Shooting an Elephant
George Orwell’s 1936 essay recalls a colonial policeman in Burma who kills a working elephant he does not want to kill, because a watching crowd expects it of him.
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A young British police officer in Burma is resented by the Burmese he polices, and privately he agrees with them about the empire he serves. One morning he is called out because a working elephant has broken loose in the bazaar. Only when he reaches the quarter where it was last seen does he find that it has trampled a man to death. By the time he finds the animal it is calm again, and he knows that shooting it would be both cruel and wasteful. Behind him stand about two thousand people who have come to watch him fire. Orwell uses that half hour to argue that the man holding the rifle is as trapped as the people he polices.
The claim
Orwell argues that empire traps the people who run it as well as the people it governs. The officer can hold on to his standing only by meeting the crowd’s expectations, so command and obedience quietly trade places.
The rhetorical situation who, to whom, when, and why
Moulmein, Lower Burma
A town where a small British administration policed a population that did not want it. Burma was then governed as a province of British India, and it was separated from India in 1937, the year after the essay appeared.
The paddy field outside the town
Waterlogged ground a short distance off a metaled road, with coarse grass and no cover. The open field puts the officer in front of the crowd with nothing between him and them except the animal.
The mid-1920s, written up in 1936
The essay is set during Orwell’s police service, which ran from 1922 to 1927, though how much of the incident is reporting is disputed. He published the account nine years after he left Burma, and left for Spain at the end of the same year.
What Shooting an Elephant says
The narrator is a British police officer in the Burmese town of Moulmein, where resentment of the colonizers makes him a constant target. He is tripped in a football match to the spectators’ delight, and young monks mock him in public. He says he had privately turned against imperial rule and hoped to leave the service, and in the same breath he admits to a furious anger at the people who made his days miserable. Such contradictory feelings, he suggests, come with the job of ruling other people.
One morning he hears that an elephant is loose in the bazaar. The animal is a tame working elephant that has gone into must and broken its chain, and its handler has followed it in the wrong direction and is now many hours away. It has already left a trail of damage, including a flattened hut, a dead cow and an overturned municipal van. The officer sets out with a rifle too light to kill an elephant, mostly to see what has happened. The townspeople give him contradictory stories until he finds the body of an Indian laborer who has been trampled into the mud. He sends an orderly to borrow a rifle heavy enough for the job.
Once the big rifle arrives, a crowd gathers and follows him. He finds the elephant in a waterlogged paddy field, pulling up grass, its violent fit apparently over. He is sure there is no need to shoot, and he also knows that the crowd is waiting for him to. Feeling the weight of the people behind him, he fires.
The animal does not die quickly. He empties the heavy rifle into it, then fires his smaller rifle again and again, and finally gives up and leaves with the animal still alive. He is told afterward that it lingered for about thirty minutes, and that villagers had taken the carcass apart before the day was out. The owner could do nothing, the killing was legal, and the Europeans in the district argued about whether it had been right.
The line of reasoning how the argument moves
- Opens with a confession that costs himThe first section reports the daily hostility the narrator met in Moulmein, then admits that he opposed the empire in principle while wanting to do violence to the monks who mocked him. Starting with an unflattering admission buys credit with the reader before any argument is made, and it establishes that the essay will not spare the narrator.
- Sets an ordinary problem in motionThe call about the loose elephant and the wrecked bazaar puts the narrator into a small administrative job rather than a moral crisis. Keeping the early stakes low, and the tone procedural, makes the reversal later feel like something that happened rather than something staged.
- Raises the stakes with a body and a rifleFinding the dead laborer supplies the legal ground for shooting, and sending for the elephant rifle changes the officer’s status in the eyes of the town. This step is what draws the crowd, and the crowd, not the elephant, turns out to be the essay’s real subject.
- Holds the narrative still at the decisionAt the paddy field Orwell slows down and reasons through the choice: the animal is calm, valuable and no longer dangerous, and the officer does not want to kill it, yet the people behind him have already settled what will happen. Placing the reasoning between the sighting and the shot makes the reader feel the same squeeze the narrator feels.
