Powerful Laughter

Far from feeling sadness at the 'black dravidian coolie['s]' death, the elephant's demise, or the police officer's gross misjudgment, I found "Shooting an Elephant" rather funny. Sardonic humour seems to delicately lace the text, affording a story that is more ridiculous than appalling.

Consider the shooting of the elephant. The first shot is anti-climatic, with neither the 'bang' nor 'kick' heard or felt, and the 'knocking down' of the elephant taking 'five seconds'. The elephant is personified as a 'senil[e]' old person 'sagg[ing] flabbily' and 'slobber[ing]', evoking images directly in opposition to concepts of aging gracefully. This denies the elephant a grand, tragic death, but instead turns the affair into a tragicomedy. In addition, laughs are extended to the bumbling police officer whose idiocy is behind this botched shooting. By failing repeatedly to shoot fatally, the officer's attempts to 'struggle' against being 'laughed at' by the crowd are, ironically, futile. Worse, readers are added to the laughing crowd.

What then is the significance of the employment of sardonic humour? Here, Orwell departs from Conrad's formal and serious tone in "Heart of Darkness" where 'the horror' of the imperialist enterprise is revealed as something obviously and overtly terrible. Instead, Orwell's use of sinister comedy allows us to laugh at it in a shifty fashion, and this goes further in critiquing imperialism. Our scornful laughter is more powerful than merely agreeing with 'the horror' in Conrad's text- laughing implicates us in the matter, forcing our subscription and attestation to colonialism's macabre face. The colonial enterprise is then fiercely critiqued for its capitalization on incidental 'pretext[s]' that make them 'legally in the right', while really, all that is craved for is 'solely [the] avoid[ance] of looking a fool'. This, being exposed covertly through the tragicomedic mode, is to me a stronger statement.

(299 Words)