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Shooting an Elephant

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Submitted By vkreiberg
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In one’s youth there are many factors which influence you and help you become the person you are going to be. In the teenage years one is often split or in a conflict with oneself. If you add a little responsibility to that the outcome can be either positive and help you become a more together person, or it can be fatal and result in poor decisions and complicated situations. That extra responsibility can come in many different varieties, for example by taking on the role as a mother for your younger siblings because of absent parents, or as in this story being given the authority of a town and licence to kill when you don’t feel old or wise enough for it.

In ”Shooting an Elephant” we have a first person narrator. For instance: “I was hated by large numbers of people. ” The “I” easily gives away our narrator. In the informative text at the beginning of page 1, we are told that the author George Orwell was a police officer in the Indian Imperial police force from 1922 to 1927. The plot in the story indicates that it is his own experiences he has written down. The story is written in past tense, most likely because Orwell is looking back upon his time in Burma, this contributes to the feeling of reading through a diary. Orwell uses everyday language, but he also makes long descriptive sentences I assume that this is the result of him being a writer, because he is trained in drawing his readers in with his lush descriptions. Another trait which makes the story seem like an extract from a diary is the way his sentences are built like a train of thoughts, he tells us about the order of the events, but also the feelings he felt at the time, and how he feels about it now. Take for instance this sentence: “I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it. ”

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