INSTITUT PERGURUAN GURU KAMPUS TEKNIK

PROGRAM PENSISWAZAHAN GURU (PPG) MOD PENDIDIKAN JARAK JAUH AMBILAN JUN 2011
IJAZAH SARJANA MUDA PERGURUAN DENGAN KEPUJIAN PENDIDIKAN MATEMATIK RENDAH KERJA KURSUS ENGLISH LANGUAGE PROFICIENY ( WAJ 3103 ) NAMA : WONG MOK LAN NO IC : 840624-01-5676 NO MATRIK: IPG/KPT/PPG/2011/MT/W0004/076 KUMPULAN: MATEMATIK 3 PENSYARAH : PUAN EVELYN GNANAM A/P WILLIAM GEORGE

SHOOTING AN ELEPHANT
Shooting an Elephant is a central text in modern British literature and has generated perhaps more criticism than any other comparable short piece. In the politicized atmosphere of contemporary criticism, commentators are especially drawn into debate about whether Orwell apologizes for or condemns imperialism. Left-wing critics see insufficient condemnation; conservative critics point out that it is the narrator, an agent of empire, who explicitly denounces the British presence as pervasively corrupting to both sides. The story is one of the most widely anthologized and studied items of the modern English-language canon. The setting is Burma (present-day Myanmar) in the 1920s, when the country was a province of India. The action takes place in the town of Moulmein in the southern part of the province, called Lower Burma, a rice-growing region on the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea. The Narrator: Young Englishman serving as a police officer in Burma in the 1920s, when Burma was part of British-controlled India. He strongly opposes the oppressive British rule of Burma and the rest of India. At the same time, he resents the ridicule he receives from the natives, who are unaware that he is on their side politically. The narrator's views represent those of the author, George Orwell (the pen name of Eric Blair). Sub-Inspector: Burmese officer who calls the narrator for help after an elephant gets loose in town. Black Dravidian Coolie: Indian laborer from the town of Coringa, India, who is killed by the elephant. A Dravidian is a lower-caste Indian who speaks his own language, Dravidian. Friend of the Narrator: Man who provides the narrator an elephant gun. Police Orderly: Person who fetches an elephant gun for the narrator. Mahout: Owner of the elephant. He becomes very angry after learning that the narrator has killed his elephant. A mahout is a skilled elephant trainer and handler. .......As a British police officer in the hillside town of Moulmein in Lower Burma, the narrator frequently endures jeers from the natives. They do not realize that he, too,

opposes English occupation of Burma. In his position, he sees the misery that imperialism produces. .......The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock -ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged with bamboosall these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt, he says. .......So here he is walking a line between anti-imperialism and "the evil spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible."

.......One morning at the beginning of the rainy season (between June and October), an incident occurs that enlightens him about the motives of imperialism. An elephant is loose in a bazaar in a poor section of town, and a Burmese sub-inspector phones him to come and remedy the situation. The elephant, normally tame, is in must, a state of frenzy brought on by sexual heat. After it had broken its chain and run away, its mahout pursued it in the wrong direction and was now many miles away. So far the elephant had demolished a hut, overturned a garbage van, killed a cow, and eaten produce in the fruit stalls of the bazaar. Because the Burmese have no weapons of their own, the elephant is free to run wild.

.......The narrator gets his .44 Winchester and travels to the site on a pony. The Winchester is not powerful enough to kill an elephant, but the noise it makes can frighten an animal. After the sub-inspector and several Indian constables greet the narrator, he investigates a hubbub at a nearby hut. Around the corner of the hut, he discovers the body of an Indian, a black Dravidian coolie, in mud. Onlookers report that the elephant captured him with its trunk and then ground him down with its foot. His body is a ghastly sightskin torn from his back, head wrenched askew, teeth clenched in agony.

.......A friend of the narrator owns an elephant gun, and the narrator sends a police orderly to fetch it. After he returns with the rifle and five cartridges, the narrator heads down a hill toward paddy fields where the elephant was last seen. Throngs of people follow him to witness the shooting of an elephant and to reap the harvest of meat afterward. However, the narrator hopes it will not be necessary to shoot the beast. .......At the bottom of the hill is a road, then the paddy fields. The elephant is on the

other side of the road feeding on grass. He seems peaceful, as if his must frenzy has subsided and he has returned to normalcy. To kill the elephant would be a terrible shame. After all, he is a working elephant, just as valuable as an expensive machine. If he has indeed become docile again, his mahout will have no trouble controlling him. The narrator decides to observe the elephant for a while. If it continues to behave, he will go home. But when he turns around and looks at the spectators, now numbering about two thousand, he realizes that they expect him to shoot the elephant and that he is a puppet who must do their bidding. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys . . . I had got to shoot the elephant . . . To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothingno, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man's life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at. .......The elephant, meanwhile, remains calm, ignoring the crowd. His left side is parallel to the road, the narrator, and the crowd. Having never before killed an elephant, the narrator is unsure of the exact location of the its brain. Nevertheless, he loads the gun, gets down on the ground in order to steady his aim, and fires at his head, in front of the ear. (He should have fired at the ear.) After about five seconds, the elephant falls to its knees. The narrator fires again. The elephant rises. He is wobbly. The narrator fires a third time, and the elephant collapses. The people rush across the road to view it close up. He is still breathing. The narrator fires his remaining two cartridges into its side, where he thinks its heart is. Blood flows from the wound, but still he breathes. Then, with his Winchester, he fires one shot after another into the beastfirst into the side, then into the throat. The elephant continues to breathe.

.......Unable to stand there and watch it suffer, the narrator leaves. He finds out later that

the beast lasted another half-hour and that the Burmans had stripped his body almost to the bones by the afternoon.

Afterward, the Burmans and the Europeans were divided on what should have been done. The owner, of course, is angry. But as an Indian, he is powerless to take action. Besides, the narrator has the law on his side. An elephant has to be killed if its owner fails to control it. The older Europeans defend the narrator. The younger ones say it is wrong to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, for the it is worth much more than the victim. The narrator says, "And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool." Imperialism is evil. First, it humiliates the occupied people, reducing them to inferior status in their own country. Second, it goads the occupiers into making immoral or unethical decisions to maintain their superiority over the people. In Shooting an Elephant, the narrator acts against his own conscience to save face for himself and his fellow imperialists.