Analysis on Shooting an Elephant

A British officer stationed at Moulmein, Burma, "shooting an Elephant" is an essay which conveys the wrongs of New Imperialism, the intense anti-European feelings in the East, and on a more psychological level: the illustration of social conformity in regards to acting in a manner "deemed" normal by Burma's post-imperialized social majority. Our narrator imparts one very significant event in his career as a Imperial police, which was shooting an elephant for the sake of not seeming like a "fool." After receiving a message about a "must" elephant rampaging the village area, the narrator proceeds in a journey to search for the mammoth beast. On the first leg of the search he finds a trampled Coolie, a death which gives him judicial and possibly moral justifications in killing the beastly Elephant. Subsequent to calling for a rifle the narrator encounters the Elephant in a rice paddy, he is not alone, the eyes of an imperialized culture are intently glaring at his confrontation. The "must" of the elephant is gone but the officer has gone too far in his attempt to tame the beast. Now the voices of thousands shouted in joyful anticipation. Now the eyes of thousands looked with interest. Now two thousand wills irresistibly pressed him to action. The slaughter of the elephant was unnecessary but the pre-established European presence of a potentate like class of individuals had already trapped him into the only feasible course of action, the execution of the elephant. Soon enough the magnificently ancient beast was put to a painfully agonizing indecent sleep. As the crowd shouted in joy, the officer had fulfilled the stereotypical, expectations in Burma's society towards the oppressive westerners, in that instant the oppressor had indeed become the oppressed, "And it was at this moment as I stood with the, rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East." Intrinsically the quote and by extension, the essay speaks of the distastefully ill nature of imperialism and its psychologically metaphorical entrapment of the westerners by conforming and growing to fit the" mask" of preconceived stereotypical notions.