George Orwell's essay, "On Shooting an Elephant,"
illuminates the paradox of imperialsim. For, as he
writes,
When
the white man turns tyrant, it is his own freedom that he
destroys.
As Orwell relates
the incident involving an elephant about which he is called upon to shoot because it had
broken its chain and caused havoc. The elephant now has settled down and is no longer
in proximity of the area. But, it is witnessed that the elephant has killed a man, so
Orwell calls for an elephant rifle and cartridges. As he prepares to deal with the
situation, Orwell realizes that he is not thinking
particularly of my own skin, only of the
watchful yellow faces behind...The sole thought in my mind was that if anything went
wrong those two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught, trampled on, and reduced
to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill....That would never
do.
With all the Burmese
watching him, Orwell feels that as a representative of the colonial government, he must
act as such and kill the elephant; that is, in his role as imperialist, he has forfeited
his own freedom and must act tyrannically. As the Burmese watch him, Orwell even grows
to disdain them for their presence which forces him to the action of killing the
elephant. After he does shoot the elephant, Orwell wonders whether any of the others
"grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool." This is the paradox of
imperialism.
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