- Generalizes from the trapBefore the shot, Orwell turns the moment into a claim about empire: a colonial official must play the role his subjects assign him, lives in dread of their mockery, and becomes a prisoner of his own power. The generalization lands here because the reader has just been made to share the pressure that produced it.
- Ends on motive rather than on justiceThe closing section reports the animal’s slow death, the owner’s helplessness, the legal cover and the split among the local Europeans, and only then gives the narrator’s private reason for firing. Putting motive last keeps the argument, not the incident, in view.
Section by section what each part does
- 1
A policeman nobody wants
The narrator introduces himself as a police officer in the Burmese town of Moulmein and describes how bitterly the local people resent him. A player trips him during a football match, the Burmese referee ignores it and the spectators enjoy the moment, and young monks mock him in public. He then admits that he had privately turned against imperial rule and hoped to leave the service, and that he also felt a violent rage toward the people tormenting him.
Why it mattersThe opening establishes the speaker’s honesty by making him look bad, which is what allows his later conclusion to sound like evidence rather than opinion. It also plants the central problem: a man enforcing a system he has privately rejected.
- 2
The call from the bazaar
Word comes that an elephant is loose. The animal is a tame working elephant that has gone into must and snapped its chain, and its handler took the wrong road in pursuit and is many hours away. It has already left a trail of damage, including a flattened hut, a dead cow and an overturned municipal van. The officer takes an old rifle with no hope of killing an elephant and goes to look, while the townspeople give him stories that contradict each other.
Why it mattersOrwell keeps this section flat and administrative, a list of damage and a light rifle brought along on the chance that the noise would scare the animal off. The low key here makes the later pressure feel like something that arrived rather than something the narrator arranged.
- 3
The dead man in the mud
In a hut area the officer finds the body of an Indian laborer who has been caught by the elephant and trampled face down into the ground, badly torn. The sight settles that the animal is dangerous. He sends an orderly to a friend’s house to borrow a rifle heavy enough to kill an elephant, and sends his pony back so it will not bolt when it smells the animal.
Why it mattersThe body supplies the legal justification the narrator will lean on afterward, and it is described plainly, with no appeal for sympathy. Sending for the big rifle is the hinge of the essay, because the rifle is what summons the crowd.
- 4
The crowd at his back
As soon as the elephant rifle appears, people stream out of the houses to follow. By the time the officer reaches the paddy field, about two thousand of them are behind him. He finds the elephant standing in the wet field pulling up bunches of grass, calm, its fit of must apparently passing. He is sure there is no need to kill it, because a working elephant is valuable and this one is no longer a danger.
Why it mattersOrwell sets the calm animal and the excited crowd side by side so the reader sees that nothing in the situation itself requires a death. The crowd’s mood, which mixes entertainment with the prospect of meat, quietly reverses who is in charge.
- 5
Playing the part the crowd expects
Looking at the crowd, the officer sees that the decision has been made for him: thousands have come for a shooting, and walking away would make him a laughingstock. He casts himself as a performer whose script is written by the audience, and he draws the general conclusion that a colonial ruler must keep up appearances before his subjects at every moment, and that holding power over others costs him his own freedom. He also weighs the risk of missing and being trampled while the crowd laughs.
Why it mattersThis is the argumentative center, and Orwell places it after the reader has felt the pressure and before the shot, so the claim arrives as a report rather than a lesson. The image of the performer makes an abstract point about power concrete in one man’s body.
- 6
Three shots and a long death
He fires, aiming for the brain but too far forward, and the elephant sinks down but does not fall. A second shot into the same place fails to drop it, and it drags itself back onto its feet; a third finally brings it down. It lies on its side, still breathing heavily. He empties the heavy rifle into its heart, then fires his small rifle into it repeatedly, and the animal will not die. At last he gives up and leaves, and is told afterward that the animal lingered for about thirty minutes.
Why it mattersThe killing is drawn out and described in technical detail, which strips it of any adventure and turns the moment into something the reader endures. The narrator’s decision to walk away rather than finish the job marks his failure as complete.
