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To Kill An Elephant Rhetorical Analysis

Satisfactory Essays

Morgan Di Donato
English II Honors
Mrs. Rollin
26 August 2015
Partial Essay Killing animals is one of the most selfish things you could possibly do. It requires crazy mentality, and awful characteristics. Orwell is a cheerless policeman who lives in mental solitude. He is unattended with his thinking since he can not share his idea that “imperialism was an evil thing” with his fellow citizens. Orwell sees the British rule as “an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down...upon the will of prostrate peoples” because he is an eyewitness of the cruel confinement and beatings that they use to invoke their force. Throughout the story, an innocent chain of events makes Orwell choose between two unsatisfactory options. When he goes to check a report that a tame elephant that had gone “must” has broken loose, Orwell takes a medium caliber rifle which is “much too small to kill an elephant, but I thought the noise might be useful in terrorem.” When he finds out a coolie had been killed by the elephant, Orwell trades his rifle for a bigger gun just for self-defense. This ends up being a crucial mistake because now the Burmese think, now that he has an elephant gun, he has decided to kill the elephant. Orwell in fact, “did not in the least want to shoot him” but …show more content…

In “Shooting an Elephant”, the act of shooting the animal symbolizes cowardness because Orwell did it because he wouldn’t be laughed at, he

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