Victimization A Postcolonial Reading Of George...

Beyond the Obvious Victimization: A Postcolonial Reading of George Orwell’s â€Å"Shooting an Elephant† In my short teaching career, I have experienced two paralyzing instances of student tears in class that required my response. One of those such instances was in response to reading George Orwell’s essay â€Å"Shooting an Elephant†: my sensitive student was so sad about the elephant’s fate that she needed to leave class to recover from her grief. Such a reaction is not unreasonable to Orwell’s tragic essay, the story of a British soldier’s experience attempting to support and maintain colonizing efforts in Burma that results in the tragic and painfilled death of the animal. A postcolonial perspective is not necessary to see the tragedy in†¦show more content†¦He claims he was hated, yet he seems to ignore that the minor discomforts of his life, the jeers and taunts and negligible hurts and humiliation, constitute the ext ent of Burmese ability to express their unhappiness. He notes, â€Å"No one had the guts to raise a riot† (2605), failing to recognize that not bravery is lacking but rather knowledge of the punishment sure to follow such action. He regrets that he must kill the elephant, but he elides further exploration of potential alternatives, immediately rejecting other ways such as testing the elephant’s behavior to predict its reaction (2609). Not only does Orwell’s own essay reveal that he is not victim but rather someone in power, but also, scholars agree that Orwell is not the victim he perceives himself to be. Criticism of â€Å"Shooting an Elephant,† especially postcolonial criticism, recognizes that Orwell is not the victim he believes he is. Ouzgane and Coleman note that â€Å"the rifle, the symbol of colonial power . . . makes George Orwell the inauthentic authority† (paragraph 16), correctly assessing that he is both the one in charge and further the one who should not be in charge. They do not describe him as a victim, they describe him as compulsive, power-wielding, and superior (paragraph 16). Further in support of Orwell’s non-victim status are Moosavinia, Niazi, and Ghaforian. In their postcolonial work applying Said’s Orientalism to Orwell’s works, they mention that Orwell â€Å"wrote Burmese Days,