No sides worth taking

Orwell seems to have achieved the effect of resisting the reader’s sympathy with either side of the colonial divide in “Shooting an Elephant”. I say this because the narrator speaks from a very personal point of view, and harbours disdain for both the Empire and the natives. Thus it is difficult for readers to treat him as an allegory for the collective Empire, or as the embodiment of sympathy towards the natives.

The narrator exposes the Empire as mercantile and unfeeling: the elephant is comparable to “machinery”. Also, colonial rule seems to have no real function other than to keep up the “mask” of colonial rule. The colonist then becomes “a sort of hollow, posing dummy” and has to “spend his life in trying to impress the ‘natives’...” At the same time, the narrator is also unkind in describing the natives: they are as a “sea of yellow faces above the garish clothes”, demonized (corpses “devilish”) and infantilized (overly excited over a “bit of fun”).

However, these descriptions of colonizer and colonized are not pitted against each other in the manner that other texts we’ve been reading do. There is no significant interaction between the two sides, and the anecdote is focused on the police officer and his personal fear of losing face. All our sympathies as readers are channelled into the elephant, murdered violently and unnecessarily. With so much attention on the elephant, the usual concerns of colonizer-versus-colonized are sidelined. The materialistic, mercantile approach that both sides take to the death of the elephant disallows us to see one as more moral than the other, and Orwell might perhaps be trying to say that there really are no sides worth taking, and colonial rule has been outdated and rendered useless.

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