Shooting the Elephant

"I marched down the hill, looking and feeling a fool, with the rifle over my shoulder and an ever-growing army of people jostling at my heels" (Orwell 3). In George Orwell's story, Shooting the Elephant, the narrator is faced with a strenuous decision that is against a somewhat formidable foe. The foe is not some lunatic of a man, but a raging elephant. The elephant has been causing amok in the town. The narrator, who is also a police officer, is called down to investigate the havoc that is being caused. Upon hearing about the troubles the elephant had caused the Burmese population and seeing for himself what the elephant has done, he is faced with a choice; whether he should shoot the elephant. Orwell is motivated to commit to the choice he made in the story because the crowd of angry Burmese people causes him to feel guilty if he does not shoot the elephant. He is strongly affected after shooting the elephant with feelings of guilt and shame while the Burmese are not affected with such feelings whatsoever. The character was motivated to shoot the elephant because the crowds made him feel he had to. It is well known that Orwell never felt the urge that shooting the elephant was justice, but he had to do it. Orwell was motivated to shoot the elephant because the elephant did commit a crime and just as if a human committed a crime, they must be punished. Orwell imagines the coolie Indians' dead body lying in the mud with the expression of pure terror and shock. The jeering of the of the crowd of people also helps makes up his mind. He does not want the people to see him as a weak. He concludes that "...the sole thought in [his] mind was that if anything went wrong those two thousand Burmese would see [him] pursued, caught, trampled on, and reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up on the hill" (Orwell 5). Orwell wants to prove to the Burmese that he can do his job and people can trust him to get important tasks done. Orwell was affected in