Shooting a man shooting an elephant

‘Shooting an elephant’ sounds very much like shooting a film called, ‘An Elephant’. At one point, the narrator is even described to have “la[in] down on the road to get a better aim”, a position which you can imagine some photographer out in Africa getting into. Conveniently, the rifle is depicted like it is a long range camera—“a beautiful German thing with cross-hair sights”. The point I am perhaps trying to raise here is the idea of theatrics, of the spectacle, of performance. And the elephant certainly looks like it is on display, while the narrator clearly is as well.
I would go so far as to draw a parallel between both the elephant and the narrator—in the same way that the elephant is this huge being, the narrator is an agent of this other huge entity called the British Empire. (It helps that elephants are grey, because that’s the colour of institutions in my mind’s eye: stony grey walls, and high pillars which kind of look like the elephant’s four thick legs too eh?) Both elephant and empire are running amok, or going haywire—“the dirty work of Empire”—and both are literally and figuratively going down—“the British Empire is dying”. Indeed, in the same way the crowds rose against the elephant, they will rise against the flailing empire.
The difference between the two is that unlike the narrator, the elephant doesn’t have anything to prove. Like someone put it, an elephant is an elephant is an elephant. The white man, on the other hand, is on display because he is trying to prove his whiteness. The camera, or the stage, then turns on him here because the one being shot/filmed is really the white man. And the crowds are watching.

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