- 7
The verdict afterwards
Local people come to cut up the carcass, and within hours it has been almost entirely taken for meat. The owner is angry but has no legal remedy, and the officer notes that the law was on his side, since a dangerous elephant may be destroyed when its handler cannot control it. The Europeans split by age: the older men back him, while the younger ones count the elephant’s loss as the greater one. He closes with a confession that the laborer’s death came as a relief because it gave him legal cover, and with the private admission that fear of public humiliation was his whole reason for firing, a motive he suspects nobody else noticed.
Why it mattersStacking the public justifications first and the private motive last exposes the distance between them. The younger men’s remark, offered as criticism, shows the value system the essay is really describing.
Rhetorical choices what the writer does, and why it works
First-person confession
In the opening scene the narrator reports his own rage at the people who jeer at him in the same passage where he says the empire is wrong. Admitting the ugly feeling before making any argument builds credibility with a reader who might otherwise dismiss the essay as posturing, and it prepares the harsher admission at the end.
Understatement
The discovery of the dead man and the description of the animal’s slow death are both delivered in a flat, procedural voice, with attention to ground conditions, angles and cartridges. The gap between the calm register and what is being described does the emotional work, so Orwell never has to ask the reader to feel anything.
Juxtaposition
In the paddy field section the animal grazing peacefully stands next to a crowd in a holiday mood, and both stand next to the trampled body from the section before. Setting the three against each other shows that the killing answers a social demand rather than a physical danger.
Extended metaphor of performance
At the moment of decision the officer describes himself as an actor in front of an audience, keeping up the manner expected of a ruler while the crowd decides what he will do. The metaphor converts a claim about political systems into something the reader can picture, and it explains why a man with a rifle can be the least free person present.
Situational irony
The only person with a weapon is compelled into an act he opposes by the very people he is supposed to control, and the law he invokes afterward rests on the death of a man he never protected. The irony runs through the paddy field section and the closing section, and it carries the argument without Orwell having to state it twice.
Withheld motive
The general claim about power arrives before the shot, but the narrator’s own reason for firing is held back until the final sentence, after the law, the owner and the opinions of the other Europeans have been dealt with. Withholding the motive until everything public has been settled forces the reader to weigh the private reason against all the official ones.
People & audiences
The narrator
Writer and speaker
A young British sub-divisional police officer in Moulmein, unnamed in the essay, whose posting matches Orwell’s own service in the Indian Imperial Police. He opposes the empire in private and enforces it in public, and he tells the story against himself.
The Burmese crowd
The audience inside the essay
About two thousand townspeople who follow the officer once the elephant rifle appears. They want the spectacle and the meat, and their expectation, not their force, is what decides the elephant’s death.
The dead laborer
The man killed before the shooting
An Indian worker trampled by the elephant and found face down in the mud. He is never named, and the essay’s final section turns his death into a legal convenience for the narrator and an accounting problem for the other Europeans.
The elephant’s owner
The injured party with no remedy
The man who lost a valuable working animal. Orwell notes that his anger had no legal outlet, which shows in one line how far the protections of law extended in a colony.
The European community
The narrator’s peers and critics
The other British residents of the district, who split over the shooting. The older men approve; the younger ones treat the lost elephant as more regrettable than the man it killed.
Readers of New Writing
Wider audience
British readers of a new literary magazine, mostly on the political left and mostly without firsthand knowledge of Burma. They are the people Orwell expects to accept his conclusion once he has supplied the scene.
Big ideas in Shooting an Elephant
What ruling does to the ruler
The essay’s argument is that the empire deforms the people who administer it, not only the people it governs. The officer is angry, ashamed and unfree, and none of that is separable from the uniform he wears.
Authority as performance
Orwell presents imperial power as a role that has to be acted every day in front of an audience. Once the audience is watching, the actor’s private judgment counts for nothing, and dread of mockery decides the outcome.
Complicity
The narrator knows the system is wrong and keeps serving it, and he is honest about the comfort that gives him. His relief that the law covered him is the essay’s sharpest self-accusation.
Who pays
A man is trampled, an elephant dies slowly, and an owner loses his livelihood, while the officer loses only his self-respect. The essay keeps the accounting visible so that its claim about the ruler never crowds out the costs borne by others.
Law as cover
The killing was legal, and Orwell says so plainly. The point of the closing section is that legality settled the question in public while settling nothing about why he fired.
