Commentary

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Early on, George Orwell makes clear the theme of “Shooting an Elephant”: “the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East.” As a young English police officer he shot an elephant that had killed a man during a rage of must even though the animal had calmed down and was harmless, and he did so to avoid looking like a fool in front of Burmese citizens under his authority. Standing in front of the crowd with an elephant rifle in his hands he appears nominally in charge, but is “only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind,” a “hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib.” But Orwell’s task as an essayist is not just to state ideas unforgettably, but to make us feel them viscerally, and it is not until he takes the shot near the end of the essay and the elephant slowly topples that the magnitude of human foolishness sinks in. Orwell lies on the ground knowing that if he misses and the elephant attacks “he should have about as much chance as a toad under a steam roller,” but the shot goes home, and the mysterious transformation begins. Outwardly the elephant appears unfazed, but “every line of his body had altered.” He “looked sud­denly stricken, shrunken, immensely old, as though the frightful impact of the bullet had paralysed him without knocking him down.” It takes three shots to do that and when the fall happens it is with hideous, slow-motion grandeur: “in falling he seemed for a moment to rise, for as his hind legs collapsed beneath him he seemed to tower upwards like a huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching skywards like a tree. He trumpeted, for the first and only time. And then down he came.” What Orwell’s bullet brings crashing down is the very sense of authority and dignity that this petty show of force was meant to protect.  “It seemed to shake the ground,” Orwell writes, “even where I lay.”

—THE