Irony in Shooting an Elephant

Orwell’s story is refreshingly ironic in its critique of British colonialism. Instead of cataloguing the cruel injustices meted by the British colonizer on the colonized in a run-of-the-mill fashion, it critiques colonialism by revealing how colonialism ironically inhibits the freedom of the colonizer. The first-person narrator experiences this revelation when he was assigned to resolve the case of the momentarily deranged elephant. Knowing that the madness was temporary, the narrator was reluctant to shoot despite possessing the “legal right” and “sufficient pretext” to do so due to the animal’s tragic killing of an Indian coolie. When the narrator assesses his visceral/emotional response towards killing, he comes to the conclusion that he does not in the “least want to shoot [the elephant].” Personifying and humanizing the elephant as grazing with a “preoccupied grandmotherly air”, he rationalizes about the moral grounds for killing and finds it wanting, knowing “with perfect certainty that [he] ought not to shoot” as “the elephant looked no more dangerous than a cow.” The act possesses to him, the gravity of “murder.” Nonetheless, his sovereignty to act according to his own free will and values are inhibited by the oppressive premises of colonialism, which imposes the “conventionalized figure of the sahib” that the “natives expect” the narrator to conform to. Since the justification of colonialism is contingent upon the British colonizer’s self-imposed myth of the courageous, strong and “resolute” sahib who “knows his own mind”, and “do definite things”, the narrator does not want to “look like a cowardly and indecisive fool” in front of the natives. To “feebly” do nothing would be a laughable spectacle inviting mockery and cries of hypocrisy from the natives as it undermines the model image of the sahib that affirms British authority. Thus, the colonizer is ironically trapped and disempowered by his own myth. He realizes that “the moment the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom he destroys.” The colonizer’s superiority is an illusion. Although “seemingly the leading actor of the piece”, he is in reality only an absurd puppet” ironically subjugated by the very mechanisms that enables his oppression of the natives.