Friday, August 2, 2013

In "Shooting an Elephant," Orwell recounts his days serving as a police officer in colonial Burma. Which statement would accurately describe his feelings at the time?

There are several statements you might choose from to demonstrate how Orwell felt about his time as a police officer in colonial Burma. For example,

In the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves.

This first quotation is an example of the anti-European hostility which the Burmese felt for men like Orwell, who they saw as symbols and enforcers of an unwanted colonial regime. The implication of this quotation is that the "sneering" and "hoot(ing)" was ubiquitous and unavoidable. Orwell acknowledges that it "got badly on (his) nerves," and as one reads on, this comes to seem like something of an understatement.
A little later in the text Orwell says that he found the hostility "perplexing and unsettling," all the more so because he "secretly of course . . . was all for the Burmese and against their oppressors." In other words, the open hostility of the Burmese was made worse by the fact that it echoed and exacerbated his own self-loathing. He understood and empathized with the anti-European feeling and "hated" the "dirty work of Empire" that he was a symbol of. He says that this "dirty work" oppressed him with "an intolerable sense of guilt." He perhaps found the hostility "perplexing" because it was directed against something, namely his police officer's uniform and the colonial regime, which he himself had no pride in and was also hostile to.
Although Orwell loathed the job he was there to do, he also admits to sometimes having felt ambivalent about his situation. He says that he felt as if he were

stuck between [his] hatred of the empire [he] served and [his] rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make [his] job impossible.

Orwell also says that he "thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down . . . upon the will of prostrate peoples," but at the same time he felt it would be "the greatest joy to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts."
Orwell felt, somewhat paradoxically, as if he were trapped. On the one hand, he understood and strongly empathized with the anti-European feelings of the Burmese, directed as they were against a regime which he knew was tyrannical. But on the other hand, he still despised the way many of the people in Burma treated him, even though he understood that he wore the uniform of the regime. This implicitly led to a contradiction which Orwell found difficult to reconcile. He couldn't quite accept that he was representative of the regime he and the Burmese despised so much, and, therefore, could never understand the hostility enough not to be angered by it.

No comments:

Post a Comment

What is the theme of the chapter Lead?

Primo Levi's complex probing of the Holocaust, including his survival of Auschwitz and pre- and post-war life, is organized around indiv...