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Shooting An Elephant Rhetorical Analysis

Decent Essays

In "Shooting an Elephant" Orwell struggles with his conscience quite a bit, and he shows this through the contradictions between what he says and what he does. For example, he feels that “imperialism was an evil thing” (13-14). Yet, he works for the very tyrannical government he claims to despise. Another being that, secretly, he is “all for the Burmese and … against their oppressors” (15-16). However, he states that “the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts” (27-28). And lastly, when encountering the elephant, he outright says he “did not want to shoot the elephant” (119) for “it always seems worse to kill a large animal” (122). But that’s exactly what he does in the end, like this, throughout the essay Orwell struggles with what he views as right and wrong. …show more content…

He goes on to say that “In a job like that you see the dirty work of [the] Empire at close quarters” (17). Things like “prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups” (17-18), the “cowed faces of the long-term convicts” (18-19), and “the scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged with bamboos” (19). Orwell clearly knows to see all this to be gross and wrong humane violations seeing as it “oppressed … [him] with an intolerable sense of guilt” (19-20). But his servitude to British Empire as an Englishman keeps him silent when he ought not

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