George Orwell was a profound novelist and essayist in the 20th century. He was known very well from his novels “Animal Farm” and “Nineteen Eighty-four”. These were based on totalitarian rule. He was born in India in 1903 and died in London in 1950. He had many works of art that expressed what he had seen and been through in his life. He made fictional work based on real life scenarios with hidden meanings. After he was sent to boarding school he was treated accordingly due to him growing up with little money but being very brilliant. His father was a minor British official in the Indian civil service. His mother was a daughter of an unsuccessful teak merchant in Burma. His mother brought him and his older sister, Marjorie, to England about a year after his birth and settled in Henley-on-Thames. His father stayed behind in India and rarely visited, Orwell didn't really know his father until he retired from the service in 1912. And even after that, the pair never formed a strong bond. He found his father to be dull and conservative”("George Orwell"). He started as a young writer and his first thing published was a poem in the local news paper at age eleven. Orwell won scholarships to two leading schools Winchester and Eton. After this he was provided a scholarship to a university but instead decided to follow the family tradition and became a assistant district superintendent in the Indian imperial police in Burma. After he did this for some years he realized that he didn’t like the oppression and supremacy involved in the government tactics. He got married to a women named Eileen O'Shaughnessy in 1936 as well as adopted a son in 1944. Orwell had always wanted to be a writer but strayed away from it until this point in his life, he came to the realization that he wanted to recount his life in novels, autobiographies or essays. He wrote a very defining essay called “Shooting an Elephant” this was a depiction of how being a officer as a white man in Burma feels as well as having to deal with the existing oppressive power.
George Orwell wrote this narrative piece to describe a first person point of view with oppressors and the oppressed. To this day it is unknown if it was a fictional essay or realistic essay based on his experience. He explains that he receives a call in order to come in to town because of a rampaging elephant. When he makes it to town he sees the elephant aggressively running around and soon leaving the area. While there he sees a dead Indian women who was trampled. He then orders an elephant rifle and heads to the elephant. At this time the elephant is laying down and calm, he doesn’t want to shoot the elephant but a group of roughly a few thousand people followed him expecting to see a show of the elephant being killed and punished for its crime.
“I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the "natives," and so in every crisis he has got to do what the "natives" expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing — no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man's life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at"("Shooting an Elephant").
This excerpt from "Shooting an Elephant" is a depiction of how Orwell was saying how the narrator felt. Based on being a white man in an Indian society there were different stereotypes and bias’s that were placed upon him. As a rule enforcer he stated that “the conqueror is not in control, but it is rather the will of the people that governs his actions"( "Shooting an Elephant"). He was against the British and strongly disliked imperialism. He stood with the Burmese which were being oppressed by the British. The statement above is saying that when you think you are in control because you have power it is more likely that the people have control over what they will stand for or against which can make being an authority figure hard. When he was an officer he was hated by many people. He had to deal with being bated constantly and treated with disrespect from the people when they felt it was safe to act that way. He also was forced to be in very close proximity to all the dirty work of the oppression and the raw affect of it on people. This moment of shooting an elephant in Orwell’s life was very definitive and showed him that he didn’t want to be oppressed anymore, that he wanted to work against it. He was very struck by having to kill the elephant and stated multiple times that he did not want to kill the elephant or shoot it. This incident was enlightening and gave him a understanding of the true nature of imperialism. When Eric Blair was accused of killing an elephant after moving around due to being a recruit, was told by the chief of police that he was a disgrace to Eton. This was because elephants were very valuable at the time and were used for transportation and heavy lifting and hauling or moving things. Soon after this Orwell resigned and wrote and published some books as well as this “sketch”.
Orwell was very impacted by the incident of having to shoot an elephant. I believe that this helped create the infamous novelist he became. By these things happening to him in his life and being so close to the oppression he was able to write about it in hidden novels. He could put real governmental tyranny into writing without getting in trouble and this was his way of fighting back. This helped inform people as well as showed them an inside view with out Orwell getting in trouble.
Orwell best known for two novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four”("George Orwell"). These were the last two novels he wrote which were the works that made him famous. He was very much against the illusion of hiding the truth in the English language or misleading people. Because of this he became a writer to illustrate the world in “truthful” words. He died of tuberculosis in 1950 at the age of 46 years old. His contribution to the world will have a lasting effect and will continue to help people understand the type of government they are possibly living in.
Works Cited
“Shooting an Elephant.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 30 Apr. 2018, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_an_Elephant.
“George Orwell.” Biography.com, A&E Networks Television, 15 Feb. 2018, www.biography.com/people/george-orwell-9429833