claim. His main reason for killing the elephant was fundamentally peer pressure. He felt that by killing the elephant, he would then be able to prove to the Burmese that he was able "man enough" to take the shot, all in an effort to win the respect of the people. Both bias and assumptions are in the writing and are exhibited by both the officer and the Burmese people as well. The Burmese people automatically had been culturally inbred with a predetermined bias toward the Europeans and they made life practically torture for those in law enforcement in their country. In the text he states that the feeling of anti-Europeanism is very bitter and that even everyone, even the Buddhist priests jeered at them. They make "every white man's life in the East was one long struggle not to be laughed at." Also in another sense, the officer himself exhibits bias toward the elephant itself. Even though at the moment before he killed