"Shooting and Elephant"-George Orwell Rhetorical Analysis

Throughout the period after Orwell shot the elephant and when he wrote his essay upon the subject, he achieved a level of wisdom and scholarly knowledge that ultimately made this essay possible. He implies many different views of conflicts that he displayed throughout the essay, which added a very conflicted tone to the essay. The purpose of this essay was to imply different conflicted views of events that happened in that sequence of time, which made the essay very appeasing to the reader. Orwell, very importantly, covers his views on imperialism, which he is most conflicted about because of reasons that he displays within the essay. All throughout the essay, orwell repeatedly displays this idea of conflicted interests and principles in the Burmese society and his own life, and very commonly how imperialism affects either of two conflicts in Orwell’s experience. Imperialism, in the mind of Orwell, has both positive and negative effects for himself. Positively, he absolutely hates the Burmese people that he is living amongst. Negatively, imperialism has a disastrous toll on the people that are being occupied by a foreign country. For example, in the second paragraph it displays, “The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lockups, the grey, cowed faces of the long­term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged with bamboos ­ all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt.” As you can see in this segment of his essay, Orwell hates the effects that imperialism has on the people of Burma, morally speaking. But on the other hand, he despises the Burmese people at the same time, for example, “All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil­spirited beasts who tried to make my job impossible.” This is just one mere example of Orwell’s many conflicts that go on throughout the essay, for example, the conflicts