Growing Up Woolf

It looks like I'm the first to post this week. I found the chapter, "Jaffna" a bit of a drag to read towards the end. Am I the only one? It starts out interesting enough, but as the memoir progresses Woolf starts transitioning abruptly from one incident to another, leaving me a bit disorientated(and bored, all those acronyms do NOT help),and I was wishing I was reading Roald Dahl's Going Solo instead, indicative of the state of nostalgia I'm currently wallowing in. (aka: I miss my childhood!) But to be fair, this Woolf's not that bad. Okay now on to my post proper:

In "Jaffna", Woolf writes retrospectively about working experience as a civil servant in Ceylon, working hard and efficiently for indolent G.As, doing their jobs for them, improving office effiency etc etc. He recounts his life in the imperialist White society, talking about the White civil servants he met. Interpersed between his accounts are extracts from his correspondence with his Bloomsbury friend, Lytton Strachey.I found most interesting his resemblance to Orwell's Shooting an Elephant, in his "growing" awareness of himself as a "ruler of subject peoples" (111) and the doubts that came along with it, where at the beginning he had been a "very innocent, unconscious imperialist" (25). Like Orwell, he becomes conscious of the dilemma that faces the white imperialist as a "cog" in the imperial machinery through day-to-day incidents with natives. Woolf, in the horse-whip incident, doubts the White imperialist's right to rule in thinking that his "sitting on a horse arrogantly in the main street of their town was as good as a slap in the face" (114). It is ironic that Woolf had disregarded traffic laws in stopping his horse to be this nit-picky, exacting civil servant, pointing out how the natives had encroached on the highway with their property. Woolf becomes aware of this irony which highlights inequities in treatment that White imperialists assume, in order to perpetuate their rule. Similar to Orwell's Shooting, Woolf becomes aware of the White imperialist as "acting" on the "stage, scenery, backcloth" that was imperialism. What Woolf seems to be projecting is the implication of being an individual within a larger organisation or machinery. In Woolf's bid to be a good civil servant, an "effective cog" so to speak, he assumes a stance that compromises fair, un-rascist treatment of the natives, thus perpetuating their dominance.
(295)