George Orwell's Autobiographical Essay 'Shooting An Elephant'

The non-literary text I have chosen is George Orwell's autobiographical essay, 'Shooting an Elephant', published in 1936 by the literary magazine ‘New Writing’ and broadcast by the BBC Home Service on 12 October 1948, in which his subjective, first-person narrative tells a story through its prose with a very strong political purpose. Orwell is called upon to shoot a hostile elephant whilst working as a police officer in Burma. Orwell demonstrates social pressure through the hierarchical structure of status, in this essentially extended metaphor whereby the elephant serves as a symbol of colonialism and, at the moment of its defeat, it is seen as an even more powerful symbol of the irrational savagery of colonialism. This extract was chosen to show how the narrator goes against his better judgment and is ironically compelled to entrench himself further in barbarism, simply because he feels that propriety dictates him to do so; which Orwell achieves through the differing patterns of figurative language and foreign phrase.
Social pressure could be described as the immediate influence on people by companions, or a person who gets encouraged to follow their peers by adjusting their beliefs, feelings, or
behaviours to correspond to those of the influencing group or individual. More specifically, The Cambridge Dictionary describes it as 'the strong influence of a group, especially of children, on members of that group to behave as everyone else does' (CU: 2018).
'The Good Old Days' (Klee, Dressen, Riess: 1996) projects how Nazi eradication was infamous for social pressure. The Nazi's systematic purge consisted of Jewish people living in Europe, Romani gypsies, people with both physical and mental disabilities, socialists and homosexuals. It is clear that some Germans are culpable for the Holocaust; SS officers and soldiers were easily bribed into the genocide and participated as executioners and wardens. However, a broader statement is harder to make — not all Germans wanted this devastation. Hegi’s novel illustrates this nature of diversity and how systems of segregation can separate a society. The townspeople of Burgdorf, are influenced by ideas about community solidarity and outsider status, and the plot identifies the distinct human impulses and choices at work when multiple people live in close proximity over decades, particularly enduring global conflict twice in their lives. When bringing the theory of social pressure into the Holocaust, German liability is even harder to decide. I would argue that the alliance of authority and peer pressure was a powerful coercive tool. Possibly the most critical reason so few individuals separated themselves from the ideology of others was peer pressure — for example, some people, such as soldiers or policemen, did not want to “lose face" in front of their associates. Many claimed that it was greater to murder than to immediately be a coward ('Reserve Police Battalion 101': 1992). This almost directly mirrors the circumstances and theories which George Orwell followed whilst serving as a police officer in Burma.
Copious studies have been launched to demonstrate the processes in which we avoid being declined by, and strive to conform to, a social group.
For example; one study was led to investigate “the multiple reasons that university students engage in the unhealthy practice of playing drinking games”. The demand to be acknowledged and accepted proved to be a prime reason for participating in this precarious behaviour; it seems that our urge for group acceptance is so influential that we potentially disregard others and our own well-being, solely to be recognised as one of the crowd (Johnson & Sheets: 2004). This exposes a striking similarity to Orwell's situation of social pressure in his essay, perhaps this source offers some psychology behind the cause of the
occurrences.
Orwell is a scrupulous writer, whose text is always rich in language and techniques as he often refers back to his '12 Writing Tips' ('Politics and the English Language': 1946); rules one and five are particularly interesting. Rule one calls to never use a metaphor, simile, or another figure of speech which 'you are used to seeing in print' and rule five suggests you must 'never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent'. Hegi's is a more driven narrative, and you have to really get into the text before you begin to see figurative language and linguistic techniques. With Orwell's, however, there is the sense he didn't want to be ambiguous in any way, hence the text is rich but clear and despite being the non-fiction text, George Orwell's seems to have a higher literariness. This being said, he breaks these rules continuously throughout the 'Shooting an Elephant' essay, perhaps to avoid saying 'anything outright barbarous' (Rule 6, 'Politics and the English Language': 1946).
Metaphors make overt connections, presented either directly or indirectly, by the transferring of attributes from one notion or thing to another in order for our understanding of one concept to be better enhanced. Both Orwell and Hegi use metaphor; not only to make their description of places, people and events more interesting and engaging but also as a structural frame through the utilisation of extended metaphor. ‘Shooting an Elephant’ is full of figurative language and crafted metaphors such as ‘caverns of pale pink throat’ to make descriptions of places, people and events more interesting and engaging, but the text as a whole also utilises metaphor as a structural frame. The elephant serves as a symbol of colonialism through the extended metaphor, and at the moment of the elephant’s defeat it only becomes a more powerful symbol of the irrational savagery of colonialism.