George Orwell's Elephant

The Shooting of an Elephant by George Orwell turned out to be a very fascinating read. I enjoyed the beginning the most, in which the soldier (I wasn’t sure if this was Orwell himself or the event of a fellow soldier he happened to witness) goes into detail about his being torn between his duty to the empire and his massive envy for the people who hate him the most. It is one of the first texts I’ve read in this course in which the British Empire is badmouthed from within for a change and not sugarcoated with supposed goodness a la Empire of Good Intentions. But what I really liked about the essay was Orwell describing the soldier who chooses to do his duty for the sake of non-embarrassment, “here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd…I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant, it’s his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy…for it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life trying to impress the “natives” and so in every crisis he has got to so what the “natives” expect of him.” (2381-2382) It reminded me of two things: 1. “The Hollow Men”, the power they gain destroying them from the inside, making them aloof to the chaos they cause for victory; and 2. A popular student who will pull off any kind of dare in order to stay popular and not show fear of losing.