everyone wants an elephant

I would just like to add on to Christine’s point about the elephant not being a modernist symbol, because I didn’t see it as one either.

While there is a certain sense of ‘unknowability’ suggested by the failure to obtain any definite information about the elephant, it nonetheless remains that the elephant IS eventually located, isolated and killed. There is a consensus that is arrived upon with regard to the elephant: While the elephant starts off as being both an enigmatic and disruptive force, the end of its violent spree coincides with a ‘conquering’ of the enigma as the elephant is no longer presented as being beyond comprehension and knowledge.
The capitalist-imperial mind DOES succeed in inscribing the elephant within its own utilitarian terms. As the narrator describes it in terms of dollar worth: “Alive, the elephant was worth at least a hundred pounds; dead, he would only be worth the value of his tusks, five pounds possibly”. Interestingly, the Burmese perspective also reduces the elephant to a simple object of value – the nutritional value that its meat provides.

This convergence of multiple perspectives into a single one is visualised in how all the Burmese people converge into a single body with a collective gaze directed upon the elephant as a thing to be killed and a source of food. Even the narrator is implicated within this gaze, as he states “The people expected it of me and I had got to do it”. Interesting to me, however, is that it is neither the white man nor the native who succeeds in gaining mastery over the elephant, but a sort of shared will, with the desire of the Burmese coinciding with the ability of the armed, white man.