Key images
The elephant
A tame working animal, expensive and useful, calm again by the time it is killed. It stands for the practical workings of a colony and for the waste that follows when a decision is made to satisfy an audience.
The elephant rifle
Borrowed rather than owned, the heavy rifle is what turns a policeman into a spectacle. The crowd appears when the gun does, which is the essay’s quiet way of saying that the weapon creates the obligation to use it.
The role of the official
The bearing a colonial officer is expected to keep up in front of a crowd. It stands for every rule of behavior a ruler has to obey in order to go on looking like one.
Repeated words and ideas
Being watched. Eyes are on the narrator throughout: on the football field, in the street, and in the paddy field. The pressure of watching is what the essay substitutes for the threat of violence.
Laughter. The crowd laughs when he is tripped, and the fear of being laughed at is the reason he gives for firing. Ridicule, not rebellion, is the force that governs the governor.
Waste. A useful animal destroyed, cartridges emptied into a body that will not die, a carcass carved up within hours. The repeated sense of things spent for nothing supports the argument that the whole arrangement is pointless.
Tensions and counterarguments
Counterargument. The obvious defense is that the elephant had killed a man and the law permitted the shooting. Orwell grants that defense in full and then shows that it had nothing to do with why he pulled the trigger.
Ideals vs. practice. The narrator believes the empire is wrong and enforces it every working day. The essay refuses to resolve that contradiction, and presents it as the normal condition of the people who staffed the system.
Authority vs. dependence. The officer appears to be in command of the situation and is in fact driven by the expectations of the crowd. The reversal of who is leading whom is the structural argument of the piece.
The conclusion of Shooting an Elephant, explained
The ending arrives in two stages, and the order matters. First the animal takes a long time to die. The narrator fires everything he has into it, gives up, and leaves with the animal still alive, hearing afterward that it lingered for about thirty minutes. That failure is deliberate on Orwell’s part. A man who has just described himself as the figure of authority is shown unable to finish the act that authority required of him.
Then the public accounting begins. Local people carve up the carcass within hours. The owner is angry, but the law offers him no route. The killing is judged legal, since a dangerous elephant may be destroyed when its handler cannot control it. The Europeans of the district divide, with the older men approving and the younger ones treating the lost elephant as more regrettable than the Indian laborer it killed. Orwell lets that last remark stand without comment, and it exposes the scale of values the essay has been describing all along.
The final admission is saved for the end. The narrator confesses that the laborer’s death came as a relief because it gave him legal cover, and that his real motive, which he suspects nobody else noticed, was fear of public humiliation. Ending on motive rather than on law sets two accounts of the same act side by side, the official one and the true one. The gap between them is the argument of the essay, and Orwell trusts the reader to close it without help.
Common misreadings
MythThe essay is a straightforward memoir of something that happened to Orwell.
ActuallyOrwell’s service in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma from 1922 to 1927 is documented, but the shooting itself is not, and biographers disagree about how much of the piece is reporting. Anthologies sometimes print it among his fiction. The argument works either way, because it depends on the pressure of the scene rather than on a date and a record.
MythThe officer shoots because the elephant is still dangerous.
ActuallyBy the time he reaches the paddy field the animal is grazing quietly and its fit appears to be passing. He says plainly that there is no need to shoot it, and the essay treats the danger as a legal justification found afterward rather than a reason at the time.
MythOrwell claims the ruler suffers more than the ruled.
ActuallyHe claims that the ruler loses his freedom too, which is not the same as claiming he suffers most. The essay’s casualties are an Indian laborer, an elephant and an owner with no legal remedy, and Orwell keeps all three in view while making his point about the man with the rifle.
AP practice a rhetorical analysis prompt in the exam's style
In 1936 George Orwell published an account, narrated by a colonial police officer in Burma, of a morning when a working elephant broke loose and was found to have killed a man. How much of it is memoir is disputed. The narrative builds toward a claim about who actually holds power under imperial rule. Read the essay carefully, then write an essay that analyzes the rhetorical choices Orwell makes to convey his view of what imperial rule does to the people who enforce it.
