Glorious?

By telling the story of a small number of English expatriates living in Burma, far from major centers of power and commerce, Orwell highlights the consequences of believing and claiming that an individual's actions must conform to common communal thought rather than to the individual's mind.

In the case of colonial Burma, the central false premise is that there's any difference between black and white. Both oppressor and oppressed believe implicitly that the English are more worthy, more capable, more real than then Burmese or Indians. U Po Kyin is described as having "grasped that his own people were no match for this race of giants".

John Flory must count as the hero of the piece, though deeply flawed. A factor for a teak-wood company, he retreated to Burma in the face of an inability to come to terms with English society. Disfigured by a birthmark on one cheek, and deeply scarred by the complete social rejection this minor blemish produced in the England of his boyhood and youth, he hides in this most distant outpost of the Empire, running a lumber camp and coming into the town of Kyauktada when he can, spending his evenings at the local European Club, "playing bridge and getting three parts drunk”, hardly a glamourous picture for a white person in a colonized landscape. Flory is a good man, but his lack of self-esteem and self-confidence make him weak in the face of the enormous social pressures exerted by the tiny community of Europeans, from which he is profoundly alienated. To some extent, he is doubly alienated and stifled in this novel- by the colonized as well as his own people, placing him in a liminality that is in some ways similar to the narrator in Shooting the Elephant- a position that is enticingly glorious yet unfriendly.

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