Shooting an Elephant

"Shooting an Elephant" by George Orwell is a persuasive essay in which he shows his personal experiences being a police officer in Burma and describe his belief towards imperialism and the disagreement with the way British Empire treats Burmanese's people. During his duty as a police, he has confusion that he gets between choosing his personal belief and the crowd's pressure on him to kill a mad elephant. Later, from this event, George Orwell also got the real meaning of imperialism that he tries to explain with the illustration from the shooting.

This essay actually could have two purposes. The main one is persuasive and the second one is literary. It could be literary because Orwell uses a lot of tension when he shot the elephants. He explains fully how bullet and after bullet strike to the elephant and the slow changes that happen of each bullet to the elephant. However, there are a lot more characteristics that support this essay to be a persuasive one. The first one is the claim that imperialism is utterly full of dirty and evil. There is no good that can be described from imperialism in this case is the British Empire. The writer is actually deep in confusion between choosing the side that he serves from his work or to those local people who discriminate him. Orwell even write that he "hated it more bitterly" as he doesn't know what to choose. He then writes that "theoretically", he's "all for the Burmese", which means he has a feeling that contradict with his personal belief. In this essay, there is also a general belief that comes up from the story of shooting the elephant. The writer describes that he knows with "perfect certainty" that he should not shoot the elephant. He describes that an elephant had a "huge worth" at that time and it is indeed a really "serious matter" to kill such a valuable machinery. He actually already has a reason for not to shoot the elephant aside from the cost, which is the mad elephant seems already to be normal again. He says that the elephant looked "no more dangerous than a cow." Unfortunately, the inevitable huge mounting pressure of the "immense crowd" from behind the writer seems to push him to do so. There are about "two thousands at the least and growing every minute." The writer admits that it is not just about the pressure but it is also about the futility and the great hollowness about the "white man's dominion in the East." It is also an irony as in this position supposedly the writer is the one who leads the environment as he has the "magical weapon" but the pressure from the crowd that makes him to fell to be pressured by the "native people". He characterizes himself as an "absurd puppet" that pushed by the will of those "yellow faces" behind and also being a "hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a salib". He thinks that like a sahib he must commit with the words that he had spoken in such