A Panopticon in Reverse

The way in which the narrator in "Shooting An Elephant" is compelled by the colonial native gaze to act out the role expected of him suggests to me a sort of Panopticonism at work: under the public gaze, one is compelled to stay within the confines of prescribed behaviour.  The narrator shoots the elephant merely 'to avoid looking a fool'; he is his own 'policeman', unwilling to let himself buck the colonial narrative.  As the narrator notes, 'when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys'; by constructing the structures of power, the structure itself becomes a constraint on the colonizer's freedom of action.  In this way, the colonial entreprise turns into a faracial performance, one that can only end when the 'white man' abandons the entreprise, and thus leaves the Panopticon that he constructed.

-Yingzhao