The plot of “Shooting an Elephant” is as follows: The narrator had set out on a pony with a much

too small, old 44 Winchester rifle to terrify the elephant with its noise on a cloudy, stuffy
morning, before the start of the rains, after receiving a call from the sub-inspector at the police
station at the other end of town about a ravaging elephant in the bazaar. On the way there, the
locals told him about the elephant’s antics, telling him that it wasn’t a wild elephant, but a tame
one that had been chained the night before, as domesticated elephants are always when their
“must” attack is due. It had, however, escaped, leaving its mahout, the only person who could
manage it in that condition, lost in a twelve-hour trek in the wrong direction.
The elephant reappeared in town, having destroyed a bamboo home, killed a cow, plundered fruit
shops, consumed the stock, and viciously trampled a municipal garbage waggon. The Burmese
population had no firearms, but they were eager for "a little fun" by following closely behind the
Sahib, who was using a "magical rifle" to bring down a devouring elephant. The gathering
behind him was massive, "at least two thousand people and expanding by the
minute," and he felt compelled to act by their collective wills and expectation.
Many minutes before he came, a black Dravidian coolie was trampled in the mud. He sent a
request to a friend’s house nearby for an elephant rifle, which arrived with five ammunitions in a
matter of minutes. Meanwhile, behind the hill, the elephant was a few yards away in the miry
waste of a rice field which was not ploughed but remained moist from the first rains and was
speckled with coarse grass. The elephant, eight yards from the road with his left side towards
him, took not the smallest heed of the oncoming crowd and stayed busy tearing up bunches of
grass for food so sweetly as though it was not the same devouring elephant minutes ago. The
narrator felt that maybe his “attack of must” was already passing off and it would be harmless by
then. In no way did he wish to shoot “the enormous beast” that had a “preoccupied
grandmotherly aspect that elephants have”, as he firmly believed that, it would equal to
“murder”. The slaughter of the elephant was to him equivalent to destroying a “costly piece of
machinery” which when alive would be worth at least a hundred pounds, and if dead, only for
the value of his tusks. He evaluated his odds of survival if he walked close the elephant to
confirm how it would behave.
Orwell was evaluating options— to shoot or not to shoot. Probably, it is his selfconsciousness of
being feeble, of being emasculated and his image of the white guy being not so decisive in front
of the audience that handled him to act impulsively in a situation that was already controlled. It
was as if he was a “actor”, a posing “puppet” in front of a theatre ravenous public. With a
German weapon, he pulled the trigger aiming at the “working elephant” at the sound of which
came a “devilish howl of glee”. The first bullet had incapacitated the elephant without knocking
him down; the second shot, instead of collapsing him, forced him clamber furiously back to his
feet, standing “weakly upright, with legs sagging and head drooping”. It was the third shot that
knocked the last remnant of strength from the elephant’s legs with a final trumpet but it hung
powerlessly between life and death, breathing extremely regularly and gasping without
weakening for a long time. Unable to stand the painful core of the situation the narrator sent for
his tiny rifle, after having failed to put the elephant to rest with the last two bullets of the German
rifle. Finally pouring shot after shot into his heart and down his neck, he took the life of the
elephant. With the inability to tolerate this frightening issue and his following actions he goes
away only to hear later that it took the elephant half an hour to die. The tribesmen brought dahs
and baskets for flesh even before he had left and had stripped the body of the elephant almost to
the bones by the afternoon. There were “endless discussions” regarding the occurrence. The
mahout was enraged but just impotent because technically it may be justified to kill a “crazy
elephant” like “a mad dog”, if its owner failed to control it. The opinions among the Europeans
were split. The older men thought he was correct and the younger men claimed it was shameful
to shoot an elephant worth more than an Indian Coolie.