Formalistic Criticism of George Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant"

The story is written in chronological order, but it started with a flashbacking scene of the main character to where the setting is placed, which is in Moulmein, in lower Burma. The author used the first-person point of view, and the character was not named, other than describing it as a white sub-divisional police officer of the town.

In the first paragraph, the author described the tension between European people and the native people in Moulmein. The second paragraph shows how the character hated his job, and so he planned to get out of it. He was on the side of the Burmese, even though he worked in the British Empire.  Moving forward, the character started to retell the incident that he was ashamed of and somehow gave him a glimpse of the nature of imperialism. He received a report from the co-police that an elephant is ravaging the bazaar, and so he responded with his rifle, an old 44 Winchester, to protect himself but not to kill the elephant.  The elephant is tame, but it would attack when obliged to. The Burmese population had no weapons and was quite helpless against it. In this part, the elephant symbolizes the Burmese people. It would attack if necessary, but its main purpose is to work and act as a huge and costly piece of machinery. Then later, he saw a dead man, and so he borrowed an elephant rifle. After a few minutes, he had the rifle and five cartridges, and the people started to put their attention to him, knowing that the elephant was going to be shot.

 It shows how people are more interested in killings than ravaging their homes because for the English crowd- it is fun since they would have meat. Rifle symbolizes the British empire- how they made fun of the Burmese and how interesting for them to kill to benefit themselves. At this part, the character started to be uncomfortable with the pressures he received from the crowd. He doesn’t have any intention to kill the elephant, but it was expected for him to do so- as an officer. 

The conflict of the story is Man (or person) vs. self, wherein the character had a struggle between fulfilling his role or follow what he thinks is right or his principle. Then in the latter part of the story, he fulfilled his role- to kill the elephant. He shot the elephant multiple times, and it was late for him to realize that it would take half an hour for the elephant to die. He has done it to impress the crowd. The last part highlighted the theme of the story, which is “to impress people is to ignore your principle.”