Shooting An Elephant Greed

Imagine that you have everything that you could ever desire. An expensive house, a loving family, influential friends, and anything you could want in the world. Then one day you see something that catches your eye. Suddenly all of your waking thoughts are consumed by that item. You are always searching for it, wishing for it. It gets to the point where all you do is obsess and lust after the object. Finally, you obtain it, but as you look around, you’ve lost everything from your previously perfect life. It seems as if in a blink of an eye that perfect life has unraveled around you. In your blind grasping for the thing you thought you desired most, you lost everything you already had. Although at first desire appears to grant all of one’s wishes,
The desire for power can lead to the person’s physical death, as shown in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and it can also lead to the death of metaphorical aspects of the person, such as their humanity which is revealed in “Shooting an Elephant” by George Orwell. In “Shooting an Elephant” the greed of the empire leads to its own downfall as well as to the loss of its humanity. The loss of the British Empire’s humanity is shown in the use of words that have animal imagery or connotations in connection to the Burmese, words such as cowed, cages, and beasts. These descriptions degrade the Burmese, stripping of them of their humanity and lowering them to the status of mere animals. The degrading of the Burmese shows the lack of humanity of the British Empire, no human would ever degrade another human in such a manner. In losing their humanity, the British become mere “absurd puppet[s] pushed to and fro by the will of [others]”; they only have the shape of a human, but they do not have anything inside of them, a heart, morals or otherwise. The downfall of the Empire is expressed in the death of the elephant. The elephant is a metaphor for the empire, as shown by how “the Burmese were quite helpless against it” and by the destruction the elephant causes in the village which is a parallel to the destruction that the empire as a whole wrecked on the country of Burma. By shooting
While freedom may have a positive connotation and is generally considered to be positive, it is chasing blindly after the freedom that is dangerous. In “the wife of bath’s tale” the wife of bath is perceived as someone who is lesser because of her desire to be free from the constraints placed by society onto women. In “Annie John” the greed of Annie John to be free of Antigua and her mother’s domineering presence leads to the death of her old self. The wife of bath from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales wishes to be free from the constraints placed on women in her society. However, her wish to establish herself not as someone’s wife but as someone leads to the destruction of her social standing. The other pilgrims’ attitude towards the wife of bath show how while the wife of bath may have gained the freedom she desired she lost her social standing and the respect of her society in the process. The wife of bath protests against her being regarded badly because of her many marriages by stating: “wise King Solomon of long ago: / we hear he had a thousand wives or so” (Chaucer, Wife of Bath’s prologue 259). In referencing King Solomon, the Wife of Bath both demonstrates that she is well versed in the bible and reveals the hypocrisy of her society. In the time period The Canterbury tales was written, being well versed in the bible was a sign of