Inability to Shoot the Symbol

Since numerous classmates have talked about Chatterjee, I am going to focus on something slightly more different: the elephant in Orwell’s text.

The elephant, in a typically modernist way, represents the unknowability of things. No one in the text is able to pin down the exact whereabouts of the elephant: “some of the people said that the elephant had gone in one direction, some said that he had gone in another, some professed not even to have heard of any elephant” (3). Just as Forster’s India eludes understanding and comprehension, so too does Orwell’s elephant.

Certainly, it is difficult to pin Orwell’s elephant down because its “madness” leads to chaos and confusion. Orwell’s elephant leaves a trail of devastating destruction behind, destroying “someone’s bamboo hut, [killing] a cow, and [raiding] some fruit-stalls and [devouring] the stock,” as well as inflicting violences upon “the municipal rubbish van” (2). Orwell’s elephant, in other words, muddles up colonial order and organization, in a way that is similar to how Forster, through Fielding, perceives India as “a muddle” (63).

At the end of Orwell’s text, there is no one single unitary perspective on the elephant. As the narrator emphasizes, “among the Europeans, opinion was divided” (8): “the older men said [the narrator] was right [while] the younger man said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie” (8). Instead of having some one come up with a single justification for killing the elephant, the narrator tells us that “there were endless discussions about the shooting of the elephant” (8); the implication being that the elephant cannot be seen from one angle but is presented from multiple perspectives.

The elephant thus becomes a modernist symbol, very much like the lighthouse in Virginia Woolf’s text and the “Buddha” symbols in Katherine Mansfield’s short stories.

(300 words)