What a strong response notices
- The opening scene, where the narrator reports the hostility he met daily and admits both his opposition to the empire and his anger at the people mocking him, which establishes credibility before any claim is made.
- The flat, procedural voice of the sections that report the wrecked bazaar and the dead laborer, which keeps the register low so that the later reflection carries weight.
- The paddy field scene, where a calm and valuable animal is set beside an excited crowd, so the reader sees that nothing in the situation requires a death.
- The reflection just before the shot, where the officer describes himself as an actor in a role the audience has written, turning one incident into a general claim about imperial power.
- The closing sections, which put the law, the owner’s helplessness and the disagreement among the Europeans before the narrator’s private reason for firing, so that the official account and the true one sit side by side.
Practice prompt written by StoryBites, not taken from a College Board exam. See the AP Language free-response guide for how answers are scored.
Test yourself
1. What is the narrator’s position at the start of the essay?
He identifies himself at the start as the sub-divisional police officer of Moulmein, a town in Lower Burma where local people resented him bitterly.
2. What is the elephant doing when the officer finds it in the paddy field?
The animal is grazing and ignoring the crowd, which is why the narrator is sure there is no need to shoot it.
3. According to the essay’s last sentence, why does the officer fire?
The closing admission is that fear of public humiliation was his only motive, one he suspects nobody else noticed.
4. What legal cover does the narrator say he had?
He notes that the law allowed the killing of an elephant that had turned dangerous and was beyond its handler’s control, and he admits he was glad of the dead man because of it.
5. How do the local Europeans react afterward?
The final section reports that opinion divided by age, and the younger men’s objection valued the elephant above the Indian worker it had killed.
Flashcards flip, self-grade, and the deck remembers what you know
Nice work.
George Orwell worked as a policeman for the British government in Burma in the 1920s. Many people there disliked him because he worked for the empire, and he had started to think the empire was wrong. One day a work elephant broke loose, wrecked part of a market and killed a man. In the essay he describes borrowing a big rifle, and a huge crowd following him to watch. When the narrator finds the elephant it has calmed down and is eating grass, so he does not want to kill it. He shoots it anyway because the crowd expects it and he does not want them to laugh at him. Orwell says that proves a ruler in a colony is not really free either, because he has to keep acting the part. Nobody knows for certain whether the shooting really happened, but the point of the essay does not depend on it.
Compare & connect
Heart of Darkness
Conrad also sends a European agent into a colonial system and shows it working on him rather than on the people he was sent to manage. Both writers use one man’s collapse to describe an institution.
1984
The later novel develops the same idea about power as performance and about officials who enforce a system they cannot believe. Reading them together shows how early Orwell arrived at it.
Civil Disobedience
Thoreau argues that a citizen must refuse to serve an unjust government. Orwell’s narrator is a man who does not refuse, so the two texts sit on opposite sides of the same question.
Discussion and essay prompts:
💬 Discussion questions
- What is the main argument of Shooting an Elephant
- Why does the narrator shoot the elephant in Orwell’s essay
- What does Shooting an Elephant say about imperialism
- How does Shooting an Elephant explore the theme of what ruling does to the ruler?
- How does Shooting an Elephant explore the theme of authority as performance?
- What is the central conflict in Shooting an Elephant, and how does it shape the ending?
✎ Essay prompts
- Analyze how George Orwell develops the theme of what ruling does to the ruler in Shooting an Elephant. Support your argument with specific evidence from the text.
- Examine the significance of the elephant in Shooting an Elephant. What does it represent, and how does it deepen the work’s meaning?
- How does George Orwell use first-person confession to shape the reader’s experience of Shooting an Elephant?
- Some readers assume that the essay is a straightforward memoir of something that happened to Orwell. Argue for or against this interpretation, using evidence from the text.
Key questions students ask
- What is the main argument of Shooting an Elephant
- Why does the narrator shoot the elephant in Orwell’s essay
- What does Shooting an Elephant say about imperialism
- Is Shooting an Elephant a true story
- What rhetorical devices does Orwell use in Shooting an Elephant
- What does the elephant symbolize in Orwell’s essay
Analysis is original StoryBites commentary. The essay (1936) is under copyright in the United States, so this guide explains it in our own words and does not reproduce or quote it.