The Inheritance Of Tools Analysis

Core values differ in every individual based on people’s intrinsic morals and beliefs more than any universal principle. Some hold religion above education or love above logic or truth above all else, all depending on the ideologies an individual holds close. However, these values change and reconfigure with every defining experience and crucial revelation that allow individuals to re-evaluate their consciences. Authors George Orwell and Scott Russell Sanders are no stranger to this concept in their essays “Shooting An Elephant” and “The Inheritance of Tools” respectively, but rather both authors embrace the idea of certain revelations being impactful enough to alter essential values. Orwell manifests such a realization as he recounts an epiphany
Throughout the essay Sanders recalls countless memories associated with the tools that have been passed down among generations in his family. With each memory an underlying attribute about the previous owner comes forward, such as when Sanders explains how the tools remind him of his father and grandfather’s strength: “The grain in the hickory is crooked and knotty, and therefore tough, hard to split, like the grain in the two men who owned this hammer before me” (332). The analogy of the tough wood to the tough men in his family connects the attributes a good father must have to the qualities the sturdy and reliable tools possessed. In doing so, the analogy also furthers the understanding Sanders has of why his father used the tools to teach Sanders about the attributes of a good man and how the same qualities he admired in the tools as a child came to life in generations of Sanders men as well. After making this comparison, Sanders comes to the epiphany that he wants to have the same solid fatherly role in his children's’ lives that his own father did. Sanders regards these tools as ones he can also use in the process of raising his children, and he realizes his children should grow to be the same respectable adults that past
From the very beginning of Orwell’s essay he makes it clear that the feeling of the natives towards him is one of hatred fueled by a popular anti-European sentiment. Yet instead of prescribing this hatred as a purely negative experience, Orwell instead touches on the sense of importance it likewise gave him: “I was hated by a large number of people - the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen” (276). By incorporating this qualifier, Orwell explains not only that this feeling of importance stemmed from what the natives believed but he also reveals that this was the only time in his life that he experienced a sense of importance at all. In this way, Orwell’s use of the qualifier establishes his position as a usually insignificant “everyman” and discloses the reasoning for his eventual decision to shoot the elephant. As an individual who has never before felt like a significant player in any situation, Orwell’s role as the man to wield the gun capable of liberating the natives’ from the elephant’s terror was a role that he felt he needed to act upon overarchingly because it was something he had never faced before. He feared that if he did not appease the natives and avoid humiliation this